After squawking at poorly labeled cockpit instruments and unlabeled route cards for long enough, Casey has officially opened the SkyChart Academy, and he’s not letting anyone leave until they’ve earned their wings.

The Tutorial Is Here

v0.2.36.0 — v0.2.37.2

SkyChart now has a full in-game tutorial with 15 chapters covering every major system, from laying your first route to corporate espionage. Two tracks available:

Quick Tour: 4 chapters to get you airborne fast. Earn the Casey’s Copilot achievement.
Full Course: All 93 systems, every panel, nothing skipped. Earn Casey’s Star Student + 25 Legacy Points.

The tutorial features a two-stage spotlight system that follows you into dropdown menus, breadcrumb progress dots, a Resume Tutorial button in Settings, and per-chapter replay if you want to revisit anything. Signal-wait timeouts mean nobody gets stuck. A “Don’t show again” option is there for the veterans.

The last two patches ironed out 40+ tutorial steps with missing navigation, wrong signal names, and stale panel references, including a Chapter 1 auto-advance that was stalling on the tarmac and a spotlight ring that pointed at nothing. Casey is now satisfied. Mostly.

“A flight manual that doesn’t tell you where the cockpit is… isn’t a manual. It’s a paperweight.”

Paint Shop Is Open

v0.2.39.6

Casey finally snapped about pilots confusing their livery with a rival’s on the map. The new livery paint shop gives you full Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders (any color in the spectrum) plus 10 preset swatches including new pink and dark teal options. Full Steam controller and d-pad support included.

Casey also installed a Rival Color Contrast Inspector: after you pick your color, he personally checks every competitor’s paint job and resprays any that are too similar. “If I can’t tell your planes apart at a glance from the tower, someone’s getting a new coat of paint, and it won’t be you.”

Controller Overhaul

v0.2.38.0 — v0.2.39.5

Casey strapped on a gamepad and rewired the entire experience from the couch. Every campaign screen (era select, mode, difficulty, airline setup) now has visible focus rings and proper d-pad navigation. Highlights:

Focus stays locked inside overlays, so no more accidentally panning the map during era selection
Airline name field glows when selected, with a toast prompt to press A for the keyboard
On-screen keyboard rebuilt: arrow keys for cursor, DEL for forward-delete, CLR to wipe the field
Steam Overlay now auto-pauses the game
Controller disconnect triggers a pause with warning
Settings and Help panels no longer eat controller input

Historical Simulation Improvements

v0.2.39.4

The diversification catalog is now historically gated. No more building a theme park in 1930:

Hotels unlock in 1946 (Pan Am started it)
Concert Halls in 1955, Golf Courses in 1965, Theme Parks in 1978
Carbon Offsets: 2005, naturally
The Strategy Planner and Recommender respect these dates

Airport capacity has been fully rebuilt: 43 major hubs now follow hand-tuned historical growth curves (Heathrow 1946, Changi 1981, Incheon 2001), with all other airports growing dynamically by city population and aviation era. Most airports start with just 1 slot in 1930.

A new Airport Expansion Alert fires every January when any airport where you operate adds new slots, so you can rush in before your rivals do.

Real Aircraft Ranges & Unit Settings

v0.2.39.0

Casey cross-referenced real-world specs for all 66 aircraft and issued corrected range certificates. The DC-3 no longer claims lunar orbit capability. A new Distance Unit setting lets you choose Kilometers, Miles, or Nautical Miles. The game auto-detects your locale on first launch. Speed displays match throughout.

Bug Fixes

v0.2.39.1 — v0.2.39.3

Ghost flight crash fixed. On macOS, the economics thread kept processing data from a previous game after returning to the main menu, causing a crash. Now the menu waits for all background calculations to complete before switching.
Supply chain events now actually enforced. Export bans, strikes, and fleet groundings now block purchases across every UI panel; AI rivals respect restrictions; the route recommender stops suggesting planes you can’t buy.
Market shocks now persist through save/reload. Fuel crises, recessions, and deregulation deals no longer vanish when you save.
Route Deregulation now grants the promised slots instead of making empty announcements.
PlatformManager crash on New Game fixed. The singleton was being swept up in menu cleanup, breaking leaderboards.
Achievement lookup fixed for Casey’s Star Student (type-checking instead of string matching).
Route renderer fixes: lines no longer disappear near map edges or during zoom-pan sequences.

Accessibility

v0.2.37.0

238 color values across 50 UI panels were hardcoded, making colorblind and contrast settings do almost nothing. Casey rewired 221 of them through AccessibilityPalette with live-refresh. Every panel from Finances to Fleet now responds to all five colorblind modes and three contrast levels in real time.

Full patch notes for every version are available in the SkyChart update history on Steam, or in-game under Settings > Patch Notes.

“Every captain deserves a proper briefing.” Casey