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Narrow-Body Aircraft Guide

Every narrow-body jet in Tailwinds compared: seats, range, lease cost, fuel burn, and per-seat economics. Find the right single-aisle workhorse for your airline.

Narrow-body jets are the backbone of almost every successful Tailwinds airline. They cover the busiest segment of the route map — short and medium-haul city pairs with strong, repeatable demand — and they do it with economics that widebodies simply cannot match on those stage lengths. If your airline only ever mastered one aircraft category, it should be this one.

The core trade-off inside the category is capacity versus cost. Smaller types like the A318 or 737-700 are cheap to lease and easy to fill, which makes them forgiving while you learn a market. Larger types like the A321neo or 737 MAX 10 carry far more passengers for only modestly higher trip cost — brilliant on proven routes, punishing on speculative ones. The table and per-type notes below use each aircraft's actual in-game numbers, including fuel cost per seat-kilometre, the single best measure of how cheaply a jet moves one passenger one kilometre.

How to choose

Match seats to demand first, then range to mission, and only then look at price. A jet that is 30% too big for its route flies half-empty and loses money regardless of how efficient it is on paper. New-generation types (neo, MAX, A220, E2) burn noticeably less fuel per seat than the classics they replaced, but lease for more — they reward busy networks that keep them in the air. Older classics are the value play for cash-strapped early airlines: far lower weekly lease, but higher burn, and they arrive second-hand with a maintenance bill already inflated by age. The oldest jets here, whose lines closed in 1976 or earlier, are buy-only, because no lessor stocks them. The Comet 1 is listed for history: its certificate was withdrawn in 1955, so it can only be bought in an era game, between 1952 and 1954.

All 52 aircraft at a glance

Figures are the game's actual values. Fuel cost assumes the base fuel price of $1.45/litre — the live market price in your save drifts between roughly half and nearly double that, which is why fuel hedging matters. Lease and price are the classic-game market rates. Any type whose production line closed in 1976 or earlier is buy-only, because no lessor stocks it, so ignore its lease column. In an era game the calendar takes over: a type appears the year it entered service, lessors only take it from ten years after that (the war-surplus C-46, C-47 and DC-4 excepted), and prices shift with the year.

Six narrow-bodies worth building a network on

Fifty-two types is too many to think about. Six will build any network you care to fly. What follows moves from the jet you lease in week one to the one you grow into, and it includes a type new players reach for far too early. Every figure comes from the table above or from the game's own market screen, with the arithmetic spelled out so you can argue with it.

Every type in the category

Reference entries for all 52, in the same order as the table. The table above carries seats, range, cruise speed, lease, price and fuel; these add the runway each type needs and its base weekly maintenance bill. That base is for a factory-fresh frame: out-of-production types arrive second-hand, already years old, and their maintenance starts higher (the market screen in the game quotes the delivered figure).