Changelog

The sortie log.

Every beta, in order. Most of these came out of real flights — a pilot heard something wrong, we went and found out why.

Beta 53 — a crew you can believe

August 9, 2026CURRENT

The break call could get you killed. FLARES was said for every missile ever fired — including the laser-guided ones that flares do nothing about. A pilot did exactly what he was told and died to a Hellfire. The crew now works out how each missile guides and only says flares when flares work; anything it cannot identify gets DEFEND, never a guess. It also stops changing its mind — break right stays break right for that missile, instead of flipping as you turn.
A missile warning now comes from whoever is talking to you. Each controller sits on its own frequency and you can only listen to one. Overlord ran a textbook defend against an SA-8 on 254.0 while you were on 255.0 with the JTAC, who was telling you to climb: obey either one and the other was telling you to die. Warnings about a missile in the air now also come from the controller currently working you, while advisories like “route around that SAM” stay with the senior net so nothing doubles up. And a controller can no longer be silenced by a quiet pilot — the JTAC missed an SA-6 shot because your last transmission was five minutes old. A pilot goes quiet exactly when he is being shot at.
The SAM spam. One SA-6 battery is four vehicles, and the crew was counting vehicles — so a single site called out four times, reworded each time so it did not even read as a repeat. Sites are now sites. A ring you cannot enter is not forecast at all (a Shilka reaches two and a half miles and was being predicted a hundred seconds ahead), only the soonest one is called, and a site that has not changed stays quiet for ten minutes. Measured on a real SEAD mission: seven vehicles became four sites, two calls on the first pass, none for the six after it.
“SAM launch, SA6.” DCS hands over the name the mission builder typed, not the type of the launcher — so the crew was reading a filename aloud, and working out the missile's reach from it, which came back as zero. A site named “Red SAM Site 1” was not air defence at all as far as the crew was concerned, so on anyone else's mission SAM handling quietly stopped working altogether. The launcher is resolved to its real type first now.
It will not say a number it does not have. “Wind check” answered “wind calm” with no weather in the feed at all — a fact you land on. The JTAC, unable to place you, invented “your 12 o'clock, one mile, heading zero zero zero”: three plausible numbers, none of them real. Line four of the nine-line read “0 feet” whenever the target's elevation was missing — the number you fuze on. All three now say they do not know, and a target really at sea level still reads zero.
Ships. One whole category of unit was never sent by the data feed, so a pilot circling a naval group was told the area was empty — twenty-seven ships dropped on one mission. Restart DCS once after updating and the feed refreshes itself.
Approach flew you in a circle. Whether you were lined up was measured against the back course, so a perfect final scored 180 degrees out and got turned again — and the handoff to Tower sat behind it, in code that could never be reached.
The second sentence. Every exam here scored one transmission at a time; nobody had ever scored the sentence after it, and only six of eleven follow-ups landed. Ask “how far is it now?” seconds after being told what to hit and you get an answer. “Say again the altimeter” gives you the altimeter, not the whole call replayed. And a question asked while a clearance is outstanding is answered as a question, instead of being marked wrong as a readback you never attempted.
More of what you say, first time. The commonest way anybody asks for a repeat — “say it one more time” — scored a flat zero, because one line both listed the phrase and vetoed it; that single contradiction was more than half of the exam's failures. “Give me a heading to the target” had no home and produced three different confident wrong answers. “Any SAMs down there?” now gets the JTAC's own threat picture instead of a redirect to Overlord. Tower will tell you the runway length. And Approach stops saying “descend and maintain” to an A-10 already below the altitude.
Words it was quietly rewriting. The garble repairer heals a mangled word by snapping it to the nearest one it knows, and some real words sit one letter away: “flanker” became “tanker”, so a claimed kill was answered with the tanker's position, and “angels thirty” became “angels thirsty” — an altitude turned into a fuel state, every single time. Spoken numbers and aircraft names are protected now.
Your name, and other people's. The crew read “New callsign” out loud on the radio when DCS had no player name set. Mishearings were growing careers of their own — “Aborting” had five thousand votes against Warhawk's twenty-two — and the squadron board listed “Should” as a pilot and the same man twice. And a station's name in front of a sentence is no longer taken as a callsign just because it is there, so nobody can introduce himself as an instruction.
The first transmission was slow and the rest were instant. Not the speaking rate: the premium voice opened its connection on the first call of the sortie. It warms up in the background at startup now — no speech, no characters.
Setup. Paste the path to a file and it takes the folder it is in. Paste your DCS install folder where Saved Games belongs and it tells you, instead of reporting success and leaving the crew half-blind for the whole flight. SRS on a second drive is found. And a fresh install no longer wears Edge's logo on the taskbar.
The Control Station. The “didn't catch” list now crosses things off — it re-drives every line through the real brain, and 198 of 200 were already learned. Its lamps no longer paint over the tabs on a narrow window. And nothing but flying writes to your logbook.
Measured again for this release, on the code that is in it. 100,000 plain-English asks: 99,352 understood (99.4%), 199 answered confidently wrong (0.2%) — that second number is the one that matters, because a wrong answer is worse than “say again”, and it has gone up from 0.16%, which is a fortnight of widened anchors showing itself. Every one of the thirty recorded real-world mangles understood, 96.1% still right with one character in twenty corrupted, and zero false safety clearances on chatter. 102 calls the crew knows and 42,039 ways of saying them, up from 95 and 39,548. The brain's share of a reply is 24 milliseconds; in July it was 70.

Beta 52 — the card you fly with

July 28, 2026

Write the card you actually fly with, in the Control Station. Six pages — the sortie, the nav log, comms, loadout, threats and the brief — laid out the way an aircrew data card has looked for fifty years: grey box means a label, yellow box means a value. Click any value and type into it.
Or don't type any of it. Pull the flight plan and the card fills itself in from the mission you loaded — waypoints, headings, leg distances, timings and a fuel ladder, the runway that is into the wind, your loadout station by station, and the rest of the package with their frequencies. Build puts it on your in-game kneeboard; Export saves the pages anywhere you like. The data feed hook updates itself the first time you start the crew.
Your record goes on your knee too — the dossier, every statistic, the head-to-head and the squadron board, as kneeboard pages you can read in the cockpit mid-flight.
Crew packs. One pick swaps every voice, the AWACS and JTAC callsigns, and the way the crew talk to you.
The first-run walkthrough talks. Three minutes in a real recorded voice — not a synthesised one — across twenty-two steps, pointing at the actual control it is describing. It opens by telling you what WILCO even is: that every other sim hands you a list of radio calls to pick from, that there are five controllers here with their own voices and frequencies, and what is doing the work underneath. It shows you the pages as it goes, not just the buttons — the radio card deck, the mission card and your career pages all open on screen. Two new steps cover Preflight check, Diagnose SRS and the support bundle, for the day something is off.
Closing the window now asks what you meant: leave the crew on the radio and tuck WILCO into the hidden icons by the clock, or shut everything down. It remembers your answer.
Only WILCO's own releases can install themselves. The updater used to install whatever address it was handed; it now takes builds from our own releases page over an encrypted connection, refuses an archive that writes outside its own folder, and checks that the version inside is the version it was promised.
A website you have open can no longer talk to your Control Station. Any page in your browser could quietly send it commands in the background — stop the crew, point your radio somewhere else. Every request now has to come from WILCO itself. The JTAC's laser command port and the DCS data feed also listen only to your own machine now, unless you deliberately run DCS on another PC.
Installs are reproducible. Every dependency has a tested version fence, so two pilots installing on different days get the same WILCO underneath — and a library that changes overnight can no longer break an install that had nothing wrong with it.

Beta 51 — your record, kept safe

July 25, 2026

Head to head. Pick any two callsigns the crew has worked and compare them straight down the line — hours, sorties, landings, kills split air-to-air, ground and SAM, touchdown rate and radio work — with a squadron board of everybody on the books underneath. Your side reads green, theirs blue, all the way down.
Your logbook can no longer be lost. The record was written straight over the live file while five controllers were reading it, so a controller catching it mid-write saw an empty logbook — and could then save that emptiness back over your career. It is now written through a temp file and swapped in one step, and a read that fails is retried instead of being mistaken for a wiped record. The same fix went into the file that stops all five controllers answering one call at once.
Only people get careers. Kills were credited to whatever the mission named as the shooter, so AI flights, ground units and mis-heard words were building up careers of their own and showing up beside your callsign. Kills now count only for human pilots, and the picker shows people rather than everything the crew has ever heard.
"Can't connect to 127.0.0.1" on start-up is gone. Closing WILCO takes a few seconds to shut the crew down, and opening it again in that window put a window on a server that was about to disappear. It now waits for the closing copy to let go, takes the port itself, and never opens a window against an address that has not answered. If it truly cannot start it says so plainly instead of showing a browser error page.
The career card, redrawn. It reads as a service record now: the numbers that matter carry the size, your kill mix is one bar you can read at a glance, and your landing trend is a proper chart instead of a progress bar that measured nothing.
The Control Station reads properly. Helper text and every settings label were dark grey on near-black — under the readable minimum, so most of the guidance on the page was effectively invisible. All of it now meets the contrast standard. The Save button rides the bottom of the panel instead of hiding under seven collapsed sections, and it tells you how many sections you have changed.
Debrief no longer warns about a cost it does not have. With the local brain — the default — the debrief is written entirely offline and free, but the button still asked you to confirm "one API call". It now checks first, and the report is typeset instead of dumped as raw text.
The radio card carries the right logo. It was drawing a single ring with the needle tilted over; the WILCO mark is two rings, a centre hub and the needle straight up. The example callsign reads like a callsign now, and the frequency band no longer leaves one tile stranded on its own row.

Beta 50 — kneeboards, career, and a crew that knows you

July 24, 2026

DCS kneeboards. A deck of WILCO reference pages now installs straight into your in-game kneeboard (RShift+K) — the five frequencies, the calls each controller knows, the brevity a new pilot needs, in the WILCO radar look. No alt-tabbing to remember what to say.
Career mode, right in the Control Station. Open the Career tab and your logbook is drawn out: hours flown, sorties, landings and how smooth they were, and kills split into air-to-air, ground, and SAM. Pick any callsign, and one button stamps the card onto your in-game kneeboard. Every pilot who flies gets their own.
The crew flies your flight. Check in as a two-ship or a flight of four and Ground and Tower work you as a flight — 'Warhawk flight, cleared for takeoff' — instead of treating the lead like a lone jet.
The crew remembers you. A controller who has worked you before greets you like it — a word about your landings, your fuel habit, your kills — once, when you check in.
Busy-net realism. Key up while the controller is mid-clearance with another pilot and you'll get a 'standby', then they come back to you — the way a real net triages. An emergency is never told to wait.
Faster, sharper hearing on NVIDIA cards. The GPU speech path is tuned — transcription in about 200ms and a bigger, more accurate model, so fewer 'say again's with the mission running.
Forum reply emails: when someone answers your topic on the site, you get a note. And the whole pilot radio card got the WILCO dark-radar restyle to match.

Beta 49 — the quiet crew

July 23, 2026

We counted: across July's sorties, 53 percent of everything Overlord said was a near-repeat of an earlier call — the same picture re-read every two minutes, the same threat re-announced for as long as it existed. That number is the whole release.
The picture now broadcasts when the picture CHANGES — a group appears, fades, moves a sector or an altitude block — never on a timer. An unchanged sky stays silent, and you can always ask.
Threat calls escalate instead of repeating: one call when a group first goes hot on you, one sharper call if it presses inside 15 miles, then the radio is yours. Missile warnings are one per missile, not one every twenty seconds. BREAK calls are untouched — a man mid-break needs the update.
Every scope call now rotates its wording from a phrase deck, the way the crew's replies already did — the clearance words never change, the trimmings do. Twenty-four calls that used a single fixed line now sound like a person.
"Say again" now re-reads scope calls too, not just replies to you — miss a threat call and ask for it. And "are you sure?" gets an affirm plus the call again, never a shrug.
Housekeeping from real transcripts: taxiway give-way belongs to Ground alone (Tower was double-calling it), the AI flavor traffic waits sixty seconds after you talk (and can be switched off with proactive.ambient), a garbled callsign is re-resolved against the live roster before the crew speaks it, a contact at ground level is "on the deck" instead of "0 thousand", and a WingLoong-I is finally "Wing Loong one".

Beta 48 — the crew answers you

July 22, 2026

Fixed the worst kind of bug: the crew hearing you and saying nothing. Transcription starts early, overlapping the end of your transmission for speed — and when that early pass came back blank, the blank was accepted. Your call was thrown away without a word on the radio or a line in the log. It now re-reads the full recording instead, so a blank first pass costs you nothing.
Drones are no longer called as missiles. A Shahed, WingLoong, Bayraktar, Reaper or Predator closing on you is a contact — the picture already names it. Being told to break and dump flares for one is worse than being told nothing. Real missiles are untouched: every SAM and air-to-air shot still gets the same warning, and anything the crew doesn't recognise still warns, because missing a launch is the one mistake this system must never make.
One break call, not thirty. Missile warnings were cooled per missile, so a SAM site firing a salvo produced a separate shout for every round — one sortie logged thirty-six identical break calls at a single flight. A pilot who has been told to break is already breaking; saying it again costs him the radio he needs.
Failures are loud now. A radio that hears you but can't make out words says so. A radio that has gone deaf says so, and names what to check. A receive channel that dies says which one and that it can still transmit. The crew used to fail in perfect silence, which looked exactly like working.

Beta 47 — the radio reliability release

July 22, 2026

Fixed the failure that costs you an evening: the crew starts, connects, and then can't say a single word. WILCO's controllers join your SRS server through External AWACS Mode, and if that's switched off every controller is refused — silently, with nothing on screen to tell you why.
WILCO already switched it on for you, but only when WILCO itself started an SRS server that wasn't already running. Start SRS yourself and the check was skipped. That mattered, because a fresh or reinstalled SRS ships with External AWACS Mode off — update SRS, and your radio quietly stops working.
It's now checked and repaired on every startup path. And if your SRS server is already running, WILCO restarts it for you — a running server reads its config once at startup, so correcting the file was never enough on its own.
The setup check now tests the radio. It used to say "ALL GREEN — you're ready" while External AWACS Mode was off and the whole radio was dead. That's how this stayed hidden. It fails loudly now.
Only three settings in your SRS config are ever touched, and both coalition passwords are set so the side you fly never matters. Everything else stays exactly as you set it. The offline brain is unchanged from beta 46 — this release is about making sure you can hear it.

Beta 46 — the account security release

July 20, 2026

Two-factor sign-in. Switch it on and every login needs a fresh six-digit code sent to your email — your password alone no longer opens your account. The code expires in fifteen minutes, works once, and never touches the page until you type it.
Reset your password by email. Forgot it? Ask for a code, get it in your inbox, set a new one — no more hunting for your invite code. And that invite code still works and always will: it's the master key that can't lock you out, so recovering with it also clears two-factor, in case email was the thing you lost.
A verified email on your account. Adding or changing your address sends a confirmation code to the NEW inbox first, so a typo — or someone else's address — can never quietly take over your reset path.
It's a second lock, not a weaker one. Passwords were already salted and stretched a hundred thousand rounds, sign-in was already constant-time, every door already rate-limited. Two-factor just adds a lock only you hold — and none of it can ever lock you out.
Behind the crew, mission control was rebuilt into a real multi-page console: every area its own page, live badges that light up exactly where something needs you — a pilot over their seats, a crash to read, a plan about to lapse — and a single switch to turn account email on.

Beta 45 — the switchgear release

July 19, 2026

The Master block became real switchgear. Start all is a guarded, glowing master switch; each crew seat is a breaker lever that physically flips up and lights phosphor when it's on — all seven in one rank, exactly like the panel it pretends to be.
The six tools are MFD soft-keys now: etched monochrome glyphs aligned in clean columns, F1–F6 function codes in the corners, and every key lights up green under your cursor. The help text sits in a recessed, etched placard.
Mission control grew up too: the operations console behind WILCO was rebuilt around a living graph — the 14-day traffic chart draws itself over glowing bars with a radar sweep looping across it, and every gauge ticks up to its reading like an instrument finding its value.
Cosmetics only under the hood — the whole exam board stayed green, and the panel's armor suites (HTTP fuzz, config corruption) re-ran clean on the new markup.

Beta 44 — the instructor release

July 19, 2026

Say "teach me" and the crew teaches. Three guided lessons taught by the controllers themselves, on frequency: the full airfield pattern (seven calls, Ground to Tower and back), working AWACS (check-in, picture, bogey dope, declare, pigeons), and close air support with Nail (nine-line, IP inbound, in hot, off, BDA). Every step prompts the exact words and checks your call; a wrong one gets the words again, "skip" jumps a step, "end the lesson" quits. The safety discipline survives teaching — a takeoff clearance still gets the confirm gate, and that's part of the lesson.
The radio report card. The crew quietly grades every session — understood first time, say-agains, readback corrections — and Ground speaks the verdict when you taxi in: "Radio tonight: 9 of 10 first time — sharp." The next night's check-in remembers it: "sharp radio last time out." A rough night gets the honest offer: "say 'teach me' next flight and we'll drill the calls."
Wrong-net armor, mined from real sorties: 259 of 283 logged "misses" turned out to be calls made on the wrong frequency. Now every station recognizes calls that belong to another seat — "Warhawk, rifle" said to Overlord gets "for that, contact Nail, two five five decimal zero" — and even when the words can't be understood at all, naming a station is enough: "sounds like you're calling Ground — reach them on two five one decimal zero."
The say-again got smarter. A call that's close-but-not-sure gets the controller's best guess by name — "say again? If that was wind check, just say 'wind check'" — and by design it will never guess a clearance.
The ears learn what the brain learns. The speech-recognition vocabulary hint now lives beside the intent bank itself, so every new call the brain understands is a call the ears are primed to hear — it had quietly drifted for weeks ("walk me in" was never in it).
Two probe-found bugs fixed before any pilot hit them: small talk ("beautiful evening, what's happening around the place") could trigger a GO-AROUND call through garble repair, and rambling near your own controller could bounce you to another frequency. Both are pinned in the permanent exams — the board now runs twenty-plus suites, including two new torture suites for the instructor.
94 intents, 41,000+ stored phrasings, brain at 33 milliseconds.

Beta 43 — the cockpit release

July 19, 2026

The brain got six times faster. Understanding a call went from ~215 milliseconds to ~33 on average — worst case 140. The proof came first: the new matching math was tested against the old one across 1.4 million trials before it was allowed in, and a 10,000-call natural-speech exam holds it at 99.5%.
ATC talks like a real tower. Pattern entries are computed for YOUR position — "enter left downwind runway 27, report midfield" — wheels-down checks on final, the altimeter follows the ATIS you actually heard, and radar contact comes with your real position on the scope.
AWACS talks like a real controller. Track direction on every group ("track southwest"), hostile identification, and two groups split by azimuth and range the way the real net does it — while the launch warning stays word-for-word invariant, because that call is life or death.
The Control Station became a cockpit. The panel is rebuilt as an avionics rack — annunciator lights showing each subsystem live, a radar-well comms log, machined switches. And the sidebar finally makes sense: what you touch every flight sits on top, setup lives in sections that fold away, and every section tells you whether it saves on pick or needs the Save switch.
A corrupt config file can no longer take the whole crew down. One bad byte in config.json used to crash every process INCLUDING the recovery panel — now it heals: the broken file is set aside, defaults load, you fly. Found by one of three new torture suites that also slam the panel with malformed requests and run the brain for 45,000 straight calls watching memory stay flat.
Nail and Overlord got their swagger back — personality pools for the quiet moments, no two shifts sounding the same.

Beta 42 — the two-ship release

July 18, 2026

One guided run per target. Two pilots saying "walk me in" used to get marshaled onto the SAME target with crossing run-ins. Now the second man is split to the next target with his own threat-scored axis — "Warhawk's got that one, you take the T-72" — and every later call (talk-on, nine-line, BDA) describes HIS target.
The queue keeps its promise. Only one target down there? "Hold high and dry — you're next: the moment that target's done with, I'll walk you in." And when the first run ends — knock-it-off or target destroyed — the wingman's walk-in starts automatically, in the same transmission.
"Cleared hot" no longer repeats forever if you sit in the window. A clearance stepped on by a missile call still comes back once — a pilot taking his time is not nagged every 45 seconds.
Radio polish: "egress straight ahead" when it matches the run-in, "two miles" instead of "two point zero miles", wake-turbulence calls speak the aircraft's real name, and the nine-line's coordinate fallback reads degrees decimal minutes you can actually punch into the jet.
Ask the wrong station and get pointed right: "walk me in", "how many targets left", "talk me on" told to Tower or Ground now answer "for that, contact Nail" with the frequency — instead of "say again".
Hearing, from real sorties: "any manpads?" and "what have you got for me?" are understood now. Every change proved by the full offline board — the walk-in exam alone is 58 checks.

Beta 41 — the box release

July 17, 2026

The crew gets on frequency instantly. The self-improvement miner used to run before the radio connected — after a garbled week it could hold all five controllers off SRS for minutes while you stared at an empty client list. It now runs in the background, one bot at a time, and picks up exactly where it left off.
Nail's box is real. With no designated target area his target board is 30 nautical miles around YOUR jet — not the whole map. A Shilka 57 miles away is no longer briefed as "your priority target" while armor sits off your nose. That sortie actually happened.
Smarter priority inside the box: a shooter only jumps the queue while it's a factor to you (inside 20 miles), and among shooters the one whose reach is closest to touching you goes first — the SA-8 that nearly covers you outranks a Shilka you'd have to fly into.
The quiet box stays honest: "the box is quiet — nearest activity is a Shilka at bullseye two three eight for one zero three, outside your box." And "walk me in" refuses to start a 57-mile attack.
Hearing armor: a runaway transcript (radio noise, music on the net) can no longer stall the brain for seconds or poison the learning log. Seven new box-discipline checks joined the walk-in exam — 50 checks, all green.

Beta 40 — the Nail release

July 17, 2026

Say "walk me in" and Nail runs your whole attack. He tests twelve run-in directions against the real battlefield — every other SAM and AAA ring on the way in and out, and the friendly positions, so your long rounds never point at friendlies — then flies you through it: steer to the roll-in, "turn in NOW", cleared hot the moment your nose is actually in the window, egress heading the second your weapon comes off.
Come off dry and he brings you back around for the re-attack. Target dies mid-run and he calls you off and re-tasks you. "Knock it off" cancels the run with a safe egress. One shooter at a time and the readback rules still apply.
MANPADS can't ambush you any more. Hard deck in the brief ("hard deck 12,000 — MANPADS in the box"), "get above 12000 NOW" if you sink below it — and a new ambush guard: orbit low over an undetected MANPAD with no attack running and no AWACS up, and Nail still calls you inside the ring and tells you to climb. That exact case used to be silent.
"How many left?" — the battle tracker: what's standing, your confirmed kills, what dies next. "What should I use?" — weapon advice read off your actual rails when the feed can see them ("you're carrying two by Maverick — launch from outside 3 miles").
All of it is proven by a new 43-check exam that flies the whole guided attack against live geometry. The radio card grew to 101 calls.

Beta 39 — the latency release

July 17, 2026

Five crew seats hear the same radio call — it now costs ONE transcription instead of five. On the bench the worst seat went from 2.9s to 0.6s; on real sorties, two out of three calls used to wait over two seconds during a busy net. Measured, fixed, and there's a stress test that proves it stays fixed.
A live LATENCY readout in the Control Station: hear (your voice to text) and think (brain to first word), measured from your own calls — not a marketing number.
No more double talk. The live log wrote some calls twice — yours and the crew's. Every field call now belongs to exactly one controller (Ground no longer parrots Tower's clearances), and only one seat logs an overheard transmission.
ATC that works the field: separation and sequencing between traffic, line-up-and-wait memory, traffic advisories, and phrase rotation so the crew stops repeating itself word for word.
New setup wizard — a guided first flight: checks, hearing, mic, the crew roster, and what to say first. Plus a Radio card button and a "didn't catch" card that shows what the crew missed so you can rephrase.
The radio-filter voice effect is back on for everyone (a config migration re-enables it), the crew keeps your callsign in every reply, and Stop all now also stops the SRS server it started.

Betas 34–38 — the radio week

July 15, 2026

The crew connects itself. WILCO joins your SRS server through External AWACS Mode — and if the server had it off, or the password didn't match, every controller was silently rejected and fell back to your PC speakers. Now WILCO configures the SRS server for you when it launches it: EAM on, password matched. Start the crew and the radio just connects.
Diagnose SRS. One button in the Control Station runs a full check against your SRS server and answers in plain English: is it reachable, does its version match, is External AWACS Mode on, is the password set — and what to do about each. There's a double-click SRS_DOCTOR.bat too.
It catches the split install. SRS auto-updates the client but can leave the server behind — the classic "worked yesterday, silent today" after an SRS update. WILCO now flags a server/client version split loudly, and automatically launches the NEWEST SRS server on your box so the split fixes itself.
No more claiming "connected" when the server said no. A controller used to print connected the moment the socket opened, even when SRS then rejected it. It now reads the server's real reply — and a mere version warning never drops the crew to speakers.
The support bundle finds your real Desktop (OneDrive redirects included) and opens Explorer with the file selected.

Beta 33 — the solo-sortie debrief

July 15, 2026

Every fix here came from one real sortie, written down in the cockpit. Nail now ranks the SAM's actual shooter first — the search radar is eyes, not the thing that shoots back — and "switch to the tank" re-tasks you instead of being heard as a frequency change.
A named spike correlates to the SAM you named: "Spike, SA-2" gets the SA-2 — notch and drag out of the ring — not the nearest MiG. Checking in inside a hostile SAM ring gets called out up front.
Reading back a clearance gets "readback correct" — Tower no longer re-issues the whole clearance at you.
Pin your callsign. DCS names every slot "New callsign" — set yours once in config and the crew always calls you by it (solo convenience: it steps aside the moment a second human is on the net).
The controllers vary their phrasing on the calls you hear most — taxi, takeoff, landing, inbound — instead of one canned line every time. The runway and hold-short words stay standard, so readbacks are unaffected.
Hook v10: the data feed survives a mission change without a DCS restart, and a dying unit can no longer flood the net with a hundred kill reports.

Beta 32 — the FPS release

July 14, 2026

WILCO now always loses the fight for CPU against DCS — as it should. Every WILCO process runs at below-normal Windows priority: a controller speaking or listening borrows cores DCS isn't using, instead of stealing frame time.
The voice engine is capped to 2 CPU threads (it grabbed every core per transmission before). Speech recognition capped to half your cores. Same hearing, same speed, half the fight.
The hearing stack no longer drags in gigabytes of unused ML libraries — lighter start, far lower memory use.
If the radio can't connect at startup (busy PC, SRS still loading), the crew retries quietly for up to 5 minutes instead of instantly switching to your PC speakers and open microphone.

Beta 31

July 14, 2026

The debrief release: every fix below came from one real sortie, analyzed call by call afterward.
Clean voices. WILCO's own radio effect is now off by default - SRS already applies its radio sound, so every voice was being processed twice into mud. (And MiG reads “mig” now, not “em eye gee”.)
One voice per warning. A missile launch is Overlord's call - not five controllers shouting the same thing. If the senior position is down, the next in line inherits it automatically.
The crew never parrots a garbled callsign: all positions share one callsign memory, and a mangled hearing folds into the name you actually use. “Copy Not, your fight” can never happen again.
Approach works arrivals like a real arrival controller - “request landing” gets vectors, never a ten-minute hold or a bounce to Tower mid-approach; vector altitudes raised; steering stops the moment Tower clears you to land.
“I'm NOT engaging” is a negative, never a confirmation. The living net stops repeating itself. Identical warnings never air twice back-to-back.

Beta 30

July 14, 2026

Talk to it like a person. A natural-speech certification pass: 99.4% understood on 100,000 plain-English asks (0.16% confidently wrong), 97.4% on a 1,000,000-utterance exam it never stored. Around 120 new everyday phrasings - “what does it look like up there”, “gear is down and locked”, “can we depart”, “steer me back to the field”.
Five deep engine fixes the new exams exposed - the word “like” could silently kill whole phrase families, “here fuel” could read as “refuel”, and a self-cancelling veto had muted every “say my heading” since it shipped. All caught, all covered by tests now.
License care. Invite codes now revalidate quietly in the background; a disabled code gets a polite radio notice and the Control Station says why - never dead air.
Radio card regenerated: 93 calls across 6 positions, matching everything above.

Beta 29

July 13, 2026

The Instructor. WILCO watches your real gauges now and coaches the two moments data can honestly judge: dragging it in low-and-slow (“you're behind the power curve — power up now, then set your pitch”) and the touchdown itself, graded to the foot-per-minute — from “greased it” to “have maintenance look at the gear.”
The Logbook. The crew remembers you across sorties — kills, landings and their trend, fuel habits. Check in and you might hear: “watch your gas tonight — that's three sorties running you've come home on fumes.”
Debrief with zero credits. The after-action report is now counted from the real tape — understood-first-time rate, a timeline with quotes, work-ons, crew reply speed — and needs no AI at all. The AI debrief still exists and falls back automatically.
Visual SAM reports. “Overlord, I can see an SA-2” is intel now: correlated with the scope (“good eyes — that's the SA-2 Guideline, bullseye…”) or plotted at your position and shared with every pilot who asks — flagged unconfirmed.
MAYDAY on every frequency. A real emergency once went unanswered on the AWACS freq — the mayday intent only lived on Tower and Approach. Every position catches it now, and answers like itself.
The small real-flight fixes: a bare hail gets “go ahead” instead of “say again”; “taxiing to the runway” gets “report holding short”; “I am in” works on Overlord and Nail; emergency phrasings can never be mis-learned; “laser OFF” can never fire the laser-ON intent.

Beta 28

July 13, 2026

The missile. Everyone says "missile in the air, defend" — DCS says it, the competition says it. It's the least useful true statement on the net, because it tells you nothing about whether you're about to die. WILCO tracks the missile, every second: "Missile off your six o'clock — twelve seconds. Notch and start defending." … "Still tracking, eight seconds. Get your nose off." … "BREAK RIGHT! FLARES! NOW!" … "Missile's off — you're clean. Nicely flown." A live countdown on the real weapon, the break called at the instant it works, and — just as important — being told you're clean, so you can stop bleeding energy and turn back. No AI can do this. It would have to invent the twelve.
The net is alive. Fly solo and you used to hear nothing unless you keyed the mic. Now the field works other traffic around you — and every call is a real aircraft in your mission, at its real position. It switches itself off the moment a second human joins: a squadron's net is already alive.
It sounds like a radio. The band-pass was a brick-wall filter, which rings — that hollow, synthetic quality. Rebuilt with a proper rolloff, a presence peak at 2 kHz (what your ear recognises as "a radio" before it understands a word), real AGC, and hiss that rides under the voice instead of sitting on top of it.
It answers in under a second. ~1.6s → ~0.9s. The brain was never the problem (44 ms). Hearing was. It now runs a model 2.8× faster that, measured on real calls, is understood identically — because the fuzzy engine was built to heal exactly that garble.
It doesn't step on you. It re-checks the frequency immediately before keying up, and waits for the net to settle — so a breath mid-sentence is never mistaken for "he's finished". With a squadron the mic is triaged: the man closest to dying gets it.
Nail runs a flight. He'd have cleared two strikers hot onto the same target at the same time. Now: one shooter, the rest hold high in cover, and the wingman is called in when the lead comes off.
And the things that were silently broken: the hook had never once reported a kill (the handler was a dead stub — so "splash one" could never have fired); an Su-27 flying with a MiG-29 was called a MiG-29, the Flanker vanishing from the picture; the ATIS letter was a hash that jumped from Kilo to Delta and back; and the runway rule was corrupting MGRS grids in a 9-line.
Restart DCS once — the hook is new.

Beta 27

July 13, 2026

Every controller had holes — they're filled. We audited the calls a pilot makes on a normal sortie and found 7 of 13 weren't understood at all. Some that did "work" were worse than a miss: "request line up and wait" was being answered with CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF. Line-up-and-wait is the opposite of a takeoff clearance — you hold on the runway. That's a runway incursion waiting to happen. It's now its own call, and it's safety-gated.
Tower — line up and wait, the option / touch-and-go / closed traffic, and the military overhead break ("initial", "break at midfield").
Ground — pushback, and a real IFR departure clearance in CRAFT order: cleared as fragged, climb and maintain, departure frequency, squawk.
Approach — holding, with a fix, a turn direction and an expect-further-clearance time.
Overlord — the ROE ("are we weapons free?"), and commit ("committing north group" used to be read as a question about groups).
Nail verifies your 9-line readback. Real JTAC doctrine: the striker reads back lines 4, 6 and 8 before anyone says "cleared hot". Nail never checked — he'd brief you and just clear you. Now he won't clear you hot until the elevation is right. A wrong one puts the bomb short, or long into the friendlies.
The exam doubled to 100,000 sentences — and got harder. It now speaks non-native English ("can you give me the picture", "i need to know the weather") — the way half the playerbase actually talks — plus terse radio habits and speech-to-text garble. Two exemptions were also removed that had been quietly hiding failures. Result: 95.9% understood, of 100,000 sentences stored nowhere. The exam paid for itself, catching "touch and go" filed under the wrong intent, and "no more missiles" being answered with a defensive notch instead of being sent home.

Beta 26

July 12, 2026

Real instrument approaches — at every airfield, on every map. WILCO now reads the actual navaids out of DCS's own map files (38 ILS localizers on Sinai alone). Approach clears you for the real ILS and reads you the real localizer frequency. If the active runway hasn't got one, it says so and vectors you to a visual — it will never invent a needle that isn't there.
Nail is a JTAC you can talk to. He used to just read a 9-line at you. Ask him "what's down there?" and he answers off the live battlefield: "An SA-8 Gecko, two T-72s and a Ural in the box. The SA-8 is your problem — your 12 o'clock, 9 miles." Ask what to hit first and he tells you why. Ask if it's defended, how far it reaches, whether you're already inside it, and what run-in keeps the frag off the friendlies. And "say BDA" now reads the sim's real kill feed — "good hits, one T-72 destroyed" — instead of "stand by for BDA", forever.
"Spiked" is a defensive call again. Being locked used to get you a bogey dope to read while you died. Now: "Spike correlates MiG-29, BRAA zero two seven, 16, hot. Notch right, heading one one seven. Call defending."
It answers your readback. "Copy, taxiing to the runway" used to get silence — so you'd say the whole thing over again. On Ground, Tower and Approach the call right after a clearance is now taken as the readback it obviously is, even with no numbers in it.
Splash. Kill something and the crew calls it: "Warhawk, splash one. MiG-29 destroyed — good kill."
It understands more of what you say. Straight from real flight logs: the word "repeat" was in no intent at all, and "holding short runway 35R" — a completely standard call — Ground could not even hear. It also stopped teaching itself wrong answers: the phrase-learner had quietly bound "repeat" to bogey dope.

Beta 25

July 12, 2026

The two brains became one crew. WILCO has always had two: an offline engine that computes the fight exactly, and an AI that talks like a person. They used to be either/or. Now the engine reads your call first — through the static — works out the answer from the live mission, and hands it to the AI, whose only remaining job is to say it. It stops guessing what you said, stops doing arithmetic, and cannot invent a number. Less to work out means it's on the air faster.
That includes the missile call. When a SAM fires, the AI now transmits the engine's exact line. It can no longer make up the bearing on a missile that is already in the air.
The 9-line stopped lying about the friendlies. Line 8 was being measured to your own aircraft — so the brief put the friendlies wherever you happened to be flying. It is now the real friendly ground unit, and it calls DANGER CLOSE when they are inside a mile of the target.
The grid is readable. "Line six: three six Romeo, Uniform Uniform, three six eight five, seven five four two." It used to say "three thousand six hundred eighty-five" — which is how you type the wrong square into the jet.
"Runway three five right" — not "runway three five arr." Every clearance, every ATIS.
You can tell the groups apart. Two contacts on the same bearing were both called "the northeast group". Now they're lead group and trail group — and a hot group inside twenty miles gets the word it has earned: "Threat."
The SAM warning says "SA-2 Guideline" instead of spelling out the Russian designator, letter by letter, in the middle of a launch call.

Beta 24

July 11, 2026

The crew can see YOU. DCS gives most pilots a default pilot name, so the callsign you said matched nothing on the scope — and everything that needs your position ("bogey dope", "declare", "BRAA") answered "I don't hold you on the link". WILCO now binds the callsign you speak to your jet. And since speech-to-text mangles a callsign differently every time, the controllers vote — the name you say most becomes your name.
It calls the missile. The DCS hook was seeing incoming SAMs and discarding them: launches were filtered by a guessed list that had never been tested against a real shot. A SAM fired at a pilot and the radio stayed silent. Missing a launch is the worst thing this program can do — the filter is gone. (Restart DCS once so the new hook loads.)
It answers your readback. "Taxiing runway three five, copy" was being swallowed as a plain "roger", so readbacks got silence — and a wrong readback was never caught. Now: "readback correct. Contact Tower two five two decimal zero when ready."
"Ground picture" answered with bandits in the air; it now gives surface threats. "I can see an SA-2" is understood. And a station or airfield name can never be mistaken for your callsign again.

Beta 23

July 11, 2026

Offline brain, guaranteed everywhere. A full "stranger test" — fresh download, fresh PC, no coaching — caught the text-mode crew and the controller-initiated calls skipping the offline brain. Both now answer instantly with no internet and no account, same as the voice crew.
Launch and SAM warnings can never silently skip again — the engine now shouts in the log if any part of the crew runs unwired.
Practice mode fixed: the fake-traffic sim now reaches every controller, so "no DCS" test flights get a live scope, not a dark one.
No more window flash on Start all / Restart / Stop — everything launches fully hidden.

Beta 22

July 11, 2026

Seat-aware plans. Paid plans serve the licensed number of pilots per session; an extra pilot gets one polite notice — and safety calls are never gated: launch warnings, go-arounds and traffic reach every pilot, seat or no seat.
Voice Studio fix: the music remover now works on machines without FFmpeg (it silently skipped separation before).
The panel shows your plan and seats; the self-learning loop now mines only real flights (test noise excluded).

Beta 21

July 11, 2026

The brain doubled its vocabulary — 11,468 radio phrasings across 72 kinds of call (was 5,684): more natural registers, more plain-English shapes, more milsim brevity.
Re-proven against 50,000 calls it had never seen: 97.6% understood. All 8 test suites green; understanding still takes under 100 ms.

Beta 20

July 11, 2026

Play-tested by flying a full sortie against it — and fixing what only a real flight finds: multiplayer callsigns without digits ("Warhawk") now resolve with several pilots on frequency, fighters are never sent to the JTAC for tasking, runway corrections say the full runway ("three five right").
Stress-hardened. A new adversarial suite proves it: prompt-injection, corrupted mission data, flooding, stale confirms — no crashes, and no trick can ever produce a clearance.

Betas 15–19 — the ELITE run

July 11, 2026

Continuous approach control. "Request vectors" now means being worked: corrections as you drift, the intercept turn, the Tower handoff — "I'll call your turns."
Tactical judgment. Ask "should I take this fight?" and Overlord counts the bandits, weighs your altitude, aspect and fuel, and answers with the reasons out loud.
Smart clarification. A genuinely ambiguous call gets "picture, or bogey dope?" instead of "say again".
It learns you. Miss once, rephrase once — your personal phrasing works forever after, per pilot, across sessions.
Intercept geometry. Cutoff vectors that lead the bandit, closure rate and a countdown to the merge in every dope call.
Real brevity doctrine. Groups inside 25 miles come as BRAA off your nose; bullseye stays for the far picture. Multi-ships are addressed as a flight.
Shift memory. Joker fuel tracked with a nudge ten minutes later, kill tallies in the end-of-shift call, returning groups called as "the same customers".
Sub-second replies — it answers the moment your call is complete, plus crosswind warnings, compound calls ("picture and pigeons"), and a red status banner in the Control Station that names silent failures.

Betas 9–14 — the local brain

July 9–11, 2026

The brain moved onto your PC. Understanding, tactics and voices now run 100% locally — no cloud, no API keys, no internet needed. Cloud AI became an optional switch.
5,684 phrasings, 69 kinds of call — grown from real flight transcripts and proven against 50,000 calls it had never seen (97.5% understood).
Garble repair. "Bogey dop", "taxy", "earth formation alpha" — healed before matching. Hesitations ("uh", "you know") ignored like a human ear does.
Readbacks verified in code — get a number wrong and exactly that number is corrected. Safety clearances confirm first when your radio was shaky.
Missile launch warnings that actually work — a new weapon watcher sees every launch the moment it exists (the old DCS event bridge never fired).
Voice Studio. Clone any voice from a sample recording, train it on your own GPU with a live step counter, assign it to any controller. Nothing uploads.
Tacview telemetry feed for multiplayer servers where you can't install the hook, and a printable kneeboard radio card generated from the brain itself.

Betas 5–8

July 7–9, 2026

Nail became a real JTAC — nose-relative talk-ons, weapon-tailored nine-lines (JDAM coordinates included), one shooter at a time in multiplayer, BDA from confirmed kills.
Hearing, sharpened. Live vocabulary biasing from the actual mission, an honest "say again" instead of acting on noise, and a hearing quality selector that never fights DCS for the GPU.
Windows Defender false-positive eliminated by removing the frozen exe entirely — the app now runs on its own bundled runtime.
ATIS numbers spoken properly, callsign hardening against garble, dozens of live findings from real sorties folded in.

Beta 4

July 6, 2026

Every controller is their own character. Ground is the deadpan thirty-year ramp veteran, Tower is the quick-draw hotshot, Approach is the smooth midnight voice, Overlord gets colder as the fight gets hotter — and Nail is still Nail.
One law for all of them: cool = fewer words. Personality lives in how they say the call, never in extra sentences.

Beta 3

July 6, 2026

AWACS radio discipline. Picture on an interval, threat calls only for closing bandits, silence during your merge — and if you ask for radio quiet, Overlord actually holds it. Missile launches still break through, on purpose.
SAM proximity warnings. Overlord warns you before you fly into a SAM's engagement ring, with real bearings.
Crystal-clear voice. Removed the last crackle source and the half-second stall at the start of every transmission — the radio beat is now a perfect 40 ms.
Controllers know your airframe. No more sending an F-16 "back to the boat".
Tower calls your departure at wheels-up, and a garbled mic can never rename you mid-flight.
One-click self-update from the Control Station — this page is now optional reading.

Beta 2

July 4, 2026

Accounts and pilot profiles — sign up, get your invite code, see your allowance, invite friends.
Premium neural voices served by your invite code, with the radio-fx layer.
Hearing selector — CPU / Standard / High, picked for your GPU.
The speed pack — instant readbacks, a fast lane for routine calls, transcription that starts while you're still finishing the sentence.
ATIS on its own frequency, departure handoffs, military pronunciation ("CAS" like the word, not the letters), and the Control Station ops view.

Beta 1

July 2026

First public beta — five controllers (Ground, Tower, Approach, AWACS, JTAC) on real SRS frequencies, live mission data, real procedures, real attitude.