Flight tracking tool Volanta has been updated to version 1.8 and includes a slew of new improvements and additions that improve on the popular utility from Orbx. The headline new feature for version 1.8 of Volanta is the addition of a new Teams feature that allows you to invite friends, share stats, create leaderboards and chat to those in your team.
As mentioned, you can now create teams within Volanta and invite a number of friends to partake in that team. Teams can track the most frequent flyer, and popular routes and see accumulative totals such as miles flown and time in the air. You can also set up team chats to stay in touch via the Volanta app.
Other new additions include squawk and vertical speed is now o flights, along with altitude on flight tooltips. Speaking of squawk codes, Volanta will now colour-code flights with an emergency number to show up red on the map. Icons for the BAe Hawk, T-6 Texan, C152 and the SR22 are now also available in the latest update.
Search and filtering has also seen an improvement with version 1.8. You can now search by exact matches for usernames and airport codes. Viewing an airport will filter departing and arriving flights from that airport, giving you more visibility of what is happening nearby.
There are also a range of fixes in the latest update. Examples include purging flights now properly functioning, flights now timed out after an hour rather than 15 minutes, and some airports now zoom to the right level. Sadly, due to the service used, US sectional charts are no longer part of Volanta, but will be back in the future once a solution is found.
Volanta 1.8 can be downloaded now by simply running the application.
Volanta is a free app for the community to enjoy. There are some premium features, which can be accessed via a Volanta Premium subscription, which starts at AU$6.35 + tax per month. For example, in the newly added Teams function, the free version allows you to add a maximum of 4 members to your Team, whilst premium allows you to add many more. You can view all the features of Volanta premium on their website.
