How the game works: what drives demand, what you pay for, and how to read a route before you commit money to it.
What you will not find here are the coefficients. The demand model runs on the server and stays there, because working out which routes are worth flying is the game. What is guaranteed is that the model is consistent and physical — real aircraft, real fuel burn, real distances, no fudged numbers pushing you toward a purchase. The rest you discover by flying.
You begin with $300,000,000 and one hub. That is enough for roughly two narrowbody aircraft and a small handful of routes, which is deliberate: the first decisions you make matter more than any decision you make later.
Your hub is where every aircraft begins and ends its day, and every route you open must start there. Three things about an airport decide what it is worth to you:
Large European and Asian hubs are the forgiving choice. A remote hub is a harder game and a more interesting one.
You cannot depart without fuel in your tanks. Prices move every 30 minutes and range between roughly $0.70 and $1.75 per kilogram — the same band real jet fuel traded in during 2026 — so the difference between a good buy and a bad one is a quarter of your largest single operating cost.
Buy CO₂ quota too. You can fly without it, but every departure without quota costs you a point of reputation, and reputation feeds back into how full your aircraft fly.
A single aircraft flying a good route earns more than three flying bad ones, and you learn the game faster with a fleet you can hold in your head. Pick something modern: the cost tables in the aircraft reference are real, and a 2016 airframe genuinely beats a 1984 one per seat-kilometre.
Opening a route costs a fee that scales with distance and with how busy the destination is. Once it is open you can see it on your network, but you cannot see its demand until you pay for a survey.
That is not an inconvenience, it is the game. You cannot compute demand yourself — the model is not published and the data behind it is not exposed — so every survey is a bet on whether a route is worth knowing about. A survey on a route you then abandon is money burned, and that is the cost of finding out.
Every route starts at the reference price — the price at which about 85% of your seats sell. Move the sliders and watch the forecast: raising the fare above reference empties the cabin faster than it fills your bank account, and dropping it below fills the cabin with passengers who are not paying enough to cover the trip.
Then dispatch. The flight takes real time — a 1,800 km trip is a little under three hours — and pays out when it lands. Close the browser if you like; the money is waiting when you come back.
Once a route is surveyed you can hand it to autopilot, which flies it while you are away. It deliberately fills fewer seats than you would — it cannot react to a demand peak or a rival opening the same city pair. Autopilot keeps the airline alive; being here is what makes it grow.
Buy fuel cheap, fly aircraft that suit their routes, price so the cabin fills without giving seats away, and put the profit into more aircraft, more routes, and the facilities that make all of it cheaper. Everything else in the game — wear, reputation, surveys, the fuel market, the rivals on your city pairs — is a pressure on one of those decisions.
Start your airline