ACARS ([A]ircraft [C]ommunication [A]ddressing and [R]eporting [S]ystem) is a digital data link system transmitted via VHF radio which allows airline flight operations departments to communicate with the various aircraft in their fleet. This VHF digital transmission system, used by many civilian aircraft and business jets, can be likened to "email for airplanes," as the registration of each aircraft is a unique address in the system developed by aeronautical radio giant ARINC (Aeronautical Radio, Inc.). Traffic is routed via ARINC computers to the proper company, relieving some of the necessity for routine voice communication with the company. With ACARS, such routine items as departure reports, arrival reports, passenger loads, fuel data, engine performance data, and much more can be requested by the company and retrieved from the aircraft at automatic intervals. Before the advent of ACARS, flight crews had to use VHF to relay this data to their operations on the ground.

With three different ACARS options utilized with Virtual Frontier, you have the ability to gather your flight information which is then submitted as a PIREP. This PIREP will record your time for you automatically upon submitting the data and eliminate the need to manually track this information.

The three ACARS options Virtual Frontier is able to accept are those reports from a freeware program called FSACARS, which is available on the Virtual Frontier website, as well as the payware programs FS Flight Keeper and FsPassengers.