Features
What the crew actually does.
No mystery AI claims. Every line below is shipped, in beta53, and most of it is covered by a test you can run.
The flagship
The missile countdown
The server hook streams every in-flight weapon. WILCO measures the closure on the one guiding on you and speaks in bands: warn, crank at twelve seconds, BREAK at six — then the call that saves your energy: “missile trashed, you're clean, come back left.”
The brain
Deterministic. Offline. 33 milliseconds.
Exact math, not vibes
BRAA, pigeons, vectors, nine-lines — computed from the live feed, never invented. If the feed doesn't know, WILCO says so. Every number you hear can be checked against the mission.
bearing · range · altitude · aspect — measured, not guessed
No API keys, ever
The default brain runs entirely on your PC. Optional cloud AI exists for richer improvisation — the offline brain feeds it the facts so it can't hallucinate.
The prediction engine
It flies the world forward: SAM ring entry warnings before you cross, merge countdowns, glideslope deviations, fuel playtime.
Readback verification
Runway, heading, altitude, squawk — checked in code. “Negative, runway three five right — read back.”
Mission memory
Kill tally across the shift, groups that faded and came back — “that group we lost is back.” Joker fuel remembered and nudged.
Wrong-net armor
Call the wrong frequency in any words and you're pointed at the right station, with its freq spoken — even when the call itself wasn't understood.
Ships and naval groups
Every hull in the mission is on the scope, so Nail can work you onto a naval group instead of calling the water empty.
The ears
It understands you, not your spelling.
102 intents, 42,039 phrasings
Say it formally, casually, or half-swallowed at 2 AM — no phrases to memorize. Certified on exams built from sentences it has never stored, re-run before every release.
Garble repair
Damerau–Levenshtein healing over an aviation lexicon: “pichure” → picture, “bogey dop” → bogey dope. Every recorded real-world mangle understood, and 96% still right with one character in twenty corrupted.
Safety gate
Clearances are anchor-gated and confirm-tiered. Chatter can never trigger a takeoff clearance — hard-asserted in the test suite.
It learns YOUR phrases
Miss → rephrase → learned forever, per pilot. Your personal wording becomes part of its vocabulary.
Sub-second endpointing
It knows when you're done talking — and answers standard calls in about 0.9 seconds, mic to voice.
Compound calls
“Picture and pigeons” gets both answers in one transmission.
The sentence after
Follow-ups know what you were just talking about — “how far is it now?”, “say again the altimeter”, “and my squawk?” Ask a question while a clearance is outstanding and you get an answer, not a readback correction.
Faster ears on NVIDIA
With a CUDA card it runs a bigger speech model at roughly 200 ms a transcription instead of 650 — fewer “say again”s with the mission running.
The voice
Sounds like a radio, not a robot.
A real comm-radio chain
Band-pass, presence peak, AGC, envelope-riding hiss, squelch tail — rebuilt from how radios actually distort, not a robot voice with static pasted on.
Different person per position
Ground doesn't sound like Tower. Overlord doesn't sound like Nail. Offline neural voices, no cloud.
Voice mood
Urgent calls speed up. Quiet nights relax. The pacing follows the situation.
Voice Studio
Paste an audio clip, train, assign — put any voice you own on any position, all locally.
Crew packs
One pick swaps the whole crew: every voice, the AWACS and JTAC callsigns, and the manner they work you in — by-the-book, or a looser squadron net.
The instructor
Say “teach me”. The crew teaches.
Guided lessons, on frequency
Three lessons taught by the controllers themselves — the full airfield pattern, working AWACS, working the FAC. Every step prompts the exact words, checks your call, and moves you to the next one. The lesson follows you across frequencies, Ground to Tower and back.
The radio report card
The crew grades your radio each session — and Ground speaks it when you taxi in: “Radio tonight: 9 of 10 first time — sharp.”
A crew that remembers you
Next check-in, the controller knows: “sharp radio last time out.” A rough night gets the honest offer to drill the calls.
Misses become teaching
A wrong call mid-lesson gets the exact words, not a “say again”. Outside lessons, a near-miss gets a named guess: “if that was wind check, just say ‘wind check’.”
Shown round on day one
The first time you open WILCO a recorded voice walks you through the Control Station — pointing at each control as it talks, and opening the actual kneeboard and career pages rather than describing them.
The net
Disciplined with twelve pilots. Alive with one.
Mic triage
Every pending call is ranked — the pilot closest to dying gets the frequency first. The crew never steps on a human: the freq is re-checked the instant before it keys up.
The living net (solo)
Real AI traffic in your mission gets worked around you. Auto-off the moment a second human checks in.
One shooter at a time
Nail holds your wingman high in cover until you're off target — then calls him in.
Handoff memory
Tower already knows what you told Ground. The shared flight log follows you across positions.
Real ATIS
Information letters only advance, like real life — and controllers catch you reading back a stale one.
Worked as a flight
Check in as a two-ship or a four-ship and Ground and Tower work you as one — “Warhawk flight, cleared for takeoff” — not as separate aircraft.
Busy-net standby
Key up mid-clearance to another pilot and you get a “standby”, then they come back to you. An emergency is never told to wait.
The warning reaches you
Every controller has its own frequency and you can only listen to one. A missile in the air is called by whoever is working you — not only by the senior net, on a radio you left ten minutes ago.
The paperwork
The card you fly with.
A real data card, 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.
Pull the flight plan
The card fills itself in from the mission you loaded: every waypoint, the runway that is into the wind, your loadout station by station, and the rest of the package with their frequencies.
It does the leg work
Headings, leg distances, elapsed times and a fuel ladder down every leg — worked out for you, and worked out again the moment you move a waypoint.
The pages you reach for
Known threats and their rings, every frequency the crew answer on, codewords and authentication — on the card, not in another window.
Straight onto your knee
Build puts the deck on your in-game kneeboard at RShift+K, and it can rebuild itself while you fly. Export saves the pages anywhere you like — to print, to share, or to drop into a mission's own kneeboard folder.
Your record
A crew that knows who you are.
The logbook is kept for you
Hours flown, sorties, landings and how smooth they were, kills split air-to-air, ground and air-defence — all counted where the facts are proven, never guessed from words.
It remembers you
A controller who has worked you before greets you like it — your landings, your fuel habit, your kills. Once, on check-in, then it gets on with the job.
Career dossier
Your record drawn as one card: rank from Rookie to Ace, landing trend, radio proficiency, the crew's own notes on how you fly.
Head to head
Compare your record against anyone else the crew has worked — hours, kills, touchdown rate, radio — and a squadron board of everybody on the books.
On your kneeboard
The dossier and a deck of reference pages install straight into the DCS kneeboard, so your career and every call ride on your knee at RShift+K.
How it compares
Other tools talk. This one sees.
There are two other ways this problem gets solved: renting a cloud language model, or running a heavyweight server suite. Here's where WILCO stands — solo and on a full squadron net.
And the price: $35, once, for the whole crew and every feature in it. No subscription, no per-call costs anywhere, so the crew never goes quiet to save someone's API bill.
Honest limits
What it doesn't do (yet)
- Carrier ops has a text-mode prototype — it's not in the Control Station yet.
- One controlled airfield at a time (a second field's crew can run in parallel).
- Windows only — it lives next to your DCS install.
- English radio. It forgives accents; it doesn't translate.
