Manifest brings passengers to life in X-Plane — they react to how you fly, board and deplane through your aircraft's own doors, and remember every trip you've flown together. Available for X-Plane 11 and X-Plane 12.
The panel runs in your sim, tracking every passenger and every phase of the flight as it happens.
Manifest pairs naturally with FSEconomy — bring your assigned passengers to life while FSEconomy handles the jobs, payments, and career side of the flight. Tested and confirmed working alongside the FSEconomy client for X-Plane.
Manifest runs quietly in the background of your flight, turning passengers from empty seats into a system that responds to your flying.
Passengers keep a running comfort score that reacts to G-forces, hard landings, steep turns, and turbulence — but not everyone reacts the same way. Each passenger carries their own sensitivity, so a bumpy climb might leave one passenger anxious while the rest of the cabin stays perfectly comfortable. Fly recklessly enough and the whole cabin can end up airsick before you're even on the ground — but comfort recovers over smooth, steady flying, so a shaky climb doesn't have to define the rest of the trip.
Every touchdown is graded from its vertical speed and G-force, from a greaser down to a very rough arrival — and a bad one doesn't just look bad in the log, it hits passenger comfort directly and follows you into your career stats. Bounces are tracked, so a skip down the runway is scored as a skip, not a single contact.
Manifest reads your aircraft's own datarefs to know exactly what flight phase you're in, and the thresholds adjust by category — business jets are treated as reaching cruise past FL180, while GA aircraft switch over at 10,000 feet — so the phase, audio, and comfort logic all line up with how that type of aircraft is actually flown.
Boarding, taxi, takeoff, cruise, and landing each carry their own sound cues, mixed to match how many passengers are actually on board.
Manifest opens the main door for boarding and closes it once everyone's on board, with passengers moving through it on their own schedule rather than a fixed animation that ignores what's happening in the cabin.
Comfort history carries across flights, so a rough landing today can follow you into tomorrow's charter — built to pair naturally with career and job-based flying.
Enter your FSEconomy data access key in Settings and Manifest reads your "My Flight" jobs on its own, filling in the passenger count, departure, and destination for you. If your load is bound for several destinations, just tap the one you're flying to. Your key stays on your computer, and no extra plugin is needed.
The HUD shows the pay FSEconomy lists for the jobs on board, and nothing more: no tips, bonuses, or made-up earnings. A live countdown tracks when your jobs expire and turns amber, then red, as time gets tight. Cut it close and passengers feel it: comfort penalties get harsher, recovery slows, and they start commenting on it. Prefer a relaxed flight? Deadline pressure can be switched off while the countdown stays visible.
Manifest follows your aircraft's seatbelt sign, or you can toggle it yourself from the HUD, and passengers care what it says. Flying with belts off on the ground, on approach, or in rough air wears down comfort, while a sign left on through a long smooth cruise breeds a little frustration. Make announcements (Welcome, Turbulence, Descent, Delay, Arrival) from the HUD, a keybind, or your phone, with a short cooldown between them. Choose a chime with on-screen text, recorded PA audio, or silent; scoring is the same either way.
Comfort isn't only about how you fly. Leave the engines running on the ramp for too long and the cabin gets restless, skip the welcome announcement and passengers notice at takeoff, and on a delay, the right announcement keeps everyone informed. Keeping your passengers in the loop is part of flying them well.
Aircraft without a seatbelt sign or PA use a passenger briefing instead: a quick "tighten belts" before you go. Skip it and comfort takes a hit at takeoff, doubled for helicopters. Descent, delay, and arrival callouts are optional there.
Turn on the optional phone view in Settings and keep an eye on your flight from any phone or tablet on your home network: a glance screen with passengers, comfort, route progress, and the time, plus tabs for the passenger list and the flight log, including your latest landing and taxi graphs. It's off until you enable it and stays on your local network. Phone buttons are a separate opt-in that let you press the cabin announcements from your phone; otherwise the phone view is read-only.
See the distance between your departure and destination and watch a progress bar fill as you fly, with distance to go and an estimated arrival time once you're airborne. The bar only moves forward, so a detour never makes it run backwards.
Your taxi out and taxi in are each scored from 100. Hard braking, fast turns, and overspeeding cost points, with limits that suit each aircraft type, and rough taxiing costs passengers a little comfort too. The takeoff roll is never counted against you, and helicopters aren't scored.
After each landing, Manifest opens a debrief once you're parked, with graphs of your vertical speed and G-force, every ground contact including bounces, your score breakdown, a taxi tab with speed graphs and events, and a summary of which announcements you made. You can reopen the last debrief anytime from the HUD.
After a scored landing, Manifest builds a boarding-pass style recap of your flight, ready to share as a post, a Story, or a wide card for Discord and forums. Add your name and flight number in Settings, and optionally show your FSEconomy job pay. Flights with a crash or no score don't get a recap, and anything Manifest doesn't know is left off rather than made up.
Show a UTC clock in the HUD header using sim Zulu time or real-world UTC, or turn it off. Every Cabin Log entry carries its time, and your per-flight logs record both sim and real time.
A first-run setup wizard walks you through FSEconomy, cabin announcements, the HUD clock, the phone view, and what happens after each flight, with a recommended choice already selected on every page. After an update that adds options, it shows you only what's new, and you can run it again anytime from Settings.
A single difficulty slider controls how forgiving the whole system is — higher settings mean harsher comfort penalties, slower recovery, and more diversions, so you can tune Manifest from a light touch up to a genuinely unforgiving passenger experience.
Turn on realistic timing and clicking "Start boarding" doesn't board anyone right away — you start cold and dark with engines off and the parking brake set, then have roughly 8–16 minutes to run your own flows, programming the FMS, checking weather, working the checklist, while Manifest counts down preflight in the background. Once that window closes, the door opens and passengers begin boarding automatically. This pre-boarding realism is currently available for business jet profiles only.
The panel is fully resizable to fit however you like to arrange your cockpit view, and closing it doesn't stop anything — Manifest keeps tracking your flight in the background, and you can bring the window back anytime through FlyWithLua's context menus. It also registers its own command with X-Plane, so you can bind opening and closing it to any joystick button, yoke switch, or key, right from X-Plane's own control bindings.
Resilience handling for aircraft that don't correctly report parking brake or altitude state, so Manifest stays reliable outside of Laminar's default fleet.
The panel, the debrief, the phone view, and the recap card, straight from real flights.
The HUD tracks the flight as it happens: route, FSEconomy job pay and deadline, progress and ETA, comfort, seatbelt sign and announcements, passengers, and a timestamped cabin log.
Once you're parked, the debrief shows exactly how the arrival went: vertical speed and G-force graphs, every ground contact including bounces, and a score breakdown, with a separate taxi tab.
An optional phone view shows your flight from any phone or tablet on your home network: a glance screen, live flight data, the passenger list, and the cabin log with your taxi graph.
After a scored landing, Manifest builds a boarding-pass style recap in three formats: a Story, a post, and a wide card for Discord and forums.
What Manifest needs to run, and where it's been tested.
Manifest has been tested against every default X-Plane 11 and X-Plane 12 aircraft, plus many third-party ones on top of that. Thanks to the resilience layer, most aircraft just work — the list below is a handful that have been individually confirmed and spot-checked.
More aircraft are added to this list as they're individually tested. Verification means Manifest has been confirmed to handle that aircraft's specific parking brake, AGL, and door dataref behavior correctly.
A few things people run into early on.
When you click "Start boarding," Manifest is doing a lot of work before the first passenger moves: it reads your aircraft's profile, runs its resilience checks against the datarefs it needs (parking brake, AGL, doors), generates the passenger manifest for that flight — names, roles, and individual comfort sensitivities — and initializes tracking for each of them. It also creates a brand-new log file for that specific flight, so every leg you fly has its own separate record to look back on. That setup is genuine, not padding, so a short pause before boarding actually begins is expected.
Yes. Manifest ships as a single version that's compatible with both X-Plane 11 and X-Plane 12 — you don't need to pick or download separately, it adapts to whichever sim it's running in. See the next question for what that means in practice.
It's the same single plugin either way, but a few of the datarefs Manifest reads to detect things like turbulence and G-force events only exist in X-Plane 12 — X-Plane 11 never exposed them. Rather than fake that data or guess at it, those specific detections are simply omitted when Manifest is running under X-Plane 11. Everything else — comfort tracking, phase-based audio, boarding and doors, career persistence, and landing scoring — works the same on both.
Depends on your sim: X-Plane 11 needs FlyWithLua NG, and X-Plane 12 needs FlyWithLua NG+. Either way, the base FlyWithLua package on its own isn't enough — Manifest relies on functionality that only NG and NG+ provide.
X-Plane shares a limited pool of sounds across every FlyWithLua script you run, so Manifest doesn't load all of its audio at once. It keeps a small set of slots and swaps the right sound into a free one just before it plays, which leaves room for your other scripts. You can add variety yourself: drop extra WAV files into Manifest's reactions folders (male, female, or any) or its PA folder, and Manifest will pick them up with no other changes.
Any aircraft in the General Aviation, Helicopter, Turboprop, Bizjet, or Airliner categories can use Manifest — Airliner profiles support up to 185 passengers. It's been tested against every default X-Plane 11 and X-Plane 12 aircraft plus many third-party ones, and thanks to the resilience layer, most aircraft just work out of the box. Citation X, Baron 58, and King Air C90 are individually spot-verified so far — see the compatibility section above for what that distinction means.
Manifest controls doors through X-Plane's standard door datarefs, and most aircraft — default and payware alike — expose these correctly, so boarding and deboarding just work. A handful of aircraft, though, especially ones with heavily custom-built systems, drive their doors through their own internal logic instead of the standard dataref path, which means there's nothing standard for Manifest to hook into. That's a limitation of how that particular aircraft is built rather than something a Manifest update can patch around. If doors aren't responding, it's worth checking whether the aircraft has its own door command or animation — if so, you may need to trigger that manually alongside Manifest.
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