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The Landing Analyser plugin grades every landing out of 100. That grade is a weighted average of six categories, each scored 0–100 on its own. This page explains what each category measures, the exact bands it uses, and how the composite is assembled — with a detailed section on Fuel Efficiency, which is the category pilots ask about most. For how the landing rate itself is measured (the curve fit through gear height, not a single simvar), see Landing Rate Detection.

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The composite score

Each category produces a 0–100 score. The composite is the weighted average of the categories that could actually be evaluated:
Everything on this page is the Stratos default. Your virtual airline can change the weights and several of the band sets in its Landing Analyser plugin configuration, so the numbers you see may not match the ones documented here. If a score doesn’t line up with this page, check with your VA staff first.

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What your VA can change

A weight can be set to zero to remove a category from the composite entirely, and any band set can be reshaped to match the airline’s own standards. Invalid configuration is ignored rather than applied: if a band set fails validation the plugin logs a warning and falls back to the defaults documented here, so a typo in an airline’s config can never produce nonsense scores. VA administrators: these live in your airline’s Landing Analyser plugin configuration on the Skyvex admin side, alongside the rest of your plugin settings.

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Skipped categories

A category that can’t be honestly evaluated is skipped, not scored zero. Its card reads “Not scored” and shows an em dash, and its weight is dropped from the composite and redistributed across the remaining categories. This happens when:
  • Rollout — the arrival runway couldn’t be matched confidently, so there’s no landing distance available to measure against.
  • Approach Stability — too few samples on short final (tracking started low, a sim hiccup, an older shell build).
  • Fuel Efficiency — no SimBrief flight plan was found for the flight, so there’s no planned burn to compare against.
A missing flight plan should never tank an otherwise good landing, which is why the category disappears instead of scoring zero.

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Verdict labels

Every category score, and the composite, maps to a label:

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Fuel Efficiency

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What the two numbers on the card mean

The Fuel Efficiency card shows two figures, and they measure different things:
  • The large number (e.g. +1,365 kg) is the total fuel you burned on the flight, in your preferred weight unit (Settings → Weight Unit). It is not a variance, a saving, or a difference from plan. The leading + is a display prefix on that card only; read it as “1,365 kg of fuel used”.
  • The small number in the corner (e.g. 85 pts) is the category score, which is what actually feeds your composite.
If you want the plan-versus-actual figures, open Detailed Data → Rollout & Fuel in the report. That panel shows the three numbers the score is built from:

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How the score is calculated

The score is based on percentage deviation from the planned burn, not on raw pounds. Stratos captures your fuel at the start of the flight (at push back by default — your VA can configure this to take-off instead), and again at touchdown. The difference is your actual burn. The planned burn is derived from your starting fuel and SimBrief’s planned arrival fuel:
Positive deviation means you burned more than planned (over-burn). Negative means you burned less (under-burn). Because starting fuel is normally captured at push back, both sides of that comparison are block figures: the planned burn includes SimBrief’s taxi allowance, and your actual burn includes your real taxi. If your VA has set fuel capture to take-off instead, both sides become enroute-only figures. Either way the comparison is like for like.

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The bands

Over-burn is penalised much harder than under-burn. These bands are fixed and not VA-configurable, though the weight the category carries is: The asymmetry is deliberate. Burning more fuel than planned usually reflects the profile actually flown: heavy, slow, low, or a lot of manoeuvring. Burning less usually means the flight plan over-padded, which is the planner’s doing rather than the pilot’s, so the penalty stops early.
85 is the floor for under-burning, not a failing grade. There is no band below it on the under-burn side. However far under plan you land, the worst Fuel Efficiency can score is 85, and internally that result is flagged as “planned burn may be off” rather than as a piloting fault. At the default weight of 10, the difference between 85 and 100 moves your composite score by about 1.5 points.

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Why a consistent 85 is common

A steady 85 means you keep landing with 15% or more of the planned burn still in the tanks. That is usually the flight plan rather than the flying, and there are a few normal causes:
  • Unburned taxi allowance. SimBrief’s default taxi fuel is generous, and with fuel captured at push back that allowance sits inside the planned burn. If your taxi out is short, the leftover counts as an under-burn. On a short sector this alone can be 15% of the whole planned burn, because the planned burn is small to begin with.
  • Fuel loaded above the OFP figure. The planned burn is derived from what you actually started with, so any extra fuel you tanker above SimBrief’s ramp figure inflates the planned burn and reads as an under-burn. Rounding up at the fuel truck, an EFB that loads by percentage, or a VA loadsheet that adds its own margin will all do this.
  • The aircraft burns less than the SimBrief profile. Airframe profiles are averages. If the aircraft or mod you fly is more efficient than the profile you selected in SimBrief, every flight will read as an under-burn.
  • A better-than-planned profile. Direct routings, no holding, favourable step climbs, and no ATC vectoring all put fuel back in the tanks that the plan assumed you would burn.

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Aiming for 100

To sit in the 100 band your block burn needs to land between 5% under and 2% over the plan. In practice that means tightening the plan rather than changing how you fly:
  1. Load exactly the SimBrief ramp figure, not a rounded-up number.
  2. Make sure the SimBrief airframe profile matches the aircraft and mod you actually fly.
  3. Set the cost index, cruise levels, and route in SimBrief to what you intend to fly.
  4. Bring SimBrief’s taxi fuel in line with your usual taxi time, especially on short sectors.
If you have done all of that and still land 15% up, the plan is over-padded for the aircraft you fly, and 85 is the score the model is designed to give.
Because the only planned figure the OFP gives us that survives contact with the flight is the fuel expected in the tanks on arrival. Comparing your actual arrival fuel against that, and working the burn back from your real starting fuel, means the comparison holds even when you load a different amount of fuel to the plan, divert, or fly a different routing. The trade-off is that extra fuel loaded and fuel not burned look identical at touchdown, which is why the under-burn penalty is capped.

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Landing Rate

The touchdown descent rate, scored on magnitude. See Landing Rate Detection for how the rate itself is derived. Bands and floor are VA-configurable (landingRate_bands, landingRate_floor); the defaults are: Anything softer than 100 fpm scores 65 rather than 100. A greaser delays weight transfer to the gear, which delays spoiler and reverser deployment, so it is not the target. VAs can move the floor or set it to zero to disable the rule.

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G-Force

Peak vertical g at touchdown. Bands are VA-configurable (gforce_bands); the defaults are: G-force is scored on its own, but it has limited say over the verdict on the landing. Sim gear-strut models routinely throw a single-frame g spike on an otherwise smooth touchdown, so g can only worsen the vertical-speed verdict by one band, and can never on its own drive the verdict to the worst band.

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Bounce Quality

Fixed bands, not VA-configurable.

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Approach Stability

Measured as how steady you were, not where you happened to be at one instant. Stratos takes the standard deviation of vertical speed and of bank angle across the approach window (airborne, at or below 1,000 ft AGL, excluding the last 3 seconds before touchdown so the flare doesn’t count against you), bands each one, and takes the worse of the two. Fixed bands, not VA-configurable. Taking the worse axis means you can’t hide a porpoising descent behind level wings, or wing-rock behind a steady rate. Fewer than five samples in the window and the category is skipped.

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Rollout

Scored on how much of the runway you used, not on a fixed distance, so a 1,800 m rollout at a 4,000 m runway is treated very differently to the same rollout at a 2,000 m one.
Bands are VA-configurable (rollout_bands); the defaults are: If the arrival runway couldn’t be matched confidently, the category is skipped and the card shows your raw rollout distance instead of a misleading percentage.

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The stability gate

Separately from the six categories, Stratos evaluates a 50 ft stabilised-approach gate against class-aware thresholds: Failing the gate shows an “Unstable approach” badge on the report. It is informational and does not change your score. Vref comes from SimBrief, so with no flight plan filed the gate isn’t evaluated and the badge is hidden.

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Frequently asked questions

No. That figure is the total fuel you burned on the flight. The + is just a display prefix on that card. For plan-versus-actual, look at the “Fuel variance” row under Detailed Data → Rollout & Fuel.
No SimBrief flight plan was found for that flight, so there was no planned burn to compare your actual burn against. The category is dropped from the composite entirely and its weight is shared out across the other categories, so it doesn’t cost you anything.
Most likely nothing. 85 is the lowest score an under-burn can produce, and it means you landed with 15% or more of the planned burn still on board. The usual causes are an unburned taxi allowance (which is a big share of a short sector’s planned burn), fuel loaded above the OFP ramp figure, or an airframe profile in SimBrief that is thirstier than the aircraft you actually fly. Tightening the plan moves the score; flying differently generally won’t.
The weights, the landing-rate bands and floor, the g-force bands, and the rollout bands are all configurable per airline in the Landing Analyser plugin configuration. The bounce, approach-stability, and fuel-deviation bands are currently fixed.
Landing Rate carries the largest default weight at 30, so it moves the composite most. Everything else is 20 or below. If a low composite doesn’t match a category card you’re looking at, check whether another category was skipped, because its weight is redistributed and that changes how much every remaining category counts.