Fuel is the largest single cost in running an airline and the only one that moves while you sleep. In The Airline Tycoon you buy it before you fly it, store it in tanks with a real limit, and pay whatever the market asks on the day — unless you have signed a contract that says otherwise.
That last part is where the game gets interesting. A fuel contract is a bet on where the price is going, made against a market that does not know you exist.
Jet fuel and CO₂ quota both have a price that updates every half hour. The price is synthetic — it is not a live feed from a commodity exchange — but the way it behaves is calibrated against real jet fuel statistics: it drifts, it reverts towards a long-run mean, and it occasionally moves further than anybody expected.
You cannot depart without fuel in the tanks. You can depart without CO₂ quota, and it costs you a point of reputation every time you do, which is the game's way of saying that flying uncovered is possible and not free.
The market page keeps a history so you can see where the price has been. That history is the only forecasting tool you get, and it is worth more than it looks: a price well below its long-run average is a different proposition to the same price on the way up.
Fuel does not appear when you need it. You buy it, it sits in your tanks, and the tanks have a capacity you can outgrow. Running a large fleet with a small tank means buying constantly at whatever the price happens to be — which is exactly the position you do not want to be in when the price spikes.
A fuel depot raises your capacity. Each level doubles what you can hold, which turns storage from a chore into a strategy: with enough capacity you can buy heavily when fuel is cheap and simply not buy at all for a while when it is not. The depot no longer gives a discount on the fuel itself, and that is deliberate — the value of storage should be the timing it buys you, not a quiet rebate.
A contract locks a price per kilogram for a fixed number of weeks, against a volume you commit to taking every week. Every week of the contract, the fuel is delivered and the money leaves your account whether you flew or not.
The price you are offered depends on four things you control or can see:
None of those terms is a fixed switch. The offer moves continuously as you change the volume and the length, and it moves as the market does — a contract quoted this morning is not the contract quoted this afternoon.
A contract is a genuine commitment. If you sign for more fuel than you can burn, the fuel still arrives and still gets paid for, and it goes into tanks that may not have room for it. If the spot price falls below your contract price, you are the airline paying above the market, week after week, until the contract runs out.
You can break a contract. It costs a fifth of everything remaining on it, which is usually more than the mistake was worth and occasionally less. Deciding which is which is the whole point.
The honest summary is that fuel rewards patience and punishes drift. An airline that buys reactively — a little, whenever it runs low — pays close to the average price forever. An airline that watches the history, holds capacity, and commits when the market is high pays less than the average, and takes on a real risk of paying more.
See also The economy and Facilities.
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