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Simulators drop connections, freeze for a few seconds, and get reloaded mid-flight. Stratos does not treat every one of these the same way. It watches the position data itself and asks a single question: is this still the same flight, continuously flown? If yes, tracking carries on without you doing anything. If no, Stratos stops and waits for you to confirm what happened. This page explains the two rules that decide “continuous,” what a brief disconnect looks like from the cockpit, when tracking suspends instead, and how to get back into a suspended flight.

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What counts as continuous

Whenever the data stream returns after a gap — a dropped socket, a spell in the sim’s menu, a reload — Stratos compares where the aircraft is now against where it was last seen and applies two rules:
  • Distance. If the aircraft is within 2 nautical miles of where tracking last saw it, the gap is continuous regardless of how long it took.
  • Plausible speed. If it moved further than that, Stratos checks whether the distance covered is consistent with the aircraft actually having flown there in the time that elapsed. A dropout that resumes 100 nm along the same route at a believable ground speed is still continuous — the aircraft simply kept flying while the connection was down.
If neither rule is satisfied — the aircraft reappears somewhere the elapsed time could not explain, such as a different airport, or a save was reloaded — the gap is a discontinuity, and tracking suspends rather than carrying on.

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Brief disconnects

Most gaps are brief and continuous: a watchdog stall, a few seconds of stutter, a short SimConnect hiccup. When one of these happens:
  • Stratos shows a warning toast, and while it waits, a Waiting for the simulator dialog with a spinner is shown — there is nothing to do here, just wait.
  • Once frames come back and pass the continuity check, the dialog closes itself and tracking continues automatically.
  • Only the distance you actually flew counts toward flight time. The gap itself is folded into paused time, not credited as time in the air, so a stall or brief dropout does not inflate your block or air time.

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When tracking suspends

Tracking suspends — stops and waits for you — when the gap is a discontinuity rather than a brief bridge. That happens when:
  • The simulator comes back — after a disconnect, or after more than 5 seconds in the menu or world map — somewhere implausible for the time elapsed, or parked on the ground after it was flying.
  • The aircraft’s position jumps mid-flight even though the simulator connection never dropped.
When any of these fire, Stratos pauses the flight, plays the error sound, raises a Tracking suspended notification, and shows the Simulator Disconnected dialog. Unlike a brief disconnect, a suspended flight does not resume on its own — this is deliberate. It is exactly the case that used to let a reloaded save or a fresh sim flight silently continue tracking from the wrong position and produce a corrupted PIREP.

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Getting back

To clear a suspended flight, get the aircraft back to where tracking left off — either by loading your save or by using Auto Reposition if your simulator supports it. The dialog polls your simulator’s current position and compares it against the last known point:
  • Once you are within 2 nm of where tracking stopped, the dialog turns green and shows “Back at last known position.” Resume is then a single click. This needs a live position: while you sit in the sim’s menu the simulator reports nothing new, so the dialog keeps showing the drift until the aircraft is loaded and reporting again.
  • Further away, the dialog keeps showing the drift so you know how far off you are, along with the Auto Reposition option where available.

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Pause vs suspend

Pause and suspend look similar — both stop the flight — but they mean different things:
  • Pause is something you choose. Pressing Pause also pauses the simulator itself.
  • Suspend is something Stratos decides, in response to a discontinuity it cannot silently absorb.
The two can overlap. If you press Pause while a gap is still bridging, Stratos honours it: when the simulator reconnects, Stratos re-pauses the sim on your behalf and holds it there until you press Resume — your pause is not overwritten by the gap resolving underneath it. And whether you paused manually or Stratos suspended the flight for you, the rule is the same: a suspended flight never resumes on its own. Only pressing Resume clears it.