If you follow freeware and utility releases at all, you’ve probably noticed the same thing we have. There are a lot of “we’ll tell you where to fly” tools around now. Route pickers, dispatchers, mission generators, career-style companions, they’ve been arriving at a steady pace, and we’ve covered our share of them. Every time one comes up, a few of you point out in the comments that browser utilities like this seem to be multiplying, often crediting the rise of AI-assisted coding for how quickly these can now be put together.
It’s a fair observation. The barrier to getting a working web app in front of people has dropped a lot, and the result is a mixed bag. Some of these tools are quick weekend projects that do one small thing before going quiet. Others have a clearer idea behind them and are worth the time to try. So when another one lands in our inbox, we can’t help but question wether this is “yet another route generator” or “does it do something the last five didn’t.”
WingRally, a free browser-based mission generator from developer Henk Salomons, has a couple of answers to that, and they’re what made us look closer.
How it works
The setup is quick. You tell WingRally what aircraft you want to fly, how much time you have, roughly where you want to depart from, whether you fancy VFR or IFR, and how hard you want it to be. From there the tool builds a mission that fits. It checks things like the available flying time, runway suitability for your aircraft, and, where it can, live weather. The developer says the point is to reverse the usual process, so you start from the time and the aircraft you have in front of you, then let the tool work out a flight that suits.
The dispatch options are the first thing that sets WingRally apart from a plain route picker. You can see the full flight plan up front, like any other planner. You can hide only the destination. Or you can use what the developer calls Blind Dispatch, where almost everything stays hidden until you accept the mission, with the arrival airport revealed only once you’re flying. The idea, in his words, is to turn a known route into more of an assignment or a small adventure.
The second thing goes beyond route-picking altogether. WingRally can also build a mission around a specific skill you want to practice, with options that include crosswind landings, managing airliner automation, Garmin 1000 work, and hand-flying.
Once a mission is generated, WingRally connects to SimBrief for dispatch and import, and it can produce a flight plan file for Microsoft Flight Simulator along with a mission file. The developer is clear that this is not meant to replace SimBrief. As he puts it, SimBrief helps you plan how to fly a route, while WingRally is about deciding what to fly, and why. The beta has already grown past single A-to-B hops, too, with connected Tours and Bush Trips that string together multiple landings or loop back to where you started. Those, the developer says, are still being refined with pilot feedback.
Where it is, and where it’s going
WingRally is in public beta, version 0.13.3 at the time of writing, and it’s free to use with no sign-up needed. You only need an account to get full use of the SimBrief dispatch and import, and the developer says that part will stay in the free version even after full release. The free tier also covers personal mission generation, saving favourite airports into collections, and a limited flight history.
A paid Pro tier is planned for later. The developer says it will focus on deeper personalisation, more advanced tours and campaigns, longer flight history, and extra planning and analysis tools, rather than simply more random routes. During the beta, Pro preview features are free to try.
Looking further out, the roadmap the developer shared points toward WingRally becoming more of a personal dispatcher than a route shuffler. On the list are personalisation based on your aircraft and past flights, saved multi-session adventures and eventual campaigns, more varied mission types, richer history and debriefing, and a local simulator bridge that could one day load missions and follow their progress, then send the result back to WingRally. Shared challenges and community features sit further down the line.
So, worth your time?
None of this makes WingRally the final word in a crowded field, and if you’re already worn out on browser utilities, one more probably won’t change your mind. That reaction is understandable. But the value in this wave of tools has always been in the ones that bring an actual idea, and WingRally has two: hiding where you’re going until you’re up, and pointing a mission at a skill you want to sharpen. The developer is upfront that it’s early, that pilot feedback is shaping what comes next, and that the tool may look different in a few months.
Since the core is free and there’s nothing to install, finding out where it lands for you costs only the time to click. You can find it at wingrally.com.
