Crashes, Landings & Penalties
FS Kingpin reads your flight telemetry from MSFS in real time over SimConnect, specifically your touchdown vertical speed and your G-force. It makes the crash call itself, and it never touches your aircraft or your sim settings.
How FS Kingpin decides you crashed
There are two ways a crash is registered:
- Hard touchdown: descent rate over 800 ft/min AND G-force over 2.5 at the moment of impact. Both have to be true. A firm landing that is fast but smooth, or a high-G but slow touchdown, is not a crash. It just gets graded as a rough landing for XP purposes and you still complete the mission.
- Mid-air crash: G-force over 5.0 while still airborne (flying into terrain, structural overstress, and the like).
The 3 nm rule
The financial crash penalty for a mission only fires if you crash within 3 nm of your destination. If you go down in a mountain 200 nm out, the mission is not failed with a penalty. It just does not complete, and the mission stays active. You lose the time, not the cash. (Trade cargo is the exception, see below.)
The reason for the 3 nm rule is to keep this as a landing penalty. Early on, players were crashing into terrain far from the destination, so the penalty is scoped to the arrival.
What a crash costs you
When you crash on an active mission at the destination, the mission is marked crashed and you pay a cargo penalty equal to the mission payout times a tier multiplier:
| Tier | Crash multiplier |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 1.0x |
| Tier 2 | 1.5x |
| Tier 3 | 2.0x |
| Tier 4 | 3.0x |
| Tier 5 | 5.0x |
So crashing a Tier 5 run costs you 5 times what the run would have paid. This is then scaled up by your territory bonus, so flying in high-territory areas is not risk-discounted, and it can be reduced by an Accountant crew member if you have one (capped at an 80 percent reduction).
Aircraft damage fee
A damage fee of 25 percent of the aircraft's purchase price applies, but only if you are renting it. If you own the aircraft outright, there is no damage fee. A Hull Insurance card also zeroes it.
Trade cargo with no active mission
If you are hauling contraband you bought yourself with no active mission and you crash anywhere, the hold is destroyed (the purchase price is already sunk) plus a tier-scaled clean-up bill on top:
| Tier | Clean-up bill |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | none |
| Tier 2 | +25% |
| Tier 3 | +50% |
| Tier 4 | +100% |
| Tier 5 | +200% |
Beginner trading is not punished. High-tier trading is.
After any crash, the handler also texts you a tier-appropriate roast or threat in the phone.
The debt in the bank
When a crash penalty lands:
- It comes out of your cash first.
- If cash cannot cover the full loss, the remainder is added to debt (cash effectively goes negative).
- On future mission payouts, debt is paid down first, before loan principal, before anything reaches your cash balance.
So a bad crash early on can dump you into debt, and you climb out by flying clean missions until the payouts clear it.
Do you need to turn crashing on in MSFS?
No, and you are better off leaving MSFS crash detection off.
FS Kingpin does its own crash detection purely from telemetry. It does not subscribe to MSFS's own crash event at all, so the MSFS crash and realism setting has zero bearing on whether FS Kingpin registers a crash.