5,000 Flights on Tailstrike

Tailstrike has passed 5,000 flights.

Thank you to every pilot who has flown a Tailstrike aircraft, and to the amazing community that has grown with us. Every one of these flights moved a persistent airframe somewhere in the shared world and left it there for the next pilot. Five thousand flights later, that Tailstrike world is busier than it has ever been.

5,000 flights, by the numbers

• 4.4 million nautical miles flown. That is about 21 trips from the Earth to the Moon.
• 11,800 hours in the air, or more than 16 months of nonstop flying.
• 692 different aircraft flown between 1,427 airports in 172 countries.
• 352 aircraft have been flown by more than one pilot, each one picked up where the last pilot left it.

At the 5,000 mark

• The 5,000th flight: UAL1427, a United 737-800 (N33286) from Detroit to Denver, flown by cautionwake (who rarely flies and had no idea). By pure coincidence, cautionwake also flew the very first Tailstrike flight, a Southwest 737-800 from Las Vegas to Phoenix, back in September 2025.
• Most flights: V1RotateAP, with 495.
• Most distance: Lyra, with 634,934 nm across 451 flights. Lyra also has the most hours in the air: 1,464.
• Longest flight: Negative, who flew B-LRA, an Airbus A350-900, from New York JFK to Hong Kong in 18 hours and 2 minutes. Negative also has the longest average flight on Tailstrike: 10.7 hours across 91 flights.
• Most aircraft flown: AndyV, with 160 different airframes.
• Most types flown: bradfier and Zach, tied at 27 types each.
• Most popular aircraft: ZK-DAY, a Cessna 172 flown for the Cessna World Tour. 19 different pilots have flown it 139 times, covering 20,747 nm.
• Top airline: United Airlines, with 460 flights, ahead of Delta (340) and FedEx (295).
• Top airports: Los Angeles (KLAX), Denver (KDEN) and Newark (KEWR).
• Top aircraft type: the Boeing 737-800, with 579 flights.

A few more stats

• The hardest-working airframe: VH-ZNF, a Boeing 787-9 flown by Negative, has covered 194,114 nm in just 32 flights. That includes Perth to London Heathrow, 7,833 nm, the longest flight by distance on Tailstrike.
• The most-flown route: Boston to New York JFK, flown 16 times.
• The average landing: a median of 165 feet per minute across nearly 1,900 measured touchdowns.
• Beyond the airliners: 570 freighter flights and 201 helicopter flights.

See how you compare on the leaderboards.

How Tailstrike has grown

The first Tailstrike flights were logged in September 2025. Even then, every aircraft was a single airframe with its own registration and location, but Tailstrike could only follow flights flown on VATSIM, and only a handful of pilots were flying. In the first three months there were fewer than 60 flights.

That changed in December, when the community arrived. Most of the names on today's leaderboard joined that month, and flights went from 29 in November to 216 in December.

In March 2026, the Tailstrike desktop plugin arrived. It records any flight in your own simulator, online or offline, so VATSIM became one optional way to fly rather than the only one.

In August, Tailstrike left beta with a redesigned app, a new desktop plugin, Intelligent Dispatch briefings, community missions, social features, and Supporters. Aircraft state persistence arrived too, allowing pilots to sync the aircraft with the remembered state from the last pilot.

In September, we partnered with TFDi Design to create the first high-fidelity aircraft integration for Tailstrike with the TFDi Design MD-11. It became the first-ever fully persistent shared aircraft, which carries over the full panel state, failures, and aircraft systems from one pilot to the next. It's currently the only sim aircraft that can accrue wear over time from different pilots flying it.

October has been the biggest month of new features so far. Real Flights by Intelligent Dispatch lets you fly a real airline flight happening today, sometimes with the same exact aircraft registration. Approach ratings, now in beta, score how you flew your approach and landing. The live flight view and the pilot hangar were both redesigned, along with several other improvements to the pilot experience.

The next 5,000

The first 5,000 flights took a little over a year. The next 5,000 will come a lot faster. Thank you for flying, and for building this world with us.