Reading the result and the cash

An airline can be profitable and still run out of money, and it can burn cash for a year while building something worth owning. The finance card on the operations screen has two tabs because those are two different questions.

The result: what flying earned

The result is built from departures that have landed and settled. Each one carries its own cost sheet, written when the flight was dispatched, so the breakdown is what actually happened rather than a model run afterwards.

The lines are:

• Ticket revenue — what the passengers paid, less any codeshare share paid out to a partner.
• Fuel — burn per block hour at the price you paid, not today's price.
• Emission quota — every kilo of fuel burnt costs quota.
• Crew — a fixed cost per flight plus a cost per seat and hour. A training centre cuts it.
• Maintenance — charged per seat and block hour, multiplied by how mixed your fleet is. This runs on every flight and is separate from the A- and D-checks you order by hand.
• Airport fees — a landing fee that scales with the size of the destination.
• Passenger service — catering, cleaning and handling, scaled by how much of the cabin is premium. A single-class cabin is markedly cheaper to serve than half a business cabin.

• Depreciation — what your aircraft lost in value flying those hours: 12% of list price per 6,000 hours, the same curve the company valuation uses. This is the one line that did not cost you cash, and the reason the result and the cash flow diverge even in a quiet week. Leased aircraft are not depreciated — you do not own them, and the rent is a standing cost instead.

Departures flown before cost sheets existed appear as one honest remainder line rather than being spread across the categories by guesswork.

Standing costs: what the airline owes

These are charged in the Monday settlement and belong to the company, not to any one flight, so they cannot be read out of a departure. They are shown as what they cost per week at your current setup:

• Loan interest, from the moment the loan was taken.
• Aircraft leases, for anything you rent rather than own.
• Service level — your target multiplied by the seats in your fleet. This is a commitment, not a purchase; see Facilities.
• Marketing campaigns — see Awareness and campaigns.
• Ground staff overtime, whenever a base handles more departures than its level supports.
• Terminal leases, for every terminal you hold at an airport.
• The loyalty programme, at your tier's rate per member.
• Wi-Fi and entertainment, per seat in the fleet, if the cabin has them.

All of them run whether you are logged in or not. The settlement is on a timer; it does not wait for you. Your departures, on the other hand, are only flown when you come back and the accountant catches the week up. That asymmetry is the single most common reason a player returns to less money than they left: the costs never paused, and a thin schedule had nothing to set against them.

The defence is a schedule that fills the week rather than a few good departures. A fleet sitting idle still charges service level, leases, interest and terminals every single week.

The cash flow: what moved through the account

Every change to your balance is recorded with what caused it. This is where an aircraft purchase appears — it never touches the result, because you swapped cash for an asset of similar value, and yet it can empty the account in an afternoon.

Reading the two tabs against each other is the point:

• Profitable result, falling cash: you are buying aircraft or repaying debt faster than the network earns. Sustainable for a while, on purpose.
• Poor result, rising cash: you are borrowing or selling shares. This is survivable and sometimes correct, but it is not a business yet.
• Both falling: the network is not paying for itself. Look at the result lines before you look at anything else.

The log keeps the last month. Anything older is discarded, because the interest in a cash movement is entirely in how recent it is.

Borrowing

The lending rate is a market. It wanders the way the fuel price does — a mean it drifts back towards, a floor and a ceiling — and the bank screen carries its history on the same chart the fuel market uses.

Your rate is three things added together:

1. The market rate on the day you sign.
2. A premium for how leveraged you already are. Borrowing against a company that is mostly debt costs more, which is the point.
3. A premium for how long you fix it. Six months costs nothing extra, a year a little, two years more.

You may borrow up to 150% of equity. Interest runs from the moment you sign and comes off when your flights settle — there is no due date to miss, and sleeping players are never charged for time they did not play.

The term is a bet. When it expires the loan rolls at whatever the market rate is then, plus the same premiums. Fixing short is cheap and leaves you exposed; fixing long costs more and buys certainty. This is the same trade as a fuel contract, and it fails in the same way: cheap right up until the moment it is not.

Repaying before the term is up costs 1% of what you repay. After the term, it costs nothing.

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