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A diversion is any flight that lands at an airport other than the one on the flight plan — a weather divert, a medical emergency, an event-driven reroute on IVAO or VATSIM, or a fuel stop on the way to the destination. Stratos handles all of these without you needing to change anything mid-flight: tracking keeps running, the landing is still captured, and the flight can still be submitted. This page explains exactly what Stratos does when you land away from the planned arrival, what it does not do automatically, and the recommended workflow for pilots and VA administrators.

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Tracking continues wherever you land

Stratos detects flight phases from what the aircraft is doing, not from where it is. Descent, approach, touchdown, rollout and taxi-in are recognised at any airport, so a diverted flight moves through descent → approach → final → landed → taxi_in → arrived → deboarding exactly as a normal flight would. See Flight Phases & Transitions for the detection rules. The landing itself is recorded the same way too — touchdown rate, G-force, speed and the rest of the landing report are captured regardless of airport. The one thing that depends on location is runway identification: Stratos matches the touchdown against the runways of the planned arrival airport, so on a diversion the report will usually show no runway match. The landing rate and score are unaffected.

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The 5 nm arrival check

Stratos treats you as having reached your destination when the aircraft is within 5 nautical miles of the planned arrival airport. This distance is used in two places:
Auto-submit deliberately stays silent on a diversion. Landing at the wrong airport is exactly the moment a pilot should decide what happens next — submit as-is, continue to the destination, or cancel — so Stratos never submits on your behalf when you are more than 5 nm from the planned arrival.

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Continuing after a tech stop

If you land away from the planned arrival, shut down, and then start the engines again, Stratos assumes you are continuing the flight. The phase resets to boarding so taxi and take-off are detected as a fresh departure, and the fuel burned on the first leg is banked and added to the total when the flight is finally submitted. Block time and flight time keep accumulating across legs. This covers the common IVAO/VATSIM case of diverting for fuel or weather, waiting it out, and then carrying on to the original destination. The flight is submitted once, at the end, as a single PIREP. If you do not intend to continue — the diversion airport is where the flight ends — simply leave the engines off and submit the flight.

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What gets submitted

When a diverted flight is submitted, Stratos sends the same PIREP it would for any other flight:
  • Departure and arrival ICAO — the airports from the flight plan. The arrival is not rewritten to the airport you actually landed at.
  • Full position history — every position report from the flight, including the descent into and landing at the diversion airport. The actual landing location is visible in this track.
  • Landing report, fuel used, flight time, distance flown — as normal.
  • Status — completed. Stratos does not currently flag the flight as diverted automatically.
Stratos does not detect a diversion on its own. A flight that lands away from the planned arrival and is submitted from the tracking page arrives at your VA with status completed and the originally planned arrival ICAO. The only place Stratos submits a flight as diverted today is the resume dialog: if a flight is recovered after a crash or restart and you choose not to continue it, it is closed out as diverted.
The diverted status does exist end-to-end — the Stratos API accepts it, the flight history filter in the app lists it, and VA integrations receive it — it just is not set automatically from your position yet. For pilots
  1. Fly the diversion as normal. Do not cancel the flight.
  2. If you will continue to the planned destination, shut down, refuel, and start up again — tracking picks the next leg up automatically.
  3. If the flight ends at the diversion airport, shut down and press Submit on the tracking page. Auto-submit will not do this for you.
  4. Tell your VA where you actually landed using whatever channel your airline uses for PIREP remarks.
For VA administrators
  • The position history on every PIREP contains the true landing location, so a diversion can always be identified after the fact by comparing the final position against the filed arrival.
  • If your integration wants to mark these flights automatically, compare the last position report in history against the filed arrival_icao on receipt and set your own diverted state. That is the same 5 nm rule Stratos uses internally.
  • Flights closed out through the resume dialog arrive with status diverted and should be treated as incomplete rather than flown.

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Feedback

Diversions are flown differently by every airline — some want the PIREP marked diverted, some want the actual arrival recorded alongside the filed one, some want the flight split into legs. If your VA has a view on how this should work, let us know; it shapes what gets built next.