December 2025 VA Update

Hello pilots,

In this month's news update we will provide some development and VA updates.

New booking experience

The new booking experience that we announced in July's news post is now the default booking experience. If the new experience prevents you from booking a flight, you can switch back to the classic booking page through the Switch back to the classic booking experience link. If you do so, have any other feedback, or have found a bug, please let us know via a support ticket or in Discord. We plan to remove the opt-out in a few months and fully discontinue the legacy booking experience.

Historical routes

Today, we are pleased to announce a new experimental feature on SkyTeam Virtual: "Historical routes". Our new historical routes section is a curated collection of flights that recreate routes from years past.

What historical routes are currently available?

We are starting this experiment with a curated selection of Aerolíneas Argentinas routes, as well as a curated selection of KLM routes. A variety of aircraft types and destinations is available, including both recently discontinued routes and aircraft types, as well as routes and aircraft types which reached their retirement date decades ago.

How can I book a historical flight?

On the regular Book Flight page, you can simply click on "Book a historical route" to book a flight.

Booking historical routes is currently only possible in the new booking experience. This is the default booking experience. If you are still on the legacy booking experience, please click on Try the new booking experience to get access to booking historical flights.

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

We are in the process of migrating to the Northern Winter/Southern Summer flying season. We expect to finish this process in the second week of December. If you find any missing routes please let us know by submitting a support ticket.

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 takes you across East and Southeast Asia. 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/EAKR7Qe.