What's New in AirPlx: August 2026

April you could see your whole field. May you could run it live. June you could make it yours. July it kept up with you. August it knows what you tow with.

We love feature requests. If you're using AirPlx and not telling us what's bugging you, other customers are making those decisions for you. Email us: hi@airplx.com.

Here's what shipped.

Tug Simulation with Tow Limits

We shipped one generic tug for a long time. That's no help if you're trying to show a new hire how a tug and a towbar swing through a turn, which is what a customer in Dayton asked us for.

A Lektro 88 is long and low and lifts the nosewheel into a cradle. A Mototok TWIN 7500 tucks under the nose and turns inside its own length. Same airplane, same corner, different answers about what fits and how you get it in there. Simulate the tow with the wrong tug and the angle you see isn't the angle you'd get.

Three degrees into a thirty degree limit.

So we built the real ones. 146 models this month, across two dozen manufacturers:

• Mototok, the whole line: the M500s, the TWIN series from 3900 NG to 7500 NG Flat, SPACER 200 and the 8600s, LB 528 up to LB 9500, the HELIMO, the Alligator 4000, and the NH90, V22 and NAVY specials.
• TowFLEXX TF1 through TF6, plus TF5 Essential, TF5.5, and the HD190 MilSpec.
• Lektro 83 through 89, the X and CX variants, the 88i, and the AP8750CX.
• Eagle TT-5 through TTR-12, the ETT electrics, and the XM-20 and XM-30.
• Best Tugs B, R, E and C series, from the B4 to the B18 Heavy Duty.
• TLD JST-25 and JST-30, the TMX-150 cab tractors, the TPX-100-E Mk3.
• TUG GT-35, MA, MR, MT12 and the M1A.
• The heavy end: Goldhofer SHERPA, Kalmar Motor TBL, TREPEL Challenger and Oshkosh AeroTech.
• And the rest of the room: MULAG Comet, JETporter, Flyer-Truck, Wollard, SCHOPF, Charlatte, AIRTUG, Bliss-Fox, SuperTow and Priceless Aviation.

A different airplane, a different limit. Green inside it, red past it.

Choose yours and it sits on the board at its real size. Another 54 are queued up, including the Best Tugs Sierra line, PowerTow, AeroTow and AC TrackTech. If yours isn't in there, tell us and we'll build it.

AirPlx Mobile

Mobile got its own post, so we won't do the whole tour again. August is where most of what's in it came from.

• Walk Around. Pick who's doing it, work a custom checklist, dictate a note and let the app transcribe it, shoot photos and video, then hand off to a damage report.
• Damage reports you mark on the airplane. Tap where the damage is, set minor, moderate or major, flag whether it was there before anyone touched the airplane, and attach photos and video to that point.
• Damage reports work offline. Data and photos, not video. The ramp is not a good place to depend on signal.
• The towing operator and wing walkers go on the tow card, and the names carry into every towing report. Type a name that isn't on the roster and the app offers to add it.
• Reports on the phone, on their own tab, matching the web.
• A base switcher on the Base view, for operators running sites hours apart.
• Dark mode, for the 0500 shift.
• Hangar Audit on a schedule, emailed daily like Line Activity and Occupancy already do.

Moving a layout between Live and Plan

• Snapshot. A button in Live View saves the current layout into your planning favorites, timestamped, ready to drop into any profile. James at RBD asked for it.
• Copy tails from Plan into Live. Tail numbers you set up in Planning come across as open-ended trips marked base tenants, so nobody retypes forty of them.
• Overlapping trip, same tail. Confirm the warning and the old trip completes. The new one starts today and runs until something replaces it.
• Live-mode-only permission. The mirror of June's Plan-mode-only, for a line tech who never opens a plan.

Seed a planning profile from Live, or from every tenant on the field.

The Base View editor

• Hide a ramp without losing it. Deactivating one used to drop its GPS calibration. Hangars and ramps now sit in a Structures panel with a toggle each, green for placed on the map, orange for not placed, blue for selected. Toggle one off and it hides without losing its calibration.
• Edit a ramp from Live. Pencil icon, so you can stay where you are.
• Rotate and resize ramp imagery in the app, and the map image unlocks so you can slide it aside.
• One tag at a time. Parkable, ramp, parking destination: picking one clears the others.
• Zoom and pan match the main Base View. Cmd/Ctrl+1 and +2, scroll to zoom, hold space for a hand tool.
• Pan while measuring, instead of starting a new measurement.

The ramp keeps its GPS whether you're looking at it or not.

Label legend

A button that slides out a panel naming every label and what its color means: Scheduled, On Site, Completed, Confirmed, 2 Days ETD, Dep Today, OK, or whatever you've built instead. It works in both Hangar and Base views. It's also a widget you can drag onto a print layout, so the sheet on the wall explains itself.

Every label, and what its color means.

New Aircraft: a B-52 and a homebuilt in the same month

Twenty-four airframes in August. The Monnett Sonerai II is a two-seat plans-built taildragger with a converted Volkswagen on the nose. The B-52H has a 185-foot wingspan and eight engines. Both went into the library the same month.

Warbirds and military: Boeing B-52H Stratofortress, Northrop T-38A Talon, Canadair CL-13 Sabre, Douglas A-26B Invader (no tip tanks), Sikorsky MH-60S Knighthawk, Piasecki CH-21C Shawnee, Ryan PT-22 Recruit, Stinson V-77 Reliant.

Golden age and classic: Grumman G-21A Goose, Piaggio P.136-L Royal Gull, Fairchild Model 24, Globe GC-1B Swift, Porterfield Collegiate CP-65, Aeronca 65TC Tandem Trainer.

Rotorcraft: Bell 525 Relentless, Bell 214ST SuperTransport, MD 500E, Brantly B-2B.

Sport, kit and glider: Game Composites GB1 GameBird, Kitfox Series 7 S7 STi, Monnett Sonerai II, Grob G 103A Twin II Acro.

Airliners: Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental, Boeing 737-300.

Don't see one you fly? Tell us and we'll build it.

Small Stuff That Adds Up

• The Base View got a lot faster. A cold load was firing 55 separate database calls and taking 5.8 seconds. It asked for every hangar and every ramp one at a time, so a 13-hangar base made 21 round trips where two would do. We also indexed a join that had been sorting 277,000 rows to disk on every call: 1.6 seconds down to about a quarter of that.
• Notifications you can switch off, by base and by device.
• Team Members shows the email, and the right role.
• Mobile App settings moved into Line Operations. One less tab.

Bug Fixes

• Aircraft snapping back to where it started after a tow in Live mode.
• An airplane moved into Hangar 2 not showing up in the Hangars view.
• Push notifications reading "null" where the tail number belongs.
• Satellite imagery not refreshing for some users.
• Label text overlapping on the Base View.
• New users landing with no FBO assigned and no record of the invitation.

Various other stability fixes from customer reports. If you reported something and it's working now, thank you.

What's Next

The stacking engine. We've been rebuilding it since July, tow paths and clearances and the whole search, and it's been in testing on real bases since then. September.

As always, the roadmap is shaped by what you tell us. Email us at hi@airplx.com.

Want to see these features in action? Schedule a quick demo or email us: hi@airplx.com