Every planning tool built on live data shares the same limitation. It describes the world at the second you ask, and a flight is not instantaneous. For the field you are parked on, that is fine. For a destination five hours ahead, the METAR you searched on will have been superseded four or five times before you are anywhere near the approach, and the controller staffing has probably turned over with it.
Where2Fly v3.0, released last week by Daniel “Blt950” Lange, goes after exactly that mismatch. The free web tool now bases its suggestions on what conditions are expected at your estimated time of arrival rather than on a snapshot taken the moment you hit search.
Predicting the arrival, not the departure
The forecasting side pulls from three sources. TAF data covers the expected weather at the destination around your arrival window, VATSIM controller bookings indicate which positions are scheduled to be staffed rather than which ones happen to be open right now, and event data flags network activity taking place later in the day.
In practice that turns the results list into something closer to a planning aid. In the screenshots supplied by the developer, an arrival card for Gander shows a booked tower position covering 23:00z to 02:00z, while another destination carries a foggy forecast tagged with a 30% probability. Probability is an important detail here, since a TAF is a forecast and not a promise. Where2Fly is showing likelihood rather than certainty, and it presents it as such.
“You’ve probably experienced this before, you search for a flight, see ATC online and a thunderstorm on the METAR, and pick that airport. Three hours later when you actually arrive, the controller’s logged off and the storm’s long gone,” said Lange. “In v3.0, Where2Fly forecasts what’s most likely happening around your estimated arrival time, the TAF, which VATSIM positions are booked, what events are running.”
85 airports picked for the challenge
The second headline addition is a curated set of 85 “Notable Airports”. These are fields selected for characteristics that make the approach or the surroundings interesting, including mountainous terrain, coastal scenery, demanding approaches and high altitude operations. Each one carries a short description and a set of tags, and the whole collection is available as a public whitelist, so you can restrict a search to that list when you want a challenge.
Innsbruck is one of the examples, tagged as mountainous with a hard approach and accompanied by a note on its circling procedure and captain-only landing requirements in poor weather. It is a small feature in terms of code, but it addresses something the tool could not do before, which is to point you towards an airport worth flying to for its own sake rather than for the weather sitting on top of it.
A darker interface and reordered filters
Dark mode arrives with this release after repeated requests from users, applying deeper tones to input fields, results panels and the map itself. The scenery list has been simplified as well, with add-on availability now grouped more clearly by simulator and MSFS 2024 listed first.
The expanded filter panel has been reordered so the most used options sit at the top, and a distance filter measured in nautical miles has been added. The top list picks up an aircraft filter. Smaller changes include Navigraph chart links on airport cards, a close button on those cards, an ATC icon that fills according to how many facilities are online, a ping animation when you select an airport from the top list, and automatic scrolling in the sidebar when you click an airport on the map.
On the fixes side, Lange lists improvements to map performance and clustering with large numbers of airports, a fix for options disappearing while editing a search, a repair for the menu breaking on tablet screens, and corrections to stuck tooltips and to layouts that broke at increased font sizes. The developer says searches now run up to four times faster after back-end work, and the airport and runway database has been updated to the 2026-07-29 release. The public API returns the new prediction data as well.
Where it sits in the planning chain
Where2Fly has been free since 2023 and remains so, funded by a tip jar. We first covered it back in October 2023, when it was a text-based search that answered a single question, and again for the 2.0 rewrite in August 2024, which moved everything onto a map and added scenery links. The trajectory since then has been consistent, with each version doing a little more of the thinking before you open the sim.
That places it upstream of the tools most simmers already run. Little Navmap, SimBrief and Navigraph all assume you already know where you are going. Where2Fly occupies the step before that, and v3.0 pushes it further into territory those tools do not cover, since none of them will tell you. The tool links out to SimBrief, Windy and now Navigraph once you have made your choice, so it slots into an existing routine.
Where2Fly v3.0 is live now at where2fly.today, and remains free to use for everyone.
