FlightBag Pro: it supports five simulators by talking to none of them

On 29 April 2024, AivlaSoft put a notice on its front page saying the sale of EFB had been discontinued with immediate effect, development would stop the next day, and support would end on 30 June. For a decade that programme had been the answer to a question flight simulation keeps asking: where do I put the paperwork? It ran on a second screen, it talked to the simulator, it knew where your aeroplane was, and it cost about eighty euros. Then it was gone, and nothing replaced it.

Two years later a two-person German outfit called Waymark Software released FlightBag Pro. One of the seven people who have reviewed it on simMarket — Zaugg, on 31 May 2026 — wrote that he had waited a long time for this tool and that it would soon replace AivlaSoft EFB on his machine. He is right about the waiting and, at the moment, wrong about the replacing, and the gap between those two things is what this review is about.

Because FlightBag Pro does not connect to your simulator. Not to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, not to 2024, not to Prepar3D v5 or v6, and not to X-Plane — the five platforms printed on the simMarket listing in the same badge style every other add-on on that site uses to tell you what it plugs into. Waymark's own FAQ says it plainly if you click the accordion open: FlightBag Pro "works alongside any simulator you plan flights for with SimBrief". The public roadmap is more honest still. The "FSUIPC / SimConnect bridge for live sim data" is a Q3 2026 item, still marked in progress. Live aircraft position on the map is Q4.

So this is an add-on that supports five simulators by talking to none of them. That is not a scandal — it is a design decision, and it is why a two-person team could ship something this polished eleven weeks after launch. But it changes what you are buying, and the store page never mentions it.

We read every public source we could find on this product, which turned out to be a smaller pile than usual: the simMarket listing and its seven customer reviews, Waymark's own site, FAQ, roadmap and imprint, three developer YouTube videos, two press posts, a 176-member Discord, and — because the product barely exists in the forums — the competitors it is really being judged against. Twenty-three sources in all, and we will be candid about how thin the independent half of that is.

What you are actually buying

One purchase, one store, one platform. There is no cheaper older version and no upgrade path, because there has never been anything before it.

Price	€ 16.72 at simMarket (net of VAT), shown as € 19.90 in Waymark's own FAQ
Where	simMarket only — Waymark has no store of its own
Version tested against the record	1.3.1, listing dated 4 June 2026, 210 MB download
Runs on	Windows 10/11 desktop app, plus any iPad, tablet or phone via a QR code on the local network
Needs	A free SimBrief account. A free ChartFox login for charts. A permanent internet connection
Does not need	Navigraph. There is no subscription of any kind on top
Sim connection	None at v1.3.1

The two price figures are the same price. simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", which for a browser with no resolved tax session means zero — so € 16.72 is the net figure and € 19.90 is what a German buyer pays at checkout with 19% VAT applied. Neither store is undercutting the other, because there is only one store. Your own number will land somewhere between the two depending on where you live.

There is a small oddity worth recording for accuracy rather than for scandal. Waymark's imprint declares the business a Kleinunternehmer under § 19 of the German VAT act — "no value added tax (VAT) is charged and shown" — while the FAQ two pages away quotes a price "incl. 19% German VAT". Both are true: simMarket is the merchant of record and applies its own VAT, not Waymark's. It is the kind of thing you notice on a site written by two people who are better at software than at storefronts.

What is in the box, then. A SimBrief OFP importer that turns the raw text file into a laid-out departure and arrival briefing — weather, NOTAMs, fuel, route map, comms, runway and SID, noise abatement, engine-failure procedure. Takeoff and landing performance calculators covering V1, VR, V2, FLEX, TODR and stop margin on one side and VREF, VAPP and landing distance on the other, with dry, wet and contaminated runway states and TO-1/TO-2 derates, across 28 Airbus and Boeing types from the A220-300 to the 747-8. Interactive phase-by-phase checklists. Auto-refreshing METAR and TAF. A VATSIM coverage map with a frequency table and an IFR clearance planner. A scratchpad. A PDF viewer. ChartFox charts. A GSX panel. And an airline-branding layer that puts your virtual airline's logo and accent colour on all of it.

Presented, and this is the part the screenshots sell, as a tablet home screen with app icons — Waymark calls it the "Aviation OS Homescreen". It looks like an iPad. It is meant to.

What the community consistently praises

Start with the one thing every single buyer mentions before anything else, in two languages, across five weeks: the interface. Hans-Peter (8 June 2026) calls it very clearly designed and user-friendly. Frederik (5 July 2026) says it stops him switching between so many windows. Sebastian (9 June) calls the surface blitzsauber — spotlessly clean. Orpheas (1 June) and Jan (30 May) say versions of the same thing. When seven independent people reach for the same compliment first, that compliment is a finding, and it is deserved: the briefing page in Waymark's own screenshots is better laid out than the OFP page in most payware airliners' built-in tablets.

Second, the tablet link works. This is the feature most likely to go wrong — every product that promises "just scan the QR code" is one router configuration away from an evening of port forwarding — and it is the second thing buyers mention. Sebastian says the iPad connection took seconds. Hans-Peter calls it easy to connect. Nobody in the record reports a network problem. For a v1 product from a two-person team, that is a real engineering achievement and it is the single strongest argument for the price.

Third, the update cadence. Version 1.0 was on sale by 29 May 2026 — the first store review is dated that day. ChartFox and GSX arrived together in 1.2.0, teased on the developer's channel in July. By mid-August the listing reads 1.3.1. Three feature releases in eleven weeks, from two people, is a pace that most one-man add-ons never manage and most studios stop managing after year two.

Fourth, support. Zaugg (31 May) and Frederik (5 July) independently describe the Discord as fast, polite and genuinely helpful, five weeks apart. That is two data points, not a survey, but they are the two data points that exist and they agree. The Discord itself has 176 members, which tells you both that support is answerable and that the userbase is small.

Fifth — and this is a structural virtue rather than a feature — the roadmap. Waymark publishes a dated, three-quarter plan that openly lists the sim bridge and live flight tracking as things the product does not yet do. That is more disclosure than the store page gives you, and it is more than most developers volunteer.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Here is where the review has to change register, because there is no chorus of complaints to report. There is no AVSIM thread — a search for "FlightBag Pro" on avsim.com returns zero results. The official Microsoft Flight Simulator forums return four hits and none of them are about this product. There is not one third-party video review: the only three videos on YouTube are Waymark's own, at 1.8K, 891 and 276 views, from a channel with 27 subscribers. There is no FSElite piece, no Threshold piece, no MSFS Addons piece. Reddit is structurally unavailable to us — it is blocked in the environment these reviews are researched in — but on a product with this little forum presence, the sentiment-at-a-glance it would have provided is unlikely to have changed the picture.

So the problems below are not complaints we collected. They are things we checked. Status on all of them: still open.

The five-simulator badge is a statement about SimBrief

FlightBag Pro reads your OFP from SimBrief's servers, your METARs and TAFs from a weather feed, your charts from ChartFox and your ATC positions from the VATSIM datafeed. Every one of those is a web service. None of them is your simulator. It "supports" MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024, P3D v5, P3D v6 and X-Plane in exactly the sense that a notepad supports them.

That means no live aircraft position on the route map, no automatic phase detection driving the checklists, no fuel or weight taken from the aircraft, no automatic logbook, and no way for the performance page to know what you actually loaded. You type the numbers in. The briefing screenshot Waymark publishes shows the gap honestly: next to Initial Climb it says "Initial climb per SID chart — enter manually".

The GSX panel is GSX's own web page

FSDreamTeam shipped GSX Pro 4.0.6 on 29 June 2026. It added a universal web remote — control GSX from any phone, tablet or second PC by typing in an IP address, nothing to install — and opened the Remote API v2 so third parties could, in FSDreamTeam's phrasing, embed the GSX menu with one line of code. FlightBag Pro's GSX integration followed in 1.2.0. Waymark's own promotional image for the feature is captioned "GSX Remote Access" and shows the GSX interface, not a Waymark one.

This is not dishonest and it is not lazy — embedding it is the right call, and doing it quickly was smart. But it is worth knowing that every GSX owner already has that page free in any browser, that it works because FSDreamTeam did the sim-side work, and that GSX has no X-Plane version at all. One fifth of the supported-simulator list can never have this feature.

Nobody has checked the performance numbers

The takeoff and landing calculators are the most ambitious thing in the product and the least verifiable. Waymark publishes no data source, no methodology and no per-type documentation, and there is not a single independent test of a FlightBag Pro V-speed anywhere in the public record. Twenty-eight airliner types are covered at type level, which is where the difficulty lives: real takeoff performance varies by engine option, by MTOW variant, by flap schedule and by airline-specific derate policy, and a generic A320 profile cannot capture all of it. We are not saying the numbers are wrong. We are saying that at the time of writing nobody has demonstrated that they are right, and a product whose headline feature is a calculator should want that demonstrated.

Charts are ChartFox, and that is a ceiling

ChartFox is free, requires a VATSIM account, and serves state AIP charts across roughly 1,800 airports with coverage that has improved a lot in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It is a good service. It is not Jeppesen and it is not Navigraph, and the gap shows on airports whose national AIP is paywalled or badly scanned.

This is not a choice Waymark made. Navigraph does not license its charts into third-party EFBs — the Vortiq EFB, reviewed by simFlight.de on 27 June 2026, hits the identical wall, and that review names the missing Navigraph support as its single biggest criticism. So the honest framing is: FlightBag Pro saves you the €8–9 a month a Navigraph chart subscription costs because it cannot have one, and if you already subscribe to Navigraph you will still have Navigraph open on the other half of the screen.

The free competition does more of the connecting

SimToolkitPro is free forever with no paywalled features, claims over 108,000 registered users, supports MSFS 2020 and 2024, X-Plane 10/11/12 and Prepar3D — the same five platforms, plus two more — and it does take high-rate telemetry from the simulator, with SimBrief import, global charts, METAR/TAF/NOTAM lookup and a landing-rate logbook on top. It is uglier. It is not close in presentation. But on the specific axis FlightBag Pro's store badge implies, the free tool wins.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, meanwhile, ships an EFB to every owner: flight planning, payload and fuel, navigation log, checklists, airport charts, weather and an app slot that GSX now occupies natively. It is in the cockpit, it is in VR, and it costs nothing extra.

And in Q4 2026, efbX arrives — a modular EFB from KatiePilot, a serving real-world Airbus captain who worked on the Fenix A320 and the iniBuilds A310, announced at FlightSimExpo 2026 with a free base tier and connected flight tracking. Vortiq EFB is already shipping at €49.99 lifetime or €2.99 a month with a "Vortiq Connect" sim bridge, GSX control and Hoppie ACARS. A reader comment under that Vortiq review, from a simmer with no stake in any of them, lists Vortiq, FlightBag Pro and efbX as a three-way race and asks for a comparison review. That is the market FlightBag Pro is in, and it got crowded fast.

Performance and stability

There is nothing to report, and for once that is a genuine compliment rather than a shrug. In eleven weeks and seven store reviews there is not one crash report, not one stutter complaint, not one installation failure. Harald (29 May) and Hans-Peter (8 June) both specifically call the installation easy.

Some of that is engineering and some of it is architecture. A 210 MB desktop application that never opens a SimConnect handle cannot cost you frames, cannot deadlock your simulator on a long-haul, and cannot break when Asobo ships a sim update. FlightBag Pro survived Sim Update 6 and AAU 05 without anyone needing to say so, because there was nothing for those updates to break. The system requirements — an i5-4460, 8 GB of RAM, 500 MB of disk — are the requirements of a document viewer, and they are accurate.

The corollary is the one you already know: the day the SimConnect bridge lands, this section stops being free of charge.

Who should buy it

The airliner simmer who flies SimBrief-planned routes on a second screen or an iPad, and wants the briefing to look like a briefing. Buy it. This is the profile the product was built for and it serves it better than anything else at the price. You will get a laid-out OFP, real V-speeds to type into the FMC, a checklist that does not live in a browser tab, and a tablet on your desk that looks like the one on a real flight deck — for one payment and no subscription.

The virtual airline pilot or VA operator. Buy it. The branding layer — your logo, your accent colour, your checklists — is the cheapest crew-facing polish you will find, and the QR-code delivery means every pilot in your VA can run it on a phone without a support ticket.

The Prepar3D or X-Plane flyer who saw five simulators on the store badge. Buy it only with your eyes open. It will work exactly as well for you as for the MSFS crowd, because it works the same amount for everybody — which is to say alongside, never inside. If you are on X-Plane, deduct the GSX feature entirely.

The home-cockpit builder who wants a real second-screen EFB in the AivlaSoft mould. Do not buy it yet. What you want is live aircraft position, phase-aware checklists and data pulled from the aeroplane rather than typed at it, and that is a Q3 and Q4 2026 roadmap promise, not a shipped feature. Wait for the SimConnect bridge, then look again — Waymark's cadence suggests the wait is measured in months, not years.

The simmer who already pays for Navigraph and runs SimToolkitPro or Volanta. Do not buy it. You already have charts that FlightBag Pro cannot license, telemetry it cannot read, and a logbook it does not have. What you would be buying is a nicer-looking briefing page, and that is a €16.72 aesthetic upgrade to a workflow you have already solved.

Where it stands today

FlightBag Pro is the best-presented thing in a category that has been badly served since AivlaSoft walked away, and it is the work of two people who have shipped three feature updates in eleven weeks and answer their Discord. Nothing in the record contradicts that. The seven customers who have spoken are unanimously happy and their reasons are consistent and specific, which is the pattern of a genuinely good small product rather than a padded rating.

But the record is seven customers, three of the developer's own videos, and two press posts on a site that names simMarket as its sponsor. There is no forum argument to read, because nobody is arguing. That is not the developer's fault and it is not a mark against the software — it is simply the state of the evidence in August 2026, and it means our score is a reading of what the product demonstrably is rather than a synthesis of many people's experience of it. On the things we could check ourselves — the price, the store rating spread, what the app connects to, where the GSX panel comes from, what the roadmap admits — it holds up as a piece of software and comes up short as a piece of marketing.

The next six months decide it. If the FSUIPC/SimConnect bridge lands as promised and live position, flight tracking and a logbook follow in Q4, FlightBag Pro becomes the thing Zaugg thought he was buying, and €16.72 becomes an obvious yes against Vortiq's €49.99. If the bridge slips past efbX's free Q4 launch, a paid EFB that reads no telemetry will be a hard sell to anyone who has looked at the alternatives. Waymark has earned the benefit of the doubt on cadence. They have not yet earned the five simulators on the badge.