Four numbers decide whether an aircraft belongs in your fleet, and they are all shown when you order one.
Range must cover the route. There is no partial credit: an ATR 72 will not reach New York, and the game will refuse the departure rather than let you find out mid-ocean.
Runway requirement must be met at both ends. An A380 needs 3,000 m. Stockholm Bromma has 1,668 m. That route does not exist for that aircraft, and no amount of money changes it.
Fuel burn per seat is what decides profitability, and it is why the aircraft list in this game is not cosmetic. Burn rate alone is misleading — an A380 burns four times what an A320neo burns, but carries three times the passengers. What matters is cost per seat-kilometre, and the aircraft reference ranks every type by exactly that.
Price is the smallest consideration of the four. A cheap old airframe that loses money on every flight is more expensive than an expensive new one that does not.
This game deliberately contains a Tupolev Tu-154M, a Boeing 727-200, an MD-82 and a 747-400. They are cheap to buy and they will lose you money, because their fuel burn per seat is genuinely 25–40% worse than a modern equivalent.
That is a correction of the most common complaint about other airline games, where obsolete Soviet jets somehow out-earn new Airbuses. Here, a 1984 airframe loses to a 2016 airframe because the real fuel figures say it should. If you buy one, buy it knowingly.
An aircraft has a number of slots, not seats. Slots convert to seats at different rates depending on class:
| Class | Slots per seat |
|---|---|
| Economy | 1 |
| Business | 2 |
| First | 4 |
An A320neo has 194 slots. All-economy that is 194 seats. Fit 16 business seats and you spend 32 slots on them, leaving 162 for economy — a 178-seat aircraft.
The cabin bar in the game shows this directly: the width of each block is the slots consumed, so you can see what premium costs you.
Premium seats earn far more per seat. Business costs close to three times the economy fare while taking twice the space, so it earns meaningfully more per slot — when it sells. The catch is in that last clause, and the reference fares in the game show you the ratio directly.
Business demand is a modest share of the market — larger on long routes between big airports, small on short regional ones — and first class only exists on long routes between major airports. Fit 40 business seats on a short regional route and most of them fly empty while still costing you the slots.
Survey the route first, then build the cabin to the demand you actually found. Around 8–10% of slots in business is a sane starting point on medium and long routes, and none at all on short thin ones, but the survey is what should decide it.
The layout is not fixed at purchase. A parked aircraft can be refitted — same slot rules, 2% of the list price, and a day in the workshop while the seats are torn out and rebuilt. Departures scheduled during that day are missed, so plan it like a check: in a night gap or a quiet weekend, and preferably before you move an aircraft to a route whose passengers want a different cabin.
Aircraft here do not age in years. They age in block hours and in cycles, one cycle being one takeoff and one landing — because that is how aircraft actually age, and because it makes how you fly an aeroplane matter as much as how long you have owned it.
Two identical aircraft bought on the same day can be in very different condition a month later, and the one that spent the month doing short hops is the tired one. Cycles punish structure — pressurisation, undercarriage, brakes — so a regional jet doing eight sectors a day wears faster than a widebody doing one, despite covering a fraction of the distance. The game weights the two according to what the aircraft was built for.
Every flight adds hours, one cycle and some wear. Old airframes pick up wear faster than new ones, so age costs you twice: once in fuel and once in maintenance.
This one catches people out, because it is the only cost in the game that depends on your fleet as a whole rather than on the aircraft you are looking at.
Every additional aircraft family you operate raises the maintenance cost of everything you own. Every additional model within a family raises it too, by less. The reason is the one that drives real airlines to standardise: separate spares, separate tooling, separate engineer training, separate manuals.
An airline that buys whatever looks good this week pays a premium on its entire fleet, permanently. An airline that picks a family and stays inside it pays the least. The factor is capped, so variety never becomes ruinous — but it is large enough that a mixed fleet needs to be earning something for the trouble. Before ordering from a new family, work out what it does to the aircraft you already have.
The fleet page shows your families and models as a number for exactly this reason. It is a cost you can only see by looking at everything at once.
You can name a preferred supplier and take a discount on parts and maintenance in exchange for committing to them for a period. It is a clean trade: a real saving now against a loss of flexibility later, and the flexibility matters most exactly when something goes wrong.
Two thresholds, both shown in the fleet list:
| Check | Cost | Grounded | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| A-check | ~1.5% of list price | 4 hours | Wear back to zero |
| D-check | ~10% of list price | 36 hours | Wear back to zero and hours taken off the airframe |
This follows the real pattern. An A-check is a routine visit that replaces worn parts. A D-check is the heavy maintenance visit where the aircraft is taken apart and inspected down to the structure — expensive, slow, and the only thing that makes an old airframe young again.
The decision is when, not whether. Running to 89% squeezes the most flying out of each check but bleeds reputation the whole way; checking at 50% wastes money on downtime you did not need.
Business aviation is a category of its own in the aircraft list, not a small airliner. Private jets carry very few people at a very high fare and reach airports that nothing else in your fleet can use. They are not a route-network aircraft and they will not fill themselves — but on the right pair, with the right passengers, they earn per seat what nothing with an aisle can.
Treat them as a specialist tool. An airline built on them is a different business to an airline built on narrowbodies, and both are playable.
Aircraft are registered automatically as your airline code plus a sequential number: SK-001, SK-002, and so on. The number is assigned when the aircraft is bought and does not change.