Simulator Connect

🇮🇱 עברית

Simulator Connect

NavAid can display your live aircraft position on the map by polling a local SimConnect HTTP bridge running alongside your flight simulator. The aircraft is drawn as a top-down airplane icon that rotates to match your real heading.

Requirements

Component	Details
Flight simulator	Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020/2024, X-Plane 11/12, or any simulator supported by Little NavMap
SimConnect bridge	Little NavMap with SimConnect integration enabled, or a compatible bridge on port 2020
NavAid	Running locally (http://localhost:8000) or on the web — any origin works as long as the bridge is reachable from the browser

Setup

1 — Start your SimConnect bridge

Little NavMap is the most common bridge. In Little NavMap:

1. Open Tools → Options → Simulator Aircraft
2. Enable Fetch Aircraft Data
3. Start the SimConnect connection (Connect button in the toolbar)

The bridge exposes a JSON endpoint on http://localhost:2020 by default.

No Little NavMap? Any HTTP server that returns the following JSON on a GET request works:

{ "latitude": 32.0, "longitude": 34.9, "altitude": 1500, "heading": 350, "ias": 90 }

2 — Open the Simulator panel in NavAid

1. Click the small ✈ plane icon in the toolbar footer (next to Terms / Privacy) — it opens the Simulator panel.
2. Click Connect to simulator — NavAid starts polling every second.
3. The status indicator shows ✅ Connected when data arrives, ⚠ No data if the bridge is unreachable.

The panel is the Connect to simulator button, the Bridge URL field and the status line. Connect shows a green active state.

Following and centring are not in this panel: they are the map's own follow switch and orientation compass, the same two controls a real fix uses. The panel used to carry its own copies, and requiring both meant the map's switch could do nothing while the panel's flag was off.

3 — Fly

Your aircraft appears on the map as a blue top-down high-wing airplane with a white outline, rotating with your heading. If the map is rotated (via the bearing dial), the icon compensates so it always points in the correct screen direction.

A heading line runs ahead of the icon, marked at 2 / 5 / 10 nm and at 2 / 5 min; in a turn it becomes a one-minute curved trend vector (see The heading line). The footer shows ground speed, altitude and magnetic heading from the sim feed, and the in-flight alerts — next leg, TOP, altitude, drift, off route — run off a simulator position exactly as they do off a GPS fix, which is the easiest way to try them on the ground.

Options

Control	Description
Bridge URL	URL of the SimConnect HTTP endpoint. Default http://localhost:2020. Change this if your bridge runs on a different machine or port.
Follow	The map's own follow switch, which works off a simulator position exactly as it does off a GPS fix — including the pan/zoom grace before it resumes.

Persistence

All simulator settings survive a page refresh:

Setting	Stored key
Bridge URL	navaid.simUrl
Connected state	navaid.simOn
Following	navaid.gpsFollow — the map's switch, shared with GPS

When Connected was on before the page was refreshed, NavAid automatically reconnects on the next load.

You do not have to open the panel to see that: the footer ✈ icon itself carries the connected state, latched and coloured the same way the ⏺ and 📍 buttons carry theirs, so one glance at the bar reads all three sources alike. Its tooltip and accessible name say Simulator connected while data is arriving.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
⚠ No data instantly	Bridge not running or wrong URL	Start Little NavMap and check the URL
⚠ No data after a few seconds	Simulator not connected to bridge	Click Connect in Little NavMap
Aircraft icon jumps	Bridge returning stale/cached data	Restart the bridge
Icon visible but wrong heading	Heading field missing from bridge JSON	Ensure bridge returns heading in degrees true
CORS error in browser console	Bridge blocks cross-origin requests	Use NavAid locally (localhost:8000) or configure CORS on the bridge

Compatible bridges

• Little NavMap (MSFS 2020/2024, X-Plane, P3D, FSX) — recommended
• cvfr-bridge — X-Plane 12 bridge (C plugin + Python UDP, maintained for NavAid)
• CVFR Map SimConnect — reference implementation
• Any HTTP server returning { latitude, longitude, altitude, heading, ias }