This page explains how money works in the game — what drives demand up and down, what you pay for, and where margin comes from.
It does not give you the coefficients. That is deliberate, and it is worth explaining why before you read further.
The single most important decision in this game is which routes are worth flying, and the way you find out is by paying for a survey. If the demand formula and the underlying airport data were public, you could compute demand for all 3,215 airports in an afternoon, and the survey — along with the entire question of where to expand — would be worth nothing.
So the model is server-side and stays there. The raw traffic figure behind each airport is not exposed by the API at all; try to read it and the database refuses.
What you get instead is a guarantee: the model is consistent and physical. Fuel burn comes from real aircraft figures, distances are real great-circle distances, CO₂ is a real combustion constant. Nothing is fudged to nudge you toward spending. If a Tupolev loses to an Airbus it is because the fuel numbers say so, and if a route disappoints there is a reason you can find.
The rest is yours to work out. Run the experiment, read the forecast, keep notes.
Demand is calculated per route, per day, per direction, and split across economy, business and first.
What pushes it up: how much traffic both airports already handle. Big hubs trade heavily with other big hubs. This is why the busiest markets in the game are the busiest markets in reality.
What pushes it down: distance, gently. Long-haul routes between major hubs remain some of the densest in the world, so the penalty for distance is mild.
What kills it: very short sectors. Below a few hundred kilometres, trains and cars take most of the traffic, and a hop between two airports serving the same city is worth far less than their size suggests.
Premium demand grows with distance and with the size of both airports. First class does not exist on short routes or into minor airports, no matter how large the cities — survey a short domestic route and the First column will read zero.
Daily demand is shared between every departure you run on that route. Two flights a day each see half the market. Add enough frequency and the marginal departure carries too few passengers to cover its own costs. Finding where that line sits is one of the better puzzles in the game, and it moves depending on the aircraft you use.
Every route opens at its reference price — the fare at which roughly 85% of seats sell. That is the number the sliders start at, and it scales with distance. Business is just under three times economy; first is around six and a half times.
Move away from reference and the cabin responds. Raise the fare and you sell fewer seats; drop it and you fill the aircraft with passengers paying less than they might have. The three classes are not equally sensitive: economy passengers react hardest to price, first class barely at all. Business sits in between.
You do not have to guess at any of this. The forecast beside the sliders is computed by the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so what it predicts is what you get. Move a slider, watch the load factor and the result, and you will map the curve for yourself in about a minute.
Note that low prices cannot summon passengers who do not exist. The cabin fills only as far as the market and your seat count allow.
Six things are charged against every departure:
| Cost | Driven by |
|---|---|
| Fuel | Burn rate × block hours × the market price when you departed |
| CO₂ quota | Fuel burned × a real combustion constant × the quota price |
| Crew | Block hours and the size of the aircraft |
| Maintenance | Block hours and the size of the aircraft |
| Airport fees | Aircraft size and how busy the destination is |
| Passenger service | Passengers carried and distance flown |
Block hours are the flight time plus a fixed allowance for taxi, climb and approach. A short sector pays that allowance over very few kilometres, which is why very short routes struggle even when demand exists.
Airport fees scale with the destination. Serving a major hub costs substantially more per landing than serving a minor one. Small airports are cheap; they simply have fewer passengers to sell to.
Leasing, offices and non-flying staff are company-level costs and are not charged per flight.
At reference prices, a well-matched aircraft on a decent route returns a healthy margin — considerably better than a real airline manages, because a game needs room for good decisions to compound.
It collapses in four situations, and every one of them is something you chose:
There is no hidden fifth thing, and no random penalty waiting for you. If a flight disappoints, one of those four explains it.
Start your airline