Turn autopilot on for a route, assign an aircraft, and choose how many departures a day it should fly (1 to 8). The next time you open the game, every departure that should have happened while you were away is flown and settled, and you are shown a summary of what happened.
Two rules keep it honest:
You must survey the route first. Autopilot will not fly blind. Everything it does is based on the demand figure you paid to find out.
Autopilot flies at 85% of the demand a hand-flown departure gets. It uses the prices you saved and never adjusts them, so it fills fewer seats than you would if you were watching the market. This is the cost of not being there, and it is deliberate: autopilot exists so your airline does not stop when you close the tab, not so the game plays itself.
Autopilot catches up at most 72 hours of flying and at most 40 departures per visit. Come back after a month and you get three generous days, not nine hundred flights. If a route runs out of fuel, or the aircraft wears past 90%, that route stops and the summary tells you which one and why.
From time to time an operator will offer you a one-off flight, outside your route network, paid up front at about 35% above the normal fare. It might be a sports team, a tour group, or a company moving people somewhere you do not normally fly.
Charters expire within the hour. There is no way to plan for them and no way to catch one while you are away — the only requirement is that you happen to be here. That is the entire mechanic: a reason to look in.
To accept one you need an aircraft free at the departure airport with enough seats and enough range, and fuel in stock.
Demand on a city pair is shared between everyone who flies it, in proportion to reputation. If you are the only operator on Helsinki–London, you see all of it. If a rival with the same reputation opens the same pair, you each see half. If your reputation is 80 and theirs is 40, you see two-thirds.
Direction does not matter: HEL–LHR and LHR–HEL are the same market.
This is what makes reputation worth money rather than being a decorative number. It also means a route that was excellent last month can quietly stop being excellent, because someone else moved in. Your survey shows the demand for the whole city pair — the share you actually get is shown on the route card.
Now and then the world does something: a summer holiday peak, a business travel boom, an oil supply shock, an ash cloud over the Atlantic. While an event is running, a banner at the top of Operations tells you what it is and how long it lasts.
Events change demand on departures, never on surveys. What you paid to learn stays the baseline; the event is a temporary multiplier on top of it. A player who is logged in during a peak can raise prices and take the extra revenue. Autopilot will fly straight through the whole thing on last week's prices.
Logging in on consecutive days builds a streak, shown in the top bar. Every seventh consecutive day gives you 5 pax tokens. Miss a day and it resets to one. It is the only way to earn tokens repeatedly, and it rewards coming back rather than playing for a long time in one sitting.
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