BeyondATC has published the results of the community survey it ran a couple of months ago, and the takeaway is quite clear. Most users are happy with the AI ATC, but vectoring and descent remain the one area they most want fixed. The team says it has heard that loud and clear, with fixes for both vectoring and ground traffic already moving through testing ahead of the planned 1.0 release later this year.
The survey drew 2,427 responses, with an average enjoyment score of 7.8 out of 10. Around 80% of respondents described their overall experience as positive. For a program still officially in early access, that is a solid base to build on, and it gives the team a clear read on what to protect and what to repair ahead of the planned 1.0 release later this year.
One of the more telling findings was how people actually use the software. The team said the split surprised them, with a larger share of hardcore users than expected:
- Power users (daily flyers): 41%
- Weekend regulars (at least weekly): 32%
- Casual users (less than weekly): 15%
- Testers (living on the experimental branch): 12%
That distribution tells its own story. A program that more than four in ten users reach for every single day has worked its way into the core of people’s simming routines, so it’s not just an occasional novelty.
The praise: voices, traffic, and one-time pricing
On what is working, the voices and traffic came out on top. BeyondATC said this was the most praised area of the whole survey, with some respondents reporting that a busy arrival sounded close to a live VATSIM event. That feedback lines up with the direction the team has been taking, including the local, on-device voice system it expanded late last year. The departure and cruise phase scored highest of all, with the gate-to-top-of-descent portion of a flight rated as dependable.
Respondents also rated in-sim stability and performance well, and a large share said they prefer the one-time pricing model over a subscription. BeyondATC sells for a single up-front price, while its closest rival, SayIntentions.AI, runs on a subscription. The survey suggests the one-time model is a real part of why people chose BeyondATC, and the team reiterated that core features will keep arriving as free updates well past 1.0.
The sticking point: vectoring and descent
Then there is the other side of the ledger. By a wide margin, vectoring and descent was named the biggest problem area. Respondents described being left too high on approach, getting late descent calls, the occasional reverse-runway vector, and overshooting the final. Ground traffic getting stuck at busier airports came next, followed by voice recognition, which the team said is harder for non-native English speakers with stronger accents.
None of this will be a shock to anyone who has followed the program. Vectoring has been a long-running focus, and back in March the team rolled out a complete rewrite of its arrival sequencer alongside a “Vectoring v3” navigation system. The survey makes clear that, even after that work, descent and vectoring remain the area users feel most keenly.
What’s being done, and what’s next
To its credit, the team did not stop at presenting the data. BeyondATC said it has built custom debugging tools to isolate the specific cases where vectoring goes wrong, and it has two fixes in the pipeline, one for vectoring and one for ground traffic.
The developer described the core vectoring system as working well in isolation and compared the situation to a single faulty spark plug that can make an entire engine seem broken while the rest of it runs fine. The claim is that the underlying logic tests cleanly, and the job now is to track down the outlier cases that ruin the experience. By the time the survey video went out, the team said a vectoring fix was likely already in the experimental branch, with a move to the main branch once it has been tested.
Ground traffic is getting a deeper treatment too. The team said it has been rebuilding that system from the ground up, with smarter taxi routing and fewer conflicts, and that the work is already in testing. Voice recognition improvements are also on the list, with the stated goal of letting users simply repeat a command and have it register.
Beyond the fixes, the roadmap points to the features the team has been steadily working toward. Live traffic, sourced from real-world Flightradar24 data, arrived in the experimental build earlier this month. VFR support continues to progress in stages, with Stage 1 already live for Supporter-tier users. The team also pointed to turnarounds and multi-leg flights without a restart, plus a longer list of planned work that includes diversions, shortcuts, holds, and oceanic procedures.
Taken together, the survey is a transparent status check from BeyondATC, which is useful for a program still heading toward its first full release. The numbers say most users are happy, and the one big sore point is one the team has been chipping away at for months and now says it is prioritising. BeyondATC seems content to show its homework, and on the evidence of this survey, that openness is part of why its community keeps flying with it.
