There are plenty of ways to reposition an aircraft in a sim. What there hasn’t been, until now, is a way to rewind the controller along with it. That’s the idea behind Backtrack, the standout of three features SayIntentions revealed at FSExpo 2026 in St. Paul. Taken together with a Navigraph-powered co-pilot that can read charts and a new ChasePlane spotting mode, the announcements make one thing clear: SayIntentions increasingly sees its product as much more than an ATC provider.
Let’s start with Backtrack, which lets you pick an earlier point along your flight path, from either the SayIntentions desktop app or the PocketSky mobile app, and jump back to it. Plenty of sims already let you slew or reload a saved situation, so the new part is what happens to the controller.
SayIntentions says the aircraft is moved back to that position and the ATC context is reset to match that point in the flight, so you can re-fly a final approach, descent or landing while still working the same controller workload that existed the first time around. The usual trade-off with AI ATC is that you give up freedom to reposition, because slewing tends to confuse the controller. Backtrack is an attempt to hand that freedom back.
The second reveal, Plate Brief, was built with Navigraph and is perhaps the most ambitious. The company describes three layers to it. The first is automatic chart loading tied to the phase of flight, so the departure chart or SID can appear when you get your takeoff clearance, and the airport taxi diagram can load once the wheels are down.
The second is plain-English voice requests, where you can ask the co-pilot to pull up the approach plate and it uses the flight context, including your assigned approach, to open the right one. You can also request charts outside your active plan.
The third layer is extremely interesting: an experimental visual analysis mode for FAA charts, where the co-pilot reads the chart itself to answer questions like the decision altitude or the missed approach procedure, including detail that may not sit in a traditional database. SayIntentions is clear that this part is experimental and limited to FAA charts for now, with wider coverage planned later.
The third feature is more about immersion. SayIntentions has partnered with Parallel 42 again, this time to bring its traffic injection into ChasePlane. The integration lets you snap the camera to injected traffic or to the aircraft currently talking to ATC, all inside the ChasePlane workflow you already use, so there’s no switching tools or disabling your preferred camera setup.
On availability, Plate Brief and Backtrack are already live for SayIntentions partners, with a wider rollout to the full subscriber base expected in the coming weeks. The ChasePlane spotting integration is listed as coming soon. Both Backtrack and Plate Brief run through the desktop app and PocketSky.
If you’ve been on the fence about trying SayIntentions, this is a great moment to jump in, since partners get first access to Backtrack and Plate Brief and the wider rollout is close behind. You can sign up for SayIntentions here. And if you’re a Captain’s Club member, don’t forget you get 10% off your SayIntentions monthly subscription, so check the member dashboard before you sign up.
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