September 2025 VA Update

Hello pilots,

In this month's news update we are introducing historical routes, and will share some additional VA updates.

Historical routes

Today, we are pleased to announce a new experimental feature on oneworld virtual: "Historical routes". Our new historical routes section is a curated collection of flights that recreate routes from years past. Thanks to pilot Andrew V for gathering information about historical routes and fleets and sharing this information with us!

What historical routes are currently available?

We are starting this experiment with American Airlines, for which we have curated a collection its 2001 routes. This will allow you to fly aircraft such as the Boeing 717, Fokker 100, MD-82, and the BAe JetStream 32.

Why the 2001 American Airlines schedule?

Late 2001/early 2002 was an interesting time for American Airlines. AAL had recently purchased TWA and its route network, many older aircraft were being phased out in favor of more fuel efficient aircraft, and of course, 9/11 had recently occurred which changed the airline industry and travel as a whole.

Upon acquisition of TWA and its route network, AAL gained many new gates and flights to and from St. Louis Missouri and San Juan Puerto Rico. AAL had intended STL to become a feeder hub to take pressure off of ORD and DFW but this changed as all air travel was drastically reduced for a period of time. At that time, AAL had not yet merged with US Airways. AAL's major focus hubs were BOS, DFW, JFK, LAX, MIA, ORD and STL. Over 4,000 historical routes have been manually entered to create the oneworld virtual historical flight database.

In the fleet hangar, AAL was moving away from, but still flying, the MD-82, 727, A300, MD-11 and F-100. Having acquired the 717's and many smaller sized aircraft from TWA, late 2001 represented an airframe transition time for AAL. As this period included some aircraft no longer flown by AAL today, we have updated the historical aircraft database to represent some notable historical additions.

How can I book a historical flight?

Booking historical routes is currently only possible in the new booking experience announced in the last news post. Once you have enabled the new booking experience, you can simply click on "Book a historical route" to book a flight.

You can also find the historical fleet and historical routes in the Operations menu. Please note that the fleet and routes are still currently in progress and it may not be possible to book a route with all aircraft listed on this page.

Experimental status

We are releasing this as an experimental feature since this is a new feature, but we are also trying to gather how much interest there is in this feature. If this feature is popular, we may add additional airlines and routes.

If you have a deep understanding and/or access to old schedules and would like to contribute to this project please reach out to us via support ticket.

Tours and aircraft substitutions

Historical flights do not currently count towards tour progress, and there are no tours for historical routes. Please also be aware that there are different aircraft substitutions for historical routes. Please use the aircraft substitutions widget on the briefing page to check your aircraft substitution. In general, we only allow aircraft substitutions between the same type, for example substituting an MD-82 with an MD-83.

Airline updates

With Qatar Airways' investment in Virgin Australia, the latter airline has moved over to oneworld virtual from our sister VA SkyTeam Virtual. You can now book routes using Virgin Australia. We are still working on incorporating Virgin Australia into various tours and expect to have more tours that include Virgin Australia in the next few months.

Tour updates

We continue to work on updating our existing tours, and if you have tours that you would like to see do not hesitate to let us know!

The monthly tour will take you across Africa and Australia. If you have any suggestions on tours you would like to see, please let us know on Discord.

Closed airspaces

Current scheduled flight time durations may need to be amended due to longer flying times on account of closed airspace. We would recommend checking your route prior to departure especially if it crosses and known airspaces with known security warnings. A complete overview can be found here. If the great circle route of your flight crosses any airspace with known safety NOTAMs a notice is placed on your flight briefing page.

Please adhere to these closures when performing flights on the VA.

Event Updates

We are working on adding more events to our event calender. Please let us know via Discord what kind of events you would like to see! If you have other events on online platforms that you feel are a good match to include on the VA please let us know. To receive more frequent updates please subscribe to the Event Announcements notifications on our Discord server.

Closing words

As always if you have any suggestions or questions do not hesitate to let us know.

We would also like to remind you we have a Discord server. To join it, use discord.gg/5wMqZnpS2w.