Moving shouldn't cost your veterans their seniority.
Hours, rank and a logbook are the only things a pilot really owns in a virtual airline, and they are the reason most airlines never move. So this page is about the move itself: what it involves, what comes across, what has to be rebuilt, and how AeroVMS actually compares to the alternative.
You stop maintaining the software and go back to running the airline.
phpVMS carried this hobby for a decade and plenty of airlines are still perfectly happy on it. If yours works and you enjoy looking after it, stay — this is not an argument that it is bad software. It is an argument about which jobs stop being yours.
What stops being your job
- Patching a PHP install, and the version of PHP underneath it.
- Fighting a theme every time something on the crew centre needs to change.
- Keeping third-party plugins alive across upgrades.
- Paying for hosting, and being the only person who can bring it back up.
- Reading every PIREP by hand to work out whether the flight was real.
The move, in order
- 01
Export from phpVMS
You take a dump of your existing database. Nothing is deleted and nothing is switched off — your install keeps running exactly as it did while the move is prepared.
- 02
We map the roster
Pilots, hours, ranks, filed PIREPs, aircraft and routes are mapped onto the AeroVMS schema. Ranks are matched to your ladder rather than reset to a default one.
- 03
You check a preview
Before anything goes live you see the mapped airline: every pilot, the hours behind their name, the rank that gives them, and the flights in their logbook. Wrong mappings get fixed here.
- 04
Cut over
Your crew centre moves to its AeroVMS address, or your own domain on the Airline tier. Keep the old install up as long as you like — the move does not depend on tearing it down.
- 05
Pilots log in with their hours intact
A pilot who was a Senior Captain on Friday is a Senior Captain on Monday, with the same total time and the same logbook behind it. Seniority survives the move, or the move was not worth making.
One-click phpVMS import is a phase P2 item.
There is no button that does this today, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The importer is scheduled alongside the live map and the virtual economy in P2 — Beta. Until it ships, founding airlines get their migration handled with them rather than at them: you send the export, we do the mapping, and you check the preview before a single pilot account goes live.
A comparison held to what both sides actually publish.
vAMSYS is the other serious option, and any comparison you can catch us bending is worth nothing. So the table below carries only what a pricing page can settle — prices and plans. Everything harder to source is argued in prose underneath, and the section below it says plainly who should stay where.
| Published figure | AeroVMS | vAMSYS |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Cadet — up to 25 pilots, no card | No free tier |
| Paid plan, monthly | $19 — Airline tier | £25 — their published price |
| Paid plan, yearly | $190 — Airline tier | £250 — their published price |
| Plans to choose between | Three — Cadet, Airline, Flag Carrier | One plan, with all features included |
Every figure in the vAMSYS column is taken from their own public pricing page. The two prices are in different currencies and we have deliberately not converted them — the rate moves, and a converted figure presented as exact would be a guess dressed up as a fact. A pricing page settles prices and plans and nothing else, so that is the whole table: the rows where we come out ahead and the rows where we do not, and none we would have had to estimate.
Maturity is the obvious omission, and it is the one that goes against us. vAMSYS has been running for years and AeroVMS has not launched. We are not going to put a number on that when we have none to cite, so it sits in the list below as a plain observation instead.
Where vAMSYS is ahead
- Years of continuous operation behind it, against a platform that has not launched.
- An established base of airlines and pilots who already know the tooling.
- Mature software, documented and screenshotted in public, so you can see what you are buying.
- It is the safe choice — and safe is a real feature when a community's history is the thing at stake.
Where AeroVMS is different
- A free tier that is a tier, not a trial: 25 pilots, no card, no expiry.
- $19 a month for unlimited pilots on the Airline tier.
- Your own isolated Postgres database per airline, rather than a shared table with a tenant column.
- A scoring model published in full — 40% landing rate, 35% route adherence, 25% professionalism — and every weight, band and penalty tunable on Airline.
- A per-flight profit and loss: fares, fuel, crew, leases, landing fees and maintenance reserves against a balance you have to keep in the black.
- A full export of your database on every tier, including the free one.
That second list is a set of claims about AeroVMS. It is not a claim that anyone else lacks any of it — we have only compared the rows in the table, where both sides publish a figure.
Who should stay where
If you are running a large, established airline today and everything works, vAMSYS is the safe choice, and we would say so to your face. Years of operation and a community that already knows the software are worth more than a feature list from a platform that has not launched.
AeroVMS is for airlines starting from nothing, airlines leaving phpVMS, and airlines that specifically want the per-flight economy, a scoring model they can open up and tune, and a free tier that is not a trial. If that is not you, staying put is a perfectly good answer — and the free tier will still be here when it is.
The roster arrives with its history attached.
An import that produces a list of names is not a migration — it is a mailing list. These are the things that have to survive the move for the airline to still be the same airline on the other side.
On the Cadet and Airline tiers, migration is a self-serve import. On Flag Carrier it is hands-on — we do the mapping with you, and you sign the preview off before it goes live.
Three things you will rebuild.
Worth knowing before you start rather than after. None of these are data — they are software that lived on your server, and there is nothing on this side for them to be imported into.
- Custom themes and pages
- AeroVMS renders the crew centre itself. Your logo and colours come across as branding settings, but a bespoke phpVMS skin and its hand-written pages do not — there is nothing on this side for them to become.
- Third-party plugins
- Anything bolted onto your install has no equivalent to import into. Where the behaviour genuinely matters, it usually rebuilds against the API and webhooks on the Airline tier.
- Forum content
- AeroVMS does not run a forum, so threads and posts stay where they are. Most airlines keep that conversation on Discord and leave the old board up to read.
The door is unlocked, and it opens from the inside.
One click gives you a full export of your airline's database — pilots, hours, PIREPs, fleet, routes and finances. On every tier, including the free one, whenever you want it. No ticket, no notice period, no fee.
This is deliberate, and it is the only part of this page we would call a commitment rather than a feature. A virtual airline's history is the one thing it cannot rebuild, and a platform holding it is a platform you can never honestly leave. We would rather compete on whether AeroVMS is good than on whether leaving it hurts.
It is also self-enforcing. The import and the export are the same engine run in opposite directions — one reads a foreign database and writes an AeroVMS one, the other does exactly the reverse. An export left to quietly rot would break the import that brings airlines in, so it does not get to rot.
Bring the airline over.
Start on the free tier, build the fleet and the schedule, and see what your roster looks like on the other side before you commit to anything. Founding airlines get the migration handled with them and the launch price locked.
25 pilots free · No card · Export everything whenever you like