An airport is a place, not a three-letter code. Click one — on the map or in any list — and you get its page: who flies there, who the people there have heard of, and what sort of city it is.
The facts. Name, city, country, size class and runway length. The runway is the hard limit: a 1,668 m runway will never see a widebody, whatever you are willing to pay. The size class is a coarse 1–10 hint about how much traffic the airport carries.
What you will not find is a traffic figure or a demand estimate. Those exist, they drive the whole model, and they stay on the server. Working out which routes are worth flying is the game; a survey is how you buy the answer.
Your presence. Your awareness here, the routes you fly through it, your base if you have one, the ground staff load if it is one of yours, and any campaign you are running. See Awareness and campaigns for what those numbers do.
Who flies here. Every airline serving the airport, how many routes each of them runs through it, and whether it is one of their bases. Counted from routes rather than from departures, so computer-run airlines appear too. What any of them earns is not shown, because it is not something you could find out by standing in the terminal.
Who they have heard of. Awareness at this airport, highest first. This is the one competitive number that is public, and deliberately so: a brand nobody outside the company can assess is not a brand.
The climate, in words rather than a score:
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open | Nobody serves it. There is usually a reason — check the runway. |
| Quiet | One or two airlines. The demand is mostly theirs, for now. |
| Contested | A handful share it. There is room, and somebody will notice you. |
| Crowded | Six or more, or a very dense network. Money is made here, but not at list fare. |
This is derived from two counts anybody could make: how many airlines fly here and how many routes they run. It is not a difficulty rating out of a model, and there is no number behind it to optimise against.
Some airports carry a visible label:
The label is public and it tells you which way the passenger mix leans. How far it leans is not published, and it is not derivable from anything on screen — it is part of the demand model, and a survey is still the only way to find out what a specific city pair actually holds.
A route between two labelled airports carries both characters. Palma to Frankfurt is a holiday route and a business route at once, and it fills differently in July than in February.
Every six weeks a host airport is announced, and the announcement comes fourteen days before the games open. During the week of the games, every route with one end at the host carries 50% more demand.
The warning is the mechanic. Everyone is told at the same moment, in the same news feed. Whether you have a base within range, a spare aircraft, and the nerve to open a route on the strength of an announcement is the entire decision. Nothing stops you from opening one on the last day either — you just catch less of it.
The skilled computer-run airlines read the announcement too, and you will see them move. That is intentional: a world that does not react to its own news is scenery.
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