The microphone key
Control, Alt and Shift did not work. Neither did the key Airside ships with, which is right Control, so anyone who never opened Settings had no microphone key at all. Fixed. Bind whatever you like.
It understands you more often
Airline callsigns are ordinary words, and speech recognition writes down what it heard. When it heard the wrong one the whole transmission used to reach nobody: flight number, instruction and all.
Now the flight number can identify the aircraft on its own. Say the callsign and the clearance, and if the airline comes out wrong while the figures are right, the aircraft you meant still gets it. If two aircraft could be meant, nothing is issued, which is what a real controller does.
Airside also reads the frequency. If one aircraft is waiting to push and you approve a pushback, that is who it was for.
And it tells you when it did not
The frequency used to go quiet when a callsign was not recognised. No readback, no query, nothing, which reads as a dead microphone. Now the desk answers: say again the callsign. Say it twice and it reminds you that the three letters on the strip work too, spelled out.
Stands carry their apron letter
Some airports use one stand number on two aprons. Zurich has a 53 at the terminal and a 53 on the cargo ramp. The map now shows them as E53 and C53 and the readback says Echo five three. Give the letter and you get that stand. Give only the figures and a freighter goes to the cargo ramp, an airliner to the passenger stand.
Traffic now uses every one of those stands. At Zurich that is 163 stands instead of 90, and the Realistic level is busier to match.
Nose to nose
When two aircraft stop head on, the panel for the selected aircraft now shows what you can say to each of them: give way, turn one eighty or tug back, and only the ones that will work where they stand.
On the apron
At Zurich the widebodies now park at the heavy gates instead of on whatever stand was free. A few stands at Frankfurt, Copenhagen and San Diego pushed back into a U and finished off the taxilane; they now end on it, nose pointing the way the aircraft will taxi.
Signing in
If a lot of sign in codes have gone to your network in the last hour, the sign in screen now says so. Nobody is locked out for the day any more, and a licence holder is never held back. Installed apps in Windows now shows the version you are running.
Smaller things
The lines that tell you what to say, the IFR clearance included, now appear only when you work by voice. The traffic fills the apron twice as quickly, the aircraft move a little more in the wind, and the two sliders in Settings no longer jump about while you drag them.