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ATC Activity

Control Center automatically tracks the controlling activity of your members to determine their active status. This status (atc_active) is critical as it influences roster management, API synchronizations, and potentially endorsement validity.

How it works

The activity tracking system runs in two distinct phases via background jobs.

1. Data Collection

This job runs periodically to fetch raw session data.

  • Source: It queries the public VATSIM Data API to retrieve ATC sessions for your members. No personal tokens are required for this.
  • Scope: It looks back a configurable number of months defined by the atcActivityQualificationPeriod.
  • Filtering: It filters sessions based on the Callsigns defined for your Areas (FIRs/ACCs). Only time spent on positions matching your facility's prefixes is counted.
  • Storage: The accumulated hours are stored per user, per area. Because the API query is already scoped to the qualification window, the stored hours reflect activity within that period.

2. Status Evaluation

This job analyzes the collected data to set the atc_active flag for each user.

A user is considered Active if they meet either of the following criteria:

  1. Grace Period: The user has a Grace Period that has not yet expired. How this is evaluated depends on the Activity Mode:
    • Total Hours: if any area has a valid grace period, the user is fully protected.
    • Per Area: each area's grace period is evaluated independently.
  2. Minimum Hours: The user has accumulated enough controlling hours to meet the atcActivityRequirement (default: 10 hours) within the qualification period.

If a user fails both checks:

  • Their atc_active status is set to false.
  • They receive an inactivity notification. In Total Hours mode, one notification is sent per user. In Per Area mode, a notification is sent for each area that goes inactive.
  • If configured, they may be removed from external rosters (see Division Integrations) during the next synchronization.

Configuration

You can customize the activity logic in Administration > Settings:

  • ATC Activity Requirement: Minimum hours required (default: 10).
  • ATC Activity Qualification Period: How far back to count hours (default: 12 months).
  • Grace Period Duration: Default duration for new grace periods (default: 12 months).
  • Activity Mode: Whether activity is calculated based on Total Hours (sum of all areas) or Per Area (requiring hours in specific areas to remain active there).
  • Allow Reactivation: When enabled, members whose atc_active status is false are included in the data collection job, allowing them to regain active status by accumulating hours. When disabled, only currently-active members have their hours updated.