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.
Every flight adds block hours and wear. Wear accumulates with flight time and accelerates with age: an aircraft at the oldest age band picks up wear noticeably faster than a new one, so old airframes cost more to keep flying as well as more to fly.
Age runs from 1 to 5.
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 one age band 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.
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.