I built a seperate status badge from the native phpVMS pilots badge. It is updated every 10 minutes by a cron job running on the server. It gets the online/offline, route, flight status, etc, from the acars data table on the site so it doesnt matter where they are flying, vatsim, ivao, offline. As long as they are connected to the acars client and the site their pilot status badge is updated. If they are not connected to the site via cars it takes the last flight data from their last pirep and displays some basic info, last flight number, date last seen, etc.
There is a page with all of the active pilot's status badges here -> http://www.virtualaca.net/index.php/status
And they are also located in each pilots profile like here -> http://www.virtualaca.net/index.php/profile/view/1
I have been debating with myself about releasing this in some way.....