Airwave

Airwave is currently in alpha. Download it and try it out on Itch.io (for free!).

You can keep up by visiting the blog.

About

Airwave is an traffic control simulator that aims to make ATC fun for the novice to the expert. Control aircraft with your voice and bring your friends; built with multiplayer since the beginning.

Features:

• Air operations: approach and departure
• Ground operations: tower and ground
• Multiplayer
• Voice integration (command aircraft using natural language)
• Toggle automatic air & ground to play how you want
• Adjust the active runways in-game (affects auto ATC too)
• Runway incursion alert system
• Open world, control any airport
• Stripboard (simple; more planned)

Showcase

See it in action!

Roadmap

Alpha 3

• Interactive stripboard (more info, scratchpad, custom headers, drag strips around)
• Smarter pathfinder
• Separation warnings
• Stats (takeoff/landing count, uptime, etc)

For Later

• Aircraft trails
• More airports
• Weather + ATIS
• Smarter Auto ATC (and more granular controls)
• Local pipeline for parsing commands from Vosk (no more OpenAI)
• Buttons and controls for quick commands
• SIDs, STARs, and other procedures (waypoints + routes)
• Clearance Delivery
• VFR Operations

Changelog

Download the latest build on Itch.io.

2026.10.02 (a13f1785)

• Remove nightly channel and use a new versioning scheme
• Make TTS speak numbers (altitudes, speeds, etc) and runways correctly
• Add a callout to departure when an aircraft is departing
• Use a void frequency (1.0) for auto airports and dormant aircraft
• Tune the client to approach when switching airports (and on first connect)
• Make Auto ATC tune landing and departing aircraft to tower and departure
• Report a system error in the chatbox when given an incorrect callsign (or aircraft is not on frequency)
• Allow heading commands for landing aircraft
• Add a "set" button for each frequency in the list "Frequencies" list
• Only speak TTS when not in recording mode (player not speaking)

2026.10.01 (8d0e8108)

• Support IPv6 when hosting a server
• Add a "--connect <address>" option to the client to connect to a server automatically
• Added a launcher to start singleplayer or multiplayer games
• Runways are now hold-short by default, use "cross <runway>" to cross without holding
• Fix system message colors
• Show system messages in the chatbox regardless of frequency filter
• Show an error in the chatbox when the LLM provider is out of credits

2026.09.27 (e8f8ef9e)

• Improve spacing for landings made by auto ATC
• Hide taxiway labels for aprons
• Auto ATC can now use multiple runways for landings and takeoffs
• Change Auto ATC to pick more than one runway for arrivals
• Implement pushback and touchdown callouts

2026.09.24 (20d47714)

• Show the facility name in chatbox messages
• Added callout to tower when freq changed and landing & on the localizer
• Added arrival and landing callouts when aircraft switch to your frequency
• Poll for aircraft updates faster when the sim speed is not 1x
• Allow parsing callsigns for different number groupings
• Fix the "line up and wait" reply
• Fix an error when speaking flight numbers with fewer than 4 digits
• Show frequency, status, and more on the stripboard
• Handle flight number parse errors instead of failing

2026.09.16 (937b1189)

• Make stripboard taller with no max height (now resizable)
• Show frequency list for the current airport in Airport Config > Frequencies
• Add dynamic categories to the stripboard (approach, landing, taxi, parked, departure, etc)
• Fix a typo in an ATC prompt
• Fix taxi command parsing for "via" waypoints

2026.08.11 (765a19f9)

• Show runway alerts for takeoffs still under 500ft

Alpha 2 (Stable)

• Added controls to enable and disable runways for arrival and/or departure (changes the runways that auto ATC uses too)
• Revamped the Controls menu
• Various UI improvements
• Added TTS
• Improved stability of voice mode
• Various fixes to ATC commands
• Rewrote the culling system so all aircraft at your airport are always up to date
• Automatically tune aircraft to the frequencies you set up in the config
• Added an overlay to indicate when the sim is paused
• And more (see the nightly releases below for a detailed list of changes)!

2026.08.05 (793c75cc)

• Log voice transcription, LLM output, and taxi path in client logs
• Include changelog in the release build
• Despawn aircraft (on the client) that haven't been refetched within the last tick
• Fetch viewport region if outside of airspace
• Simpler culling: always fetch aircraft of your airport
• Highlight ATC messages if they're for the selected aircraft

2026.08.03 (70de279a)

• Automatically tune aircraft to ground or approach so players can access them
• Added UI in ground mode that shows if a runway is occupied or if a landing is close
• Add "jet blue" as a valid callsign for "jetblue"
• Rewrite prompts for vosk output
• Increase ground radar ceiling to 1000ft
• Fix old implementation of server address that wasn't updated with the new docs
• Add "line up and wait" to vosk grammer

2026.08.01 (bd473fdf)

• Only show ILS lines for runways enabled for arrivals
• Don't trigger TTS for messages not on your frequency
• Add runway statuses (set them to: arriving, departing, or both)
• Increase the resolution of the airspace ring mesh from 32 to 64

2026.07.29 (b2bffc7f)

• Add TTS
• Color ATC and aircraft callsigns in chatbox

2026.07.28 (84b4651c)

• Add logging to LLM pipeline

2026.07.27 (6f775f1e)

• Aircraft should reply on their current/last frequency before switching to a new one
• Add an overlay to indicate sim is paused
• Add option to show yours or all messages in chatbox
• Remove input mode selector
• Add correction and disregard to vosk grammer
• Clamp heading from 0 instead of 1
• Docs: Add note that text mode is always available
• Add notice to getting started doc
• Update help text on disabled voice mode (link to docs)
• Constrain altitude, heading, and speed given to aircraft
• Rename config window to "Controls"

Alpha 1 (Stable)

• Air control (approach and departure)
• Ground control (tower and ground)
• Voice integration using Vosk
• Multiplayer
• Dynamic workload management with Auto ATC