An airline is a crew, a shared account and a shared fleet. A line pilot only needs the schedule: take a flight and fly it, management handles the rest.
Join an existing one
The catalogue shows each airline’s size, its fleet and how active it is. Applying takes one click, and the owner or a manager decides. It is the simplest start: the aircraft are there, the schedule is written and salary is paid from day one.
Start your own
The capital covers four or five leased narrowbodies or a dozen and a half ATRs. For a young airline leasing almost always beats buying: the money stays free for fuel and salaries.
Upload your own logo in the Edit details window: PNG or WebP, 240–1024 px, up to 256 KB. Without it, a monogram or the mark of the airline under “Operating as” sits next to the name.
Who does what
- The owner and managers run the fleet, schedule, hiring, finance, hubs and loans. An executive is the owner’s deputy with every right except handing the company over or appointing other executives.
- Pilots take flights, fly them and collect salary and bonuses.
- AI crews are hired computer pilots who fly the schedule on their own and draw a salary too.
Freezing and closing
An airline that no live member has signed into for 14 days is frozen. The AI fleet finishes the legs in the air and stays parked, nothing leaves the account, and the airline disappears from the catalogue and standings. Aircraft, crew and lines stay put.
You can close the airline for good with the button at the bottom of Airline details once no other members are left. It is irreversible: lines are shut, crews go to the hiring market, aircraft go back to the lessor or are sold. The loan is paid off first and the rest is lost; pilots keep their flights and hours.
Airline home page
The “Needs attention” block gathers matters waiting for management, urgent ones first, and each line leads to where the matter is handled. A pilot sees only departures without a pilot that they can take themselves.
Everything people do in the airline goes into the journal, and next to it runs the fleet dispatcher feed: which aircraft went where and why. Pilots do not see the journal, a dispatcher sees only their own work.
The schedule and lines
Management creates lines by hand or imports a real airline’s network, including from the 1950–2026 archive. Import lets in only as many lines as the fleet can fly: about 10 departures a week per aircraft. A bigger network needs more aircraft first. An empty schedule means pilots have nothing to take: in an airline you don’t know, check this first.
- In the new line form, before you type, the arrival field suggests recent airports of your network (marked «recent») and popular routes from the departure («popular»). Search understands Russian names of cities and airports worldwide: «Казань» finds Kazan, «Париж» finds Charles de Gaulle. On an equal match a major airport ranks above small strips and helipads. If a small airfield is not found, type it in English or use the code.
- A rotation is a line and its return on one row; the game pairs them by route and type itself. An empty second half means there is no return line for that type and the aircraft comes back empty.
- Every night the dispatcher lays the schedule out over the aircraft and picks the departures the fleet and crews can fly without a miss. Such a departure is secured: it has its own aircraft and leaves at its own hour, within 15 minutes. The rest fly opportunistically, if a free aircraft of a matching type happens to be nearby. A new line gets secured departures after the night recount. A late departure is caught up until the end of the day, then it is lost. Departure times do not bind a live pilot: they fly whenever they like.
- Schedule accuracy on the Flights tab shows what share of secured departures left on time and what would cover the unsecured ones: a crew or one more aircraft. Before an action that breaks secured departures in the next 26 hours (manual maintenance, selling an aircraft, dismissal), the game shows which will suffer, and the decision is yours.
- Lines from one departure can be created in a batch. In the new line form a picked arrival replaces the previous one, and «Another destination» opens a list: each next arrival becomes a row in it, a row keeps only the types that reach it, and «Create N pairs» creates every ready row at once. The list holds up to 50 destinations. A row with no suitable type stays in the list. Departure, category and types stay after creation.
- A quick flight is a line with an expiry date for live pilots, say for one evening. The AI fleet never takes it. It can be opened for “any type”, and the flight number can be left to the pilot.
- An assignment is a flight handed to a named pilot on their flight board. They can accept or decline it before it expires.
- An aircraft tied to lines flies only those. Watch for dead ends: if no tied line departs from an arrival airport, the aircraft comes back empty at the full cost of a flight. The form names such airports.
- An empty positioning flight costs fuel and navigation fees with no revenue; usually it is 1–3 % of flights. When there are many, the owner gets a notification naming the airports aircraft leave empty from: open a paying flight from there or move the aircraft.
- The line screen opens from the flight number: net result over 30 days, average load and the load below which the line loses money. A zero in the “Who flies it” column means nobody works the line.
Demand map
The Demand tab of the Flight map suggests where to open a line: the thickness of an arc shows the daily pool of a route, shared by all carriers. The “Check the line” button opens the new-line form with the chosen pair.
Airline management gets a Profit view for an airport on the demand map: the projected leg profit for destinations from there, calculated like the preview in the line form. Pick a fleet type or “Best in fleet”. The “Compare destinations” link in the new line form opens the map at your departure.
Departure board
The Departure board on the airline home page shows its day: what left, what is in the air, what is selling tickets and what never departed. Any member can see it and there is no money on it; a shortened board also sits on the airline’s public page.
Line fare
A passenger line has its own ticket price: a multiplier on the market rate from ×0.50 to ×2.00 on the line screen. A route’s flow is split between all carriers: a cheap ticket wins you a larger share, and with a dear one some people stay home.
- The line screen draws the profit curve of a flight across the whole range and shows up to what price the cabin stays full.
- The route market is the average fare of other airlines’ lines from last night’s snapshot. The comparison is always against the market without you.
- The price applies only to unsold seats. A bought ticket keeps the price it was sold at.
- You can hand the price to a hub manager with the switch on the hub card: once a day they steer lines from the hub towards the highest daily profit. A value you set stays until their next pass.
- There is no fare control on a private charter, an on-request flight, a quick flight, a factory delivery, the flight of the day or cargo lines.
Hubs
A hub is an airport where the airline is established. Handling is cheaper there, reputation grows faster, and transfer passengers fill empty seats on flights from and to the hub. Level runs from 1 to 5: the higher it is, the dearer the upkeep and the bigger the capacity.
Capacity is measured in units of operating muscle: a light aircraft takes a quarter, a regional one, a narrowbody two, a widebody up to five. Four units come free. Fleet above capacity is not seized; it parks at somebody else’s stand at the commercial rate.
The first hub runs free and cannot be closed, and each further one costs 15 % more to open than the previous. Hubs open only at aerodromes: a helipad can be a home point but not a hub.
Building prices and effects above are for a large airport: at a medium one they are half, at a small one a quarter.
- A hub manager (₽400,000 a month) seats AI crews where aircraft cannot depart without them, removes surplus people and sends crews to aircraft. The Manager duties card on the Staff screen sets what they do on their own.
- A mechanic (₽300,000 a month) clears light and medium tech issues on the hub’s aircraft for free and schedules overdue checks. More in the maintenance chapter.
AI crews
The minimum crew is set by the aircraft type. Below the minimum the aircraft will not depart at all.
Crew work is counted in duty hours, ground time of the legs included. A leg that does not fit the rest of the duty is not taken and the crew goes on long rest, and a leg longer than a whole duty needs a person above the minimum.
With hours, crews grow in stability, smoothness and rank. Mood depends on pay, work and the aircraft: a happy crew flies more neatly, an unhappy one lands harder, and if nothing changes it leaves two weeks later.
- A raise, when pay has fallen behind rank: up to +10 %, no more than once every six months. You cannot raise pay of your own accord, only agree to a request. “Automatic raise” in the Salaries block answers for you.
- A transfer to the airport where their aircraft now is: free, and it lifts mood. This can be automated too.
- Leave, when burnt out.
- A bonus for a thousand hours with your airline.
The whole AI fleet lives on the Staff screen: there you seat people on aircraft and hire from the candidate market, and the advisor tells you how many people the fleet needs.
Reputation and advertising
An airline has its own reputation at every airport, from 0 to 100, and it cannot be bought. Reputation 100 lifts flight loads by about 5 percentage points (averaged over both ends of a leg). Four contributions make it up:
Airport advertising adds what you have not flown: for the term of a paid campaign reputation rises, by no more than 20 points. Repeat campaigns at the same airport give a quarter of the contribution.
Ops room and flight comms
The Operations room brings events on your network: a storm over a destination, a run of failures, a rival poaching a pilot. A good outcome earns money or a temporary effect, a bad one deducts nothing, but a pilot you fail to keep may leave.
On the Comms tab management and the dispatcher can send a pilot in the air a telex straight to the cockpit. If the datalink is not set up, it arrives as a notification on the site.
Your own flight rules
The owner and executive can set the airline’s own scoring limits: pitch, bank, taxi speed and approach descent rate (Edit details, Flight rules tab). A rule set to “Include in the score” replaces the platform check and can only be stricter. Pilots see the rules on the airline home page and in the booking briefing.