Devlog

October 22, 2026

Schedule your week

• A Schedule tab under Operations. Every aircraft gets a row with its week laid out from Monday to Sunday, each flight drawn as a round trip. Drag a flight to choose when it leaves, or drag one in from the aircraft’s list of routes. Anything you don’t place is scheduled for you, so the whole thing is optional: open it when you want to tidy a timetable, ignore it when you don’t. Times show in your hub’s local time or in UTC, and you can zoom in to 2× or 4×. With a flight selected, the arrow keys move it by 15 minutes (an hour with Shift).
• The departure board follows your schedule. Your flights now leave at the times you set, shown in each airport’s local time.
• Charters are on it too. A charter shows as a fixed, striped block on the aircraft flying it. You can see how much of the week it takes, and your own flights are scheduled around it, but the customer decides when it flies, so it can’t be moved.
• The schedule is for planning and for the board. It doesn’t change demand or costs, and an aircraft can still fly only as many hours a week as before (see the fleet planning guide).

October 22, 2026

Fewer clicks: shortcuts, flights from the Fleet page, and your families in the Market

• A shortcuts bar. Every page in the Network, Fleet, Airports and Company menus now has a ☆ beside it. Star up to eight and they appear as buttons on a bar under the menus, one click away. Click the ★ again, or the × on a shortcut, to remove it. Shortcuts are kept in your browser, so they stay put across saves and new games.
• Change flights from the Fleet page. Every route on an aircraft's card now has its own −/+ for flights per week, and Adjust flights on all routes sets every route the plane flies to the same number in one go — or adds or removes flights on each, or fills the aircraft's spare hours. Tick several aircraft in the fleet table and Flights/wk on the selection bar does the same for all of their routes. Freighters included. The usual limits apply: no route goes past the aircraft's flying hours or the gate slots, and you are told what stopped it.
• “Your families” in the Market. A new Show only chip lists just the aircraft families you already fly or have on order — your types plus their stretches, shrinks and freighter versions, which share your crews and your maintenance set-up — so ordering more of what you fly no longer means scrolling the whole catalogue. Every type is in the aircraft guide.

All three suggested by VodkaOnFire on Discord.

October 22, 2026

Route Finder: how much of a market is already flown

• A Served column. Beside each market's size, the Route Finder now shows how much of it is already being flown, as a percentage. It counts rivals' nonstops, their one-stop connections over their hubs, and your own flights. Low means there is room for you; close to 100% means a new route would mostly win passengers from someone else. Hover over the figure to see who carries what, and how many travellers a week nobody carries yet. It comes from the same market-share calculation as your weekly results, for a fully established route this month.
• Sort by “Most demand left”. Ranks markets by the travellers nobody carries yet, so a huge lane rivals already fill drops below a smaller one nobody flies.
• The freight finder catches up. Its freighter list now starts with your own freighters, with how many you have, how many are idle and the range of your best one. A new Show lanes I already serve switch brings back the lanes you fly, labelled with your route. It also gets the Served column, counting your own freighters, and the Most demand left sort. Plan → now takes the freighter you were searching with to the planner.
• The freight planner lists your freighters first, with how many are idle, and picks one of yours for the forecast instead of the first freighter in the catalogue.
• The From box starts with your network. In both finders it now opens on the airports you picked recently, then your hubs and focus cities, then the other airports where you hold gates. Typing still searches every airport, with your own listed first. The other airport drop-downs in the game also gain a Recently Used group, and list the regions you fly in first.

Thanks to VodkaOnFire on Discord for all of these.

October 21, 2026

A faster Route Finder

Sorting the Route Finder by profit could take several seconds on a big airline, every time you opened it or changed the search. Each row's forecast plays out a full week of your network with that route added, so it can count connecting passengers, and a profit sort needs 150 of them. Three changes, prompted by VodkaOnFire on Discord:

• It opens on your last forecasts. The finder now remembers the figures it worked out, per airline and aircraft, even after a reload or a new week. When you come back, the table is ranked straight away. The old figures are dimmed, with the week they're from in the tooltip, and fresh ones replace them in the background. Plan → always forecasts the route from scratch, so an older figure can't change the route you actually open.
• Switching aircraft is about 6× faster. The network-week part of a forecast doesn't depend on the aircraft, but it was being redone for every row. It is now reused when you switch aircraft on the same lanes.
• Forecasting runs in the background, on spare processor cores. The page stays responsive while the numbers come in. On a 4-core machine, a 150-row profit sort took about 1.6 seconds instead of 4.2. The numbers are exactly the same as before.

October 21, 2026

Lease gates from the map

• Tap an airport, lease a gate. An airport's page now opens with a Lease a Gate card: what the next gate costs each month, what it adds to your weekly bill, and a button to lease it. Tap any airport on the network map and it is right there, so you can find somewhere new on the map and open a gate without a trip to the Airports tab.
• Your own airports open too. Before, only the dim background airports on the map could be tapped. Your hubs and the airports you already fly to now open the same page, so adding a gate where you are short of slots takes a couple of taps.
• Airport pages fit a phone. On a narrow screen the page now shows one card per row. Before, half the cards, the lounge among them, sat off the right-hand edge.

Thanks to Alex585975 for the idea on Discord. New to gates? The how-to-play guide covers what they do.

October 21, 2026

Rival sets: more than one maker, and fixes

• Several manufacturers per airline. A rival in a custom set can now name more than one aircraft maker, as a list like "maker": ["Boeing", "Embraer"] or as "Boeing, Embraer". It buys from any of them, picking the best-sized aircraft for each route. A misspelt maker is skipped with a warning and the rest still count. The competition guide now lists every maker name the game knows, with the years each one's aircraft were built.
• Historical airlines arrive on time. In era games, the game's own random start-ups could fill the field and leave a set's later airlines waiting for years, or never appearing at all. Start-ups no longer take the room a set airline is waiting for, so every airline in your set joins in its founding year.
• Fleet preferences hold as airlines grow. A rival that filled its biggest preferred aircraft used to step up to another maker's (an all-Boeing carrier buying A380s). It now stays on what it prefers. Routes it could only open with another maker's aircraft can still grow.
• Copying a field keeps founding years. Copying your rivals from the Competition screen gave airlines that joined mid-game your start year, so a shared copy brought them in early. Each now keeps the year it was founded.

More in the competition guide.

October 18, 2026

Reserves by airport

Pick the Reserve filter on the Fleet page and a new Reserves by base panel shows where your standby aircraft are parked: each airport, how many reserves it holds, and how many of each type. Click an airport to list only its reserves, or click a type to narrow it to, say, just the A320s at that base.

October 18, 2026

More control over your rivals

• Fix: custom rival sets now work. Games started from a pasted set were quietly getting the random field instead. If you started one, start it again.
• Fleet preference. A rival in a set can list the aircraft it flies, or just a manufacturer: an all-Boeing carrier stays all-Boeing as it grows, and with production lines it competes for slots on those lines. When nothing it prefers can fly a route, it takes whatever fits.
• Closing years. In era games, a rival can now close in a given year as well as open in one, so a set of historical airlines rises and falls on schedule. An airline that has already closed by your start year never appears.
• Starting routes and a second hub. A set can give a rival its real starting network and a second hub, instead of a generated one. Any listed route no aircraft of the era can fly is left out, and the game tells you which.
• Random logos. Give any rival in a set the logo "random", or shuffle every logo at once with "randomLogos": true. Random logos are spread evenly, so a big set doesn't repeat one over and over.
• A chance to appear. A rival in a set can have a chance from 0 to 100, so a long list of airlines gives a different field every game. It leans toward underserved markets: an airline is likelier to appear where few others are based near its hub. Thanks to VodkaOnFire for both ideas.
• How many rivals. Start with a few (10), the usual 25, or many (40).
• Rival pressure. Relaxed rivals pay you less attention, start fewer fare wars and move less often; fierce ones watch you from early on and move more often.
• New airlines and mergers. Random start-ups can now be none, rare, normal or frequent, and you can stop rivals merging with each other.

All on the setup screen under Rivals, for new games. More in the competition guide.

October 17, 2026

Choose your rivals

New games have a Rivals section on the setup screen, so you decide who you’re up against.

• Custom rival sets. Paste in a set of airlines, each with a name, home airport, tier and size (small, medium or large). Optionally add a founding year, logo, personality and quality. Play with only your set, or add it to the usual random field. A set can start with up to 60 rivals.
• Rivals founded in their own year. In era games, an airline founded after your start year appears once the calendar reaches its year, if there’s room in the field.
• Share a field. The Competition tab copies any game’s rivals as a set you can post or paste into a new game. The airlines still to be founded come with it.
• No rival at your hub. Start without any rival based at your home airport. Others still fly in.
• No random new airlines. Switch off the random start-ups that appear mid-game, so a custom set plays exactly as written.

More in the competition guide.

October 17, 2026

Production lines: you and your rivals share the factory

Until now every airline had its own private delivery queue, and rival airlines didn’t queue at all: when one decided to grow, its new aircraft appeared that week. In new games, aircraft now come off production lines that you share with the rivals, and they have to order and wait just like you.

• One line per aircraft family. Each family (737NG, A320neo, 777 and so on) has one factory line building a set number of aircraft a week: more for turboprops, fewer for jumbos. When rivals book the weeks you wanted, you wait longer, or you pick a type on a quieter line.
• Rivals order and wait too. A rival opening a route, adding flights or moving to a bigger type now orders the aircraft first. The change happens when they arrive, so you can see it coming in the news. Rivals with plenty of cash will pay for early slots when a line is busy, and they move to another type when their favourite is booked solid.
• Pay to jump the queue. The order form shows the line’s next weeks. The standard week is list price; earlier weeks cost up to 25% more. Your own deliveries from one line arrive at least a set gap apart, from a week for turboprops to five weeks for jumbos.
• See who is buying. Every aircraft in the market shows how many are flying and on order across the game, which airlines hold them, and how busy its line is. This works in every game, old saves included.
• Purchases are paid in stages. A deposit when you sign, instalments as delivery approaches, and the remaining three quarters on the week the aircraft arrives. The order form warns you if the balance would take your cash negative.
• Era games: launch customers. New types are announced two years before they enter service. For six months after the announcement you can sign up as a launch customer: at least 20 to 30 aircraft, paid in full, at a discount that grows each time you launch another type from the same manufacturer, with the first slots on the line. Launch orders are firm and cannot be cancelled.

Production lines are on by default for new games and can be switched off on the setup screen. Games already running keep their private queues. More in the fleet planning guide.

October 17, 2026

Lighter cabins now add range sooner

• The real ultra-long 787-9 routes now work. Qantas flies Perth–London (14,508 km) and Melbourne–Dallas with a 236-seat 787-9, and Air New Zealand flies Auckland–New York with about 275 seats. In the game none of these reached, because taking seats out of a cabin added range too slowly.
• How it works now. At the typical cabin an aircraft is at its take-off weight with the tanks a few percent short of full. Each passenger you leave off becomes fuel at the same rate that packing in an extra one costs it, until the tanks are full, up to 5% more range. A 787-9 with 236 seats now reaches about 14,850 km, against 14,140 km at its typical 290.
• The maximum hasn’t changed. A light cabin still adds at most 5%. You just reach it after removing a few dozen seats rather than every seat. Packed cabins lose range exactly as before, and nothing that flew before is affected. Added to Headwinds as well.

October 17, 2026

Fix: long routes near an aircraft’s range wouldn’t open

• The Route Planner counted your cabin twice. Since range started depending on seats, the planner took an aircraft’s range with its cabin already counted, then counted the cabin’s weight again for the forecast. A route your aircraft could reach, but only with a few hundred kilometres to spare, showed no forecast and no Open Route button. For example, an A340-300 with 362 seats reaches 12,351 km, but the planner treated it as about 11,300 km and wouldn’t open LA–Sydney (12,061 km). The planner, the cargo planner and the “Best aircraft for this route” table now use the range your aircraft really has.

October 17, 2026

Runway length now counts when you move routes

Moving a route to another aircraft no longer lets you put it on a plane that cannot use the runway. Thanks to Barca for the report on Discord.

• Routes → move to another aircraft and Fleet → Transfer Routes now check the runway at every airport the route touches, including stops on a multi-stop route.
• An aircraft that needs more runway than an airport has is greyed out at the bottom of the list, with the reason: for example “Runway too short at SNA: the A321neo needs 5,950 ft, SNA has 5,700 ft”.
• Routes that were already flying into a short runway before the rule existed keep working, and can still move to an aircraft that needs no more runway than the one flying it today.

October 17, 2026

Release year on the aircraft market

Every aircraft in Fleet → Market now shows the year it entered service, so you can tell a fresh design from an old one at a glance. Thanks to VodkaOnFire for the suggestion on Discord.

• Cards show “Introduced 1998” next to the manufacturer.
• Table view has a new Year column you can sort by, newest or oldest first.
• Era games: under the year, the table tells you when passengers start marking the design down. It turns yellow five years out and red once the design has dated, with the quality points it is costing you.
• Fix: the “Dates from” badge on market cards was one year early. It now names the first year passengers actually mark the design down.

October 17, 2026

Design your own livery

Open ✎ Edit Branding → Livery and paint your airline: fuselage, tail and winglets, engines, a cheatline, swoosh, belly, retro or tail-wrap style, your name on the fuselage and your logo on the fin. It is painted onto a real Boeing 737-800 illustration and shows on your Fleet page.

• Every airline already has a livery in its logo colour — the editor is there when you want to make it yours. “Surprise me” rolls a random scheme if you would rather not design one.
• One aircraft type for now. Each extra type (787, A380, ATR…) costs $15 in artwork licensing; a $15 donation adds the type you fly for everyone.
• Also live in Headwinds, where your planes on the globe fly in your colours too.

October 17, 2026

Range corrections for 22 aircraft

With range now tied to a typical cabin, we checked every aircraft’s range against its maker’s figure at that cabin. 22 types were wrong: most too generous, a few too short. Added to Headwinds as well.

• The biggest correction is the 747SP, from 15,400 km to 10,800 km at 276 seats.
• Others that lost range: the Tu-154M (4,250 km), DC-9-50 (2,408 km), 737 MAX 8-200 (5,000 km), 737-500 (4,398 km), 720B (5,926 km), DC-8-30 (7,417 km), MC-21-300 (6,000 km), Beechcraft 1900D (1,259 km with all 19 seats filled), Cessna Grand Caravan EX (1,689 km), Short 360 (1,056 km), Viscount 700 and 800 (2,140 and 2,220 km), MA600 (1,430 km) and Il-14 (1,305 km).
• Aircraft that gained range: the Trident 3B (3,593 km), 737-200 (4,815 km), Superjet 100 (3,530 km) and Pilatus PC-12 (3,339 km, quoted with four passengers aboard, as Pilatus does).
• The A350-900 now uses Airbus’s current figure: 15,400 km at its typical cabin, up from 15,000 km. Packed to 440 seats it reaches about 13,600 km.
• The 737 family is now quoted on one basis, so the -700 (5,575 km), -800 (5,436 km) and -900ER (5,463 km) compare fairly with each other.
• Your existing routes are untouched. A route you were flying before the range update keeps the aircraft’s old figure. Routes you open from now on use the corrected one. If you opened a route on one of these aircraft since then and it’s now out of range, the out-of-range notice flags it and says when a lighter cabin would fix it.
• Some figures we left alone. A few aircraft that looked off, such as the Super Constellation and the Islander, turned out to be quoted on a different but valid basis, so they keep their current range.

The narrow-body and turboprop guides list the corrected ranges, and the wide-body guide has the new A350-900 figure.

October 17, 2026

Range now depends on how many seats you fit

Aircraft makers quote range with a typical cabin: 525 seats on an A380, 396 on a 777-300ER, 165 on an A320neo. Until now the game gave every aircraft that range even when packed to its exit limit, which no real aircraft can do. Every aircraft now has its maker’s typical seat count, and range follows the cabin you fit. Added to Headwinds as well.

• At the typical seat count you get the full quoted range. The marketplace now shows which cabin that is, for example “15,200 km at 525 seats”. Hover over it to see the range with every seat filled.
• Packing in more seats costs range. Every passenger past the typical number, about 100 kg with bags, is fuel the aircraft can’t carry. An A380 packed to 853 seats reaches about 12,900 km, and a 777-300ER packed to 550 about 11,600 km. On short and medium routes this costs you nothing, so packing a cabin is still a good way to earn more on them.
• Fewer seats than typical adds little. At the typical cabin the tanks are already nearly full, so stripping seats out adds 5% at most.
• New aircraft arrive with the typical cabin. The order screen starts at the typical seat count and shows the range as you change the cabin. The Route Planner has an “all economy, typical seats” default and a separate “packed to the limit” option.
• The ultra-long-range A350s are now quoted at 18,000 km with Singapore’s 161-seat cabin and Qantas’ 238-seat cabin. Packed full, neither can reach Sydney–London.
• Your existing routes are untouched. Every route you were flying when this update arrived keeps the old rule on the aircraft flying it. A route you open from now on, or an existing route you move to another aircraft, uses the new rule. If a new route is out of range and a lighter cabin would fix it, the out-of-range notice tells you which cabin.
• AI rivals follow the same rule. On routes they open from now on, they carry as many seats as the distance allows: every seat on short and medium routes, fewer close to the aircraft’s range. Their existing routes keep the capacity they have.

Planning long-haul? The wide-body guide now lists each aircraft’s range at its typical cabin and fully packed, and fleet planning covers matching aircraft to missions.

October 17, 2026

Crew: staying fully staffed in long games

• “Replace leavers automatically” now hires ahead. It used to rehire someone only after they had left, and the replacement then needed recruiting and training time. That meant every group ran a few people short forever, even at top pay, with an on-time penalty and a “Short-handed” warning that never went away. Now it also keeps the people expected to leave during training already in the pipeline, so your crews sit at full strength. It still only replaces leavers: crew for new aircraft is still your hire.
• Reserve crews cover tiny gaps. Every group’s requirement already includes standby and reserve crews. A gap of 1% or less is now flown by those reserves, with no on-time penalty and no warning. The crew card shows it as “short, covered by reserves”. A small airline missing one person out of twenty is still short.
• Top pay is worth paying for. Resignations used to stop falling at about 1.9× pay, so the last stretch of the pay slider cost more and changed nothing. They now keep falling all the way to 2.0×. The lowest rate, about 3% a year from retirements and moves, hasn’t changed, and nothing changes below market pay.

October 17, 2026

New aircraft: the Airbus A350-1000ULR

One of the most requested aircraft on the Discord, added to Headwinds as well.

• What it is. The A350 Qantas ordered for Project Sunrise: an A350-1000 with an extra 20,000-litre fuel tank and a higher take-off weight, built to fly Sydney to London and Sydney to New York nonstop. The photo is the real first aircraft, test-flying out of Melbourne in its Project Sunrise colours.
• How it plays. With every seat filled (480) it reaches about 14,600 km: the aircraft hits its weight limit before the extra tank can be filled. Every seat you take out becomes fuel, so a light cabin is where the range comes from. A Qantas-style 238-seat cabin reaches 18,000 km, enough for Sydney–London, and a lighter one up to about 18,900 km. It also costs more to buy and lease, and burns about 4% more fuel than a standard -1000, so it only pays on routes that genuinely need the range.
• The A350-900ULR now works the same way. It used to fly 440 passengers 18,000 km, which the real aircraft can’t do: Singapore Airlines flies it with 161 seats and no economy cabin. Packed full it now reaches about 13,700 km, and a Singapore-style 161-seat cabin takes it to 18,000 km. A Singapore-style cabin still reaches Singapore–New York. If you fly one far with a dense cabin, the route will show as out of range, and the notice will tell you which lighter cabin brings it back.
• Range on screen. The marketplace shows each aircraft’s range at the cabin it is quoted with, for example “18,000 km at 238 seats”. An aircraft’s own page in your fleet now shows its real range with its current cabin and any engine or wingtip options, instead of the catalogue figure.
• When you can get one. In classic games it’s in the marketplace now. In era games it enters service in 2027, the same year Qantas takes its first one.

Planning ultra-long-haul? The wide-body guide lines it up against the A350-900ULR and the 777X-8, and route economics covers when the longest routes pay.

October 17, 2026

Route Finder keeps its ranking when you lease a gate

• No more reset after + Gate. Leasing a gate from a Route Finder row used to throw away every forecast, so a list sorted by best profit fell back to biggest market and started forecasting all 150 markets again. The finder now keeps showing the previous figures, dimmed, while it updates them, and the list stays in profit order and re-ranks itself as the new numbers come in.
• Forecasts survive a trip to the planner. Going to Plan → and coming back no longer starts the forecasting from scratch either.

October 16, 2026

Faster screens, route hours and runways, and bulk frequency changes

• Less lag on big airlines. The Routes and Gates screens and the Route Finder now do their work in far fewer passes, and stop recalculating everything when you click something unrelated. The Route Finder shows forecasts as they are worked out instead of freezing until the whole list is done.
• Hours and Runway on the Routes page. Two new sortable columns: Hours is the block time of one flight (hover for the weekly flying it takes), and Runway is the shorter of the two runways at either end, which is the one that decides what can fly the route. The routes table now shows 25 rows at a time, with a button for more.
• Bulk frequency. Like bulk pricing, but for flights a week. Change the frequency on many routes in one go, from the Routes header (filtered by how full the routes are) or from a selection of routes. Each route moves as far as its aircraft’s flying hours and the gate slots allow, and the preview tells you which limit stopped it. Fill spare hours shares an aircraft’s spare hours across its routes instead of handing them all to the first one.
• Gates. Your gate list shows 25 airports at a time, and browsing a region lists the top few airports in each country with a button for the rest.

More on choosing frequencies in the route economics guide.

October 16, 2026

Replace ageing aircraft automatically

Re-equipping the same routes with newer aircraft used to mean ordering, waiting for delivery, moving every route by hand, then selling or returning the old aircraft, one at a time. Now an order can say which aircraft it replaces, and the swap happens by itself on delivery.

• Replace on delivery. When you order, pick which of your aircraft each new one replaces. You can also set or change this later from any order in your order queue. When the new aircraft arrives it takes over every route of the old one, with the same frequencies and fares and no relaunch cost, and the routes keep their maturity.
• Bulk replace. Select aircraft on the Fleet page and choose Replace. You get a list of types that can take over their routes, showing how many of your selection each one fits and the change in seats. Pick one and the order form opens with the replacements already filled in, oldest aircraft first.
• Choose what happens to the old aircraft. Sell it (owned) or hand it back to the lessor (leased, on the normal early-return terms), or keep it as a spare. The order form estimates the early-return fee before you commit, and warns you if a lease will run out before its replacement arrives.
• It still has to fit. A replacement has to be able to fly the old aircraft’s routes: range, runways, airport rules and weekly flying hours are all checked, and aircraft that don’t fit are greyed out with the reason. If the old aircraft is in the shop or flying a charter when the new one arrives, the new one waits and takes over as soon as it’s free.

Opening new routes is still up to you. This only takes the repetition out of renewing the ones you already fly. More on picking replacements in fleet planning.

October 16, 2026

World events are fairer to established airlines

Players reported that recessions, pandemic scares and other world events made the game very hard from around year three. They were right. A small airline barely feels a downturn, because even a weakened market still fills its few flights. Once your network is sized to its markets, every downturn hits in full, and a couple of rules made that much worse than intended.

• Overlapping events can no longer halve your demand. No single world event moves demand by more than 30%, but two of them used to stack (a recession on top of a pandemic scare, say), which could cut a route's market roughly in half for months. The 30% limit now applies to the combined effect on each route.
• One downturn at a time. A global downturn (recession, pandemic scare or industry fare war) no longer starts while another downturn is already running. Separate regional slumps in different parts of the world can still overlap.
• The AI airlines feel it too. Rival carriers used to sail through recessions, pandemic scares and fuel spikes untouched. Now their loads and profits suffer exactly like yours, and the weaker ones trim service, so a downturn can be a chance to take ground.
• Strikes stay at the struck airport. A Heathrow ground-staff strike now hits routes through Heathrow only, not every route in the UK.
• The AI notices you gradually. Rivals used to switch from ignoring you to targeting you the moment your airline passed $100M in value. That attention now builds steadily with your size, and fare wars become more likely as you grow rather than all switching on at once.

More on how rivals behave in competition and alliances, and on protecting yourself from fuel spikes in fuel hedging.

October 16, 2026

Six more airports in Egypt

Another batch requested on the Discord, added to Headwinds as well.

• Sphinx (SPX) in Giza has low-cost and Gulf flying. Capital International (CCE) in the New Administrative Capital, east of Cairo, only started scheduled flights this year. Both are part of Greater Cairo, so they share its market with Cairo International, the way London’s airports share London’s, so flying from them competes for the same passengers instead of creating new ones.
• Sohag (HMB) serves the Nile valley between Asyut and Luxor, and most of its traffic goes to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
• Abu Simbel (ABS) sits beside the temples near the Sudanese border. Nearly everyone who flies there is a tourist coming from Cairo or Aswan.
• El Alamein (DBB) and Marsa Matruh (MUH) serve Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, a summer beach destination for Cairo, the Gulf and charter flights from Europe.

Thinking about a second base in a city you already serve? Hub strategy covers when a second airport is worth it, and route economics covers what makes a new route pay.

October 16, 2026

Every airport on the map, and a route finder that fits a phone

• The whole world on the network map. Every airport in the game now shows as a small grey dot under your own network, so you can see where places actually are before you fly there. The big airports show at every zoom; the smaller regional fields fill in as you zoom toward them, and their codes appear once there is room to read them.
• Hover for a name, click for the details. Hovering a dot gives the airport's name, city and size. Clicking it (or tapping it on a phone) opens the same airport page you get anywhere else in the game.
• A map from day one. A brand-new airline with no routes used to get an empty "no routes yet" box. Now it gets the map, centred on your hub, which makes it a good place to look for your first destinations.
• Too busy? The All airports switch in the map's legend hides the dots, and the game remembers your choice.
• Route finder on phones. On a narrow screen each destination now leads with its airport code, puts the city underneath in small type and shortens the badges (+2 instead of +2 airports). Distance, demand and the forecast now fit on screen next to it instead of sitting off the edge. The passenger and freight finders both get this. Desktop is unchanged.

New to picking routes? The route economics guide covers what makes a market worth flying.

October 16, 2026

Smaller touches: typeable counts and better photos

• Type a number instead of clicking. Departures and other counts now use the same minus / box / plus control as seat allocation, so you can type the number you want.
• Better aircraft photos for the Tu-104, C-47, SSJ100, E195, A320ceo, 737-500 and 777X-8.

October 15, 2026

Cloud saves for supporters

Your airline can now follow you between browsers and devices.

• Three cloud slots. Open Save / Load and sign in with your Headwinds account (Google, Discord or an email link). Supporters can upload an airline to a cloud slot on one device and load it on any other.
• A thank-you, not a purchase. Uploading is switched on for people who support the game. If you stop, the cloud saves you already have stay yours to load. Nothing in the game itself changes, for anyone.
• Two devices, no surprises. If a cloud slot changed on another device since you last looked, the game shows you what is there now and asks before replacing it.
• New device? The new-game screen has a Load from a save slot or the cloud link, so you can pick up an airline without founding a new one first.

Cloud saves are best effort, on the same hobby servers as Headwinds. Saving in your browser works exactly as before. Step by step, including phones, in the FAQ.

October 14, 2026

New game option: randomized passenger demand

An idea from VodkaOnFire on the Discord: what if the map you know weren’t the answer?

• Realistic or Randomized. The Launch step has a new Passenger demand choice. Realistic is the game as it has always been. Randomized rolls every airport’s passenger traffic before you start.
• Bigger swings at smaller airports. Mega airports roll between −20% and +10%, majors between −30% and +50%, and regional airports between −50% and +100%. A city with several airports rolls once for all of them, so London is one roll, not five.
• Tiers follow the dice. A major airport that booms far enough becomes a mega, and a mega that slumps far enough drops to major. The same happens between major and regional. A tier change moves the airport’s gate and landing fees, and changes which airports rival airlines target and how big a rival based there grows. By default a major can only become a mega when a mega has dropped out, so the world never has more megas than the real one. Tick Allow more mega airports to lift that cap.
• The world stays the same size. After the rolls, the world’s total passenger market is brought back to its real-world level, so demand moves between cities rather than appearing from nowhere. Rival airlines play in the same world you do.
• Shareable worlds. Every randomized world has a number. Give a friend the number and the same mega setting and they get the same world. Your hub’s roll is only revealed when you launch, and each airport’s page shows its roll and whether it changed tier.

New to picking a base? Hub strategy and route economics still apply. You just can’t take the numbers for granted.

October 13, 2026

Sort every airport in the game, and filter the aircraft market

Two requests from VodkaOnFire on the Discord.

• All airports table. The Airports tab has a new All airports view next to By region. It lists all 2,134 airports in pages of 50, and you can sort any column: passenger market, cargo market, metro population, longest runway, how many airlines fly there, your gates and the cost of the next gate. Filter by name, region or tier, then jump straight to an airport’s details or add a gate.
• Passenger and cargo market. These two columns add up every city pair from an airport — the same demand the Route Planner and Cargo Planner show you, totalled for the whole airport. Airports in the same city share that city’s market, so every New York airport shows New York’s. The passenger figure grows with your game’s calendar, so a 1960 world shows 1960-sized markets.
• Aircraft market filters. Fleet → Market has a new Show only row. In production hides types you can only buy second-hand, Leasable now hides anything no lessor will lease you yet, and in era games Hide dated designs hides types passengers already mark down for age. The market remembers your choices, which helps once you are twenty years into a save.

Weighing up a type? The aircraft guide has every model’s numbers, and hub strategy covers picking where to grow.

October 13, 2026

Four more airports: Niigata, Noida, Leeds Bradford and Doncaster Sheffield

Another batch requested on the Discord, added to Headwinds as well.

• Niigata (KIJ) serves Japan’s Sea of Japan coast, with domestic flying to Sapporo, Osaka and Fukuoka and short international hops to Seoul and Taipei.
• Noida International (DXN) is Delhi’s new second airport at Jewar, which opened to airlines in June 2026. It shares Delhi’s market with Indira Gandhi International, the way London’s airports share London. It’s a long way out of town, so travellers favour it most for domestic trips. Long-haul passengers still lean heavily towards DEL.
• Leeds Bradford (LBA) gives West Yorkshire its own airport for holiday and short-haul European flying.
• Doncaster Sheffield (DSA) has had no airline flights since it closed in late 2022. It has a long runway, so it’s an open market for anyone who wants to bring South Yorkshire back on the map. It sits too close by road to Leeds Bradford and Humberside for flights between them to sell.

Choosing where to grow next? Hub strategy covers when a second airport in a city is worth it, and route economics covers what makes a new route pay.

October 9, 2026

Staff pay and hiring rework, plus gate slots in the Route Finder

Three requests from the Discord: Barca, Dunno23 and VodkaOnFire. All three are in Headwinds too.

• Unions no longer table pay demands. Pay is now entirely your call. A demand used to count as refused if you didn’t answer it in time, and over a long game the demands pushed pay up toward the 2.0× ceiling. Any demand open in your save is withdrawn with no penalty. Strikes still happen when pay is low enough that morale falls below 50.
• Hold a pay rate. Each staff group on the Labor screen now has a Hold this rate lock. A held group stays at the multiplier you set and pays the full premium every week. A group you don’t hold still drifts back toward market by about 6% a year, as before.
• Recruiting depends on pay. In games where you hire your own crew, you can only take on so many recruits a week. A large hire is paid for up front. Recruits fill a queue week by week and then train as normal. The better you pay, the faster the queue fills. You can cancel the part of the queue not yet recruited and get that money back.
• Lease gates from the Route Finder. Every passenger and freight result now shows how many weekly slots you have free at that airport. Your origin gets the same line above the list. Wherever you are short of a 7-flights-a-week route, there is a + Gate button, so you no longer have to open the planner to find out you have no gate.

October 8, 2026

Five new airports: London Southend and four in southern Italy

Another request from the Discord. All five are in now (in Headwinds too).

• London Southend (SEN): London’s sixth airport, sharing the London market with Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and City. It draws a smaller slice of London demand than the big fields, but its 1,856 m runway takes an A320 or 737 comfortably.
• Salerno Costa d’Amalfi (QSR): reopened to airlines in 2024 after its runway was extended, and the closest airport to the Amalfi Coast, so it gets a tourism boost. Salerno–Naples is a short train ride, so no flights between them.
• Crotone (CRV) on Calabria’s Ionian coast, and Foggia Gino Lisa (FOG), the gateway to the Gargano. At 1,795 m, Foggia’s runway is the shortest of the five, so check your aircraft’s field requirements first.
• Taranto-Grottaglie (TAR): a 3,200 m runway with no airline service at all in real life. It’s an open market for whoever wants to be first in. Taranto–Brindisi counts as a road trip, so no flights between them.

October 8, 2026

Jumbo jets, Concorde and freighters arrive on the right schedule

• 747s and the A380 no longer arrive faster than a widebody. Every 747 passenger model and the A380 was being built on a regional jet’s schedule: about a month for the first one, then one every two weeks. They now take the longest of any airliner: 10 weeks for your first, then one every 5 weeks. Orders you’ve already placed keep their dates. Thanks to VodkaOnFire on Discord for spotting it.
• Concorde and freighters fixed too. They had the same problem. Concorde now delivers on a widebody’s schedule. Freighters now go by size: an ATR 72F arrives like a turboprop, a 777F like a widebody, and the An-225 is as slow as a jumbo. Compare types on the aircraft guide.
• The marketplace shows the real delivery date. The “Delivery in” figure on aircraft cards and in the comparison table left out the longer wait for the first aircraft of a type, so it often showed half the real time. It now matches the order form and when the aircraft actually arrives. Progress bars on pending orders now fill steadily from the day you order, too.
• The Fleet screen’s category view now shows every aircraft. Jumbos, Concorde and freighters were missing from it. They now get their own sections.

October 3, 2026

Reset many routes to reference fares at once

• New: Reset to ref on the bulk-edit bar. Tick several routes on the Routes screen and the bar that appears now has a Reset to ref button next to Apply %. It puts every cabin on the selected routes back to its market reference fare in one go, the same as the button in each route’s fare editor. You’re asked to confirm first, since it replaces any custom fares on those routes. See route economics for how reference fares work.

September 30, 2026

Alliances wait for 1997, cargo routes say why they won’t open, and staff pay settles down

• No alliances before 1997 — for anyone. In era games you couldn’t join an alliance before 1997, but rival airlines could. The alliance screen showed five full blocs you were locked out of. Now no airline is in an alliance until 1997. That year the founding members form the five blocs, and others join as they qualify. Until then the alliance cards say when they open.
• The cargo “Open route” button no longer does nothing. Some lanes broke an airport rule the freight planner didn’t check, such as a runway too short for your freighter. The button looked ready, but clicking it did nothing. The planner now checks the same rules as the game and tells you which one blocks the lane. Separately, a long lane could show 3 flights a week while opening the route with 7. It now uses the number it shows.
• Staff pay no longer climbs to 2× and stays there. Union pay rises stacked on top of each other, so in long era games every staff group ended up on the maximum. 1.0× now always means today’s market rate. As wages rise across the industry, pay above market drifts back toward it by about 6% a year, and each union pay rise is measured against market rate. Over decades, pay settles around 1.1–1.3× instead of the maximum. This applies to pay you set yourself as well, so each staff card in Operations now shows where that group’s pay will be in a year if nothing changes. Nudge the slider back up if you want to keep the premium.
• New: replace leavers automatically. Even on top pay, a few staff leave each week. Each staff group in Operations now has a Replace leavers automatically option. With it on, leavers are rehired each week at the normal training cost and wait. It only hires up to what your fleet needs.

September 30, 2026

Fixes from Discord: departure boards, crew warnings and Route Finder demand

Three fixes from reports in the Discord. They apply in Headwinds too.

• Departure boards show your flights everywhere you fly. The board only listed your flights from the airport each route started at, usually your hub, so your return flights were missing at every other airport. Every route now departs both ends, and a stopover route departs its middle stop in both directions.
• You’ll be told when crew shortages park your aircraft. At 15% or more short on pilots or cabin crew, aircraft are parked. Their routes earn nothing while lease and maintenance still bill. Until now the only place that said so was Operations. The Dashboard now shows a warning that names the short group and links to Operations. Parked aircraft are marked No crew on the Fleet page, and the Operations banner says how many are parked. There is a new ⓘ on Labor Groups that explains how crew works, and a new Crew section in the in-game guide.
• Route Finder demand matches the Route Planner. The finder showed today’s traffic, while the planner showed your game’s. In an era game that starts in the 1950s, that made a pair look 20× bigger in the finder than it really is. Both now show the same weekly demand, including the season and traffic growth, and so do the top city pairs on the airport screen. See route economics.

September 24, 2026

Era games: passengers notice when your aircraft are out of date

In a game that runs through history, nobody in 2000 wants to fly on a design from the 1950s. Until now, only the age of the individual airframe counted, and that penalty stops growing after about 13 years. A 1950s type flown into the jet age cost you nothing extra, and a young second-hand 707 bought in 2000 scored almost as well as a brand-new A320. Now the age of the design counts too. This applies in Headwinds as well.

• Design age is a new part of the quality score. For the first 15 years after a type enters service, nothing changes. After that it loses 1 quality point a year, up to 20 points once the design is 35 years old. A 707 (in service 1958) is fine through 1973, loses 10 points by 1983 and the full 20 by 1993. This is on top of the existing fleet-age score, so an old airframe of an old design gets hit twice.
• It works on the calendar, not on when you bought the aircraft. A 707 delivered new in 1978 is still a 1958 design. Buying newer aircraft of an old type won’t fix it. Moving to a newer generation will.
• Why it matters. Quality decides your share wherever you compete with other airlines, and it decides how many business travellers you attract even on routes you have to yourself. Holding on to old metal still saves money on leases, but you now pay for it in passengers. See how demand and quality work.
• You can see it before you buy. In the aircraft market, types that have already dated show a red Dated design badge with the current penalty, and types within five years of dating show when it starts. The Route Detail quality breakdown has a new Design age line, and the Fleet page shows the penalty on each aircraft.
• There is always an up-to-date option. In every era, from 1950 onwards, each aircraft category has at least one type on sale that carries no penalty. Concorde is the one exception to the rule: nothing replaced it, so it is never marked down.
• Classic games are unchanged. They are set in a fixed 2026, so this only applies to games that move through the years.

September 24, 2026

Aircraft audit, part two: real turboprop figures, one runway rule, and prices that match the metal

Part one of the aircraft audit moved every propeller aircraft onto the jets’ fuel scale with a single multiplier. Part two replaces that with real numbers, aircraft by aircraft, and works through the rest of the list: runways, a cliff edge in how old aircraft arrive, and a handful of prices that made one choice obviously right or obviously wrong. All of it applies in Headwinds too.

• Every turboprop now burns its own real figure. 29 propeller aircraft were checked individually against published fuel data. About half go up and half come down: the Dornier 228, C-46 and ATR 72F were well under their real burn, while the DC-3, C-47, Islander and Electra were over it.
• One runway rule for every aircraft. Runway requirements had been set a few different ways over the years. 21 aircraft now follow the same rule as the rest of the catalogue. The biggest changes: the 747-400D (built for short Japanese domestic runways) drops from 9,800 to 7,500 ft, the Tu-204 from 7,200 to 5,700, and the 737-900ER rises from 5,700 to 7,100. Routes you already fly keep flying. The new figures apply when you open or reassign a route.
• No more cliff at 50 years. A type whose production line closed 50 or more years ago arrives 20–30 years old and can only be bought. Until now, a line closed 49 years arrived at a normal used age, so the Il-18, two years short of the line, was one of the strongest aircraft in the game. Lines closed 35–49 years ago now arrive progressively older as they approach 50, which means higher maintenance from week one. They can still be leased.
• The 747-8I costs what a nine-year-old 747-8I costs. It was priced like new metal ($190M) while arriving nine years old, so it never made sense next to the 747-400. It is now $80M ($186K a week to lease).
• The 777-200LR matches its sibling. It came off the same line as the 777-200ER, which closed in the same year, but arrived seven years older and $37M dearer. It now arrives the same age and costs $62M, a 30% premium for 2,800 km more range. The 777-8, which replaces it, drops from $195M to $180M.
• Two cohort fixes. The A310-300 was cheaper than the older, shorter-ranged A310-200, which made it the best return on capital in the game by a distance. It now costs $18M. The Il-96-300 was priced as if it were efficient and now costs $30M, in line with the A340-300 of the same age.
• Era games: the A380 and 777-300ER are no longer charged twice. Their prices are kept at new-aircraft level on purpose, because at a used price they would take every long-haul trunk route. Era games were adding the new-build premium on top of that, so a new A380 in 2010 cost $762M. It now costs $305M.
• Two more ranges corrected. The 707-320B and Tu-204 carried ranges from lighter loads than the rest of the catalogue uses. If this puts a route of yours out of reach, you’ll get the same news item and Out of range badge as last time. Reassign the route and it keeps its pricing and ramp-up.

Aircraft you already lease keep the rate you signed. Aircraft you own are valued at the new prices, so a 747-8I is worth less if you sell it and an A310-300 is worth more. Every aircraft’s current figures are in the aircraft guide.

September 23, 2026

Eleven new airports across Ireland and Northern Ireland

A request from the Discord: the island of Ireland was missing a string of its smaller fields. They’re all in now (in Headwinds too).

• Northern Ireland: City of Derry (LDY) and George Best Belfast City (BHD). Belfast City and Belfast International share one Belfast market, the way London’s airports do — Belfast City is the stronger pick for UK domestic flying, International for holidays and Europe.
• Republic of Ireland: Donegal (CFN), Sligo (SXL), Galway (GWY), Waterford (WAT) and Bantry (BYT). Galway, Sligo, Waterford and Bantry have no airline service in real life today, so they’re open markets waiting for someone to bring flights back. Check the runways first: several are short enough to rule out jets.
• The Aran Islands: Connemara (NNR) plus the island strips on Inishmore (IOR), Inishmaan (IIA) and Inisheer (INQ). These runways are around 500 metres, so only the smallest island-hopping turboprops can land. The short hops across Galway Bay and between the islands count as real journeys, because there’s no road to take instead.

Thinking of a short-runway operation? The turboprop guide lists which aircraft can use strips this short, and route economics explains why a 20 km hop has to be flown cheaply to make money.

September 21, 2026

Your first aircraft now come with a crew

A new player opened six routes, watched the Routes page show a healthy profit on every one of them, and flew nobody. New airlines start with no staff, and an aircraft with nobody to fly it stays on the ground. The only place that said so was the crew card on the Operations screen, which is easy to miss when it is your first game. That was on us, not on the player.

• Your first two aircraft are crewed for you. When they join your fleet, pilots, cabin crew, ramp staff and engineers are hired for them straight away at the normal training cost, and a message tells you it has happened. From the third aircraft on, crew are still yours to plan: hire them in Company › Operations, and remember pilots take ten weeks to train.
• You are told when an aircraft can’t fly for lack of crew. The Dashboard now opens with a red alert naming how many aircraft are grounded for want of crew, and it links straight to Operations. Any week in which a routed aircraft sat out for lack of crew also ends with a warning.
• The Routes page no longer quotes profit that isn’t happening. A route whose aircraft has no crew is marked No crew and counts as earning nothing, and it shows under the Disrupted filter. The route’s own page explains that its figures are what it would earn once crewed.

New to the game? How to play and common beginner mistakes cover the first few weeks, and on-time performance explains what flying short-staffed costs you.

September 20, 2026

Propellers now burn what propellers burn

A full audit of all 197 aircraft went looking for two things: specs that did not match the real aircraft, and prices that made one choice obviously correct. The big finding was a propeller problem. Every turboprop and piston airliner in the game was burning roughly half to two-thirds of the fuel its real counterpart burns, while every jet was close to the real figure. The Q400 was the most fuel-efficient aircraft per seat in the entire catalogue — ahead of the A330neo, the A321XLR and the 787-9 — and a 1961 Vickers Vanguard was second.

• Turboprop and piston fuel burn is now on the same scale as jets. Where real figures could be verified against engine data or published trip fuel — the Q400, the ATR 72-600, the Il-18 and the Vanguard — those numbers are used directly; the rest of the propeller fleet moved by the same proportion. A turboprop still beats a comparable regional jet on fuel, by the 20–35% it does in reality rather than the 40–45% it was managing here. The knock-on effect is that modern regional jets are worth flying again: the E195-E2 in particular goes from an also-ran to one of the strongest aircraft in the game on short, busy routes.
• The 777X is finally a new aircraft. Both 777X variants were within about 1% of the 777s they replace on fuel per seat, which is not what a new engine and a new wing buy you. They now deliver the roughly 10% per seat they should, so upgrading is worth doing.
• Aircraft whose production lines have closed no longer arrive factory-fresh. The A380, 747-8I, 777-200LR, E190, E195, CRJ-1000, SSJ100, An-148 and MA600 were all being delivered brand new from lines that shut years ago. They now arrive about as old as their line has been closed, which means a realistic maintenance bill from the first week rather than a brand-new one.
• The Dash 7 is priced for what it can do. It is the only aircraft in the game carrying more than 40 seats that can use a runway under 3,100 feet, and it was leasing for less than a 40-seat Dash 8-200. That capability now costs what it is worth. It is still the right answer on a genuinely short field — it is simply no longer the cheapest way to do everything else as well.
• Spec corrections. The 737 MAX 7 and MAX 10 now enter service when they actually will rather than years ago, the A319neo’s service date is corrected, and the Yak-40, HS 748 and Stratocruiser carry their real certified seat counts. The 767-200SF was burning more fuel than the larger 767-300F, which is the wrong way round, and no longer does.
• Six ranges corrected — and you will now be told when a route is out of reach. The DC-8-63 could fly further than the long-range DC-8-62 it was a stretch of, and the Il-96-300, An-148 and three freighters (the A330-200F, 767-200SF and DC-8-73F) were all carrying more range than the real aircraft. Until now, a route beyond its aircraft’s range simply stopped earning with no explanation at all while the aircraft kept costing you. That is fixed: a route that goes out of range gets a news item, a warning, and a red Out of range badge on the Routes and cargo pages naming the leg and the shortfall. Reassign it to a longer-range aircraft and it keeps its pricing and ramp-up — no relaunch cost. The same warning now also catches a cabin refit that costs a route its range.

Existing fleets keep the aircraft they have. Burn figures apply from this week, so a propeller fleet will see a higher fuel bill — if that changes the maths on a route, route economics explains how to read it, and every aircraft’s current figures are in the aircraft guide. If any of your routes are affected by the range corrections, you will see them in News the first time you load your save.

September 20, 2026

Fuel is a department now, not a button

From the fuel thread on Discord. LtFrosty: “I’m burning 62 mil in fuel each week… I just did a 26 wk contract and it only saves 3.5 mill”, and “it would be cool but probably not realistic if we could purchase our own fuel station, refinery, or trucks.. something to lower the cost”. TheCookiesGuy: “especially as well since they add a premium on top of the percentage so the savings is negligible”. Both were right, and the reason was worse than the symptom: the hedge premium was so large that locking a price was a losing bet on average, whatever the market did. So the correct play was never to hedge — which is exactly what the standings showed. Fuel had one button, and the button was wrong.

• Hedging is cheaper, longer, and you can get out. Premiums are down by roughly half across the board, there is a new 52-week contract for airlines that want to fix a price for a year, and a live contract can now be unwound early at what it is worth today less a small haircut — so a hedge that has done its job, or one you regret, is no longer something you sit and wait out. A scoreboard on the Fuel tab says what every contract you have ever closed actually made or lost, which is the number the old page never showed you.
• You can spend money to burn less. Seven fleet-wide efficiency programmes — single-engine taxi, reduced APU use, cost-index flying, engine washes and the rest — each cut burn by a fraction of a percent for a one-off cost and a weekly running charge. Together they are worth about 8%. Each also has a real trade-off: some cost you punctuality, one trades a little margin for fuel, one raises maintenance. Separately, wingtip devices can be retrofitted to individual aircraft from the fleet page for a permanent cut in that tail’s burn and a little extra range.
• Where you buy the fuel now matters. Every airport has its own fuel price, driven by how close it is to refining and how much competition it has on the ramp — a Gulf hub is cheap, an island station is dear, and the spread is wide enough to change which routes are worth flying. The price is shown on every airport surface in the game: the airport page, the gate table (sortable, so you can rank the world by cheapest fuel), hub management, the route planner, route detail and the airport pickers. Routes can also tanker — carry the return fuel out of the cheaper end — and the game works out every week whether it pays, which it only can when the sector is short enough that the tanks allow it.
• And you can own the supply. A consortium stake at an airport you fly from makes your fuel there cheaper; a full fuel farm makes it cheaper still, and there is only one farm per airport. Above that sits a refinery: two and a half billion dollars, a year to build, and it moves a fixed slice of your fuel off the jet price and onto crude plus a refining cost. That is not a discount — it is a different bet. When the gap between crude and jet is wide it pays handsomely; when that gap collapses you pay more than the market on every one of those litres and the running costs are due anyway. Delta bought a real one in 2012 for exactly this reason and lost nine figures in the years it went against them. Hedges cannot cover the refined share, because the spread is the thing you bought.

New games start with airport-by-airport fuel pricing on. Existing saves keep flat world fuel and are completely unaffected — every number in a save made before today is what it was.

Two long-standing bugs went out with it. The route planner was forecasting fuel at the normal price no matter what the market was doing, so a route quoted during a spike looked better than it would ever be; it now uses the same fuel number the weekly tick charges. And a malformed hedge could produce a negative fuel bill — that hole is closed.

How hedging works and when it is worth it is in the fuel hedging guide; what fuel does to a route’s economics is in route economics, and burn by type is in the aircraft guide.

September 20, 2026

Gate rent at a big hub stops running away

• A large hub no longer costs more than it can ever earn. From Matthijs: “Getting very expensive gates out of nowhere… also when I increase any other airport to same amount of gates it stays cheap”, with a Tokyo Narita holding billing $100.18M a week. Each extra gate at an airport has always cost a little more than the last — the tenth gate is harder to get than the first, and the fee said so. What it never did was stop. Compounding at ten percent a gate, that nudge was worth a few percent at five gates and thirty-six million dollars a month by the sixty-first, and the whole bill had quietly become the largest line in the airline. Gate 61 at Narita was charging more rent per departure than most of those departures sold in tickets.
• The escalation now has a ceiling. A gate can cost up to six times the airport’s base rate and no more; every gate past that point bills the same flat top rate. Below the ceiling nothing has changed — not by a dollar — so ordinary holdings, and every hub under twenty gates at a mega airport, cost exactly what they did yesterday. That Narita hub goes from $100.18M a week to $9.09M. It is still the most expensive real estate in the game, and it is a bill a hub that size can actually carry.
• The odd part of the report was the same bug seen from the other side. The rate of escalation differed by airport class, so sixty gates at a mega airport compounded to more than a hundred times sixty gates at a regional one — a gap nobody designed, produced entirely by the compounding rather than by any intended difference between the two. Big airports should cost more than small ones, and they still do; the difference is now about tenfold rather than a hundredfold, and it comes from the base rate, which is where it was always meant to come from.

What a gate buys you in slots, and how that feeds a hub, is in route economics.

September 16, 2026

Three from the bug channel: a phantom absence, a plane that was never short, and a planner that kept up

• “While you were away” no longer appears in Tailwinds. From ASAS: “i know what happened i manually advanced every of these weeks so it shouldn’t be popping up”, and TheCookiesGuy: “it happens to me when i switch between save files”. That screen belongs to Headwinds, where the world moves while you are gone. In Tailwinds nothing happens without you, so it had nothing true to say — and because every save on your computer shared one memory of “where you were”, starting a new game and then loading your main one read as months away. Gone.
• The Route Planner now tells you which aircraft is actually short. From Ringwraith: the Convair 580s were “flying other networks and can’t reach EZE–IOS directly”, “even with idle planes”. EZE–IOS is 2,958 km; a stock Convair 580 reaches 2,900. One tail with a lighter cabin could make it — so the type was listed — but that tail was busy elsewhere, and the parked ones were 58 km short. The planner only knew how to say “out of range” when every tail was, and fell back to a sentence that was false about the idle ones. It now says which tails reach the lane and what is stopping each of the others, with the fix that would actually help — lighten a cabin, fit wingtips, or route the long-legged one through the airport first. The planner also now counts an aircraft’s tag stops as airports it serves, the way the game already did when you pressed the button, so a plane flying through your origin on a multi-stop route is no longer ruled out.
• The Route Planner is up to ten times faster on a big airline. From TheCookiesGuy: “when your airline gets big the creating route options lags A LOT”. The plane finder was re-running the entire network model once per candidate aircraft — seventy-odd times — on every keystroke, and the seasonal strip did it twelve more times per row. On a 279-route airline that was about three and a half seconds of frozen page per change; it is now well under half a second, and every number is the same. Very large networks will still feel the seasonal strip; that is next.

How range, cabin weight and network reach decide what can fly a route is in the aircraft guide and route economics.

September 16, 2026

Small charters, business jets, and a plane finder that ranks the whole year

Three more from the Discord thread on the new charter board.

• Charter work for small airlines. From Matvocaat: “I like to grow my airline organically, start out small and buy the big airliners later. So charter contracts for 1–20 people would be great”. Every contract on the board asked for ninety seats or more, so a startup with two Caravans opened the page to a wall of work it could not touch. There is now a Small group charter — four to nineteen people, a wedding party or a mine crew, any aircraft that seats them — priced against the cheapest commuter aircraft that could fly it. And the board now reads your fleet: brokers post work to carriers that can fly it, so a two-Caravan outfit sees small jobs on about half its slots and a 787 operator almost never does. The big contracts do not vanish for the small carrier — there is always something to grow into — they just stop being most of the page.
• Four business jets, and executive charters to fly them on. Also Matvocaat: “maybe you could add a few bizjets to the game? Like a CJ4 or Challenger?”. The Citation CJ4, Phenom 300E, Challenger 350 and Gulfstream G650ER are in the market. None of them will ever pay on a scheduled route — ten seats on a jet engine is the worst per-seat fuel figure in the game — and that is the point: they exist for the new Executive charter, a private party who will fly on a business jet and nothing else. Those contracts are priced against a business jet, with the cost of the aeroplane itself built into the fee the way real executive charter is priced by the hour, so a light jet kept busy on them roughly covers its lease and its margin, and a light jet sitting idle costs you exactly what it looks like. A Caravan seats the party and reaches the field; the customer still says no.
• “Best aircraft for this route” can rank by the whole year. From ASAS: “i like the new route planner’s plane finder, although an average per year feature would also be nice”. The Ranked for picker now has Average over the year: every candidate is priced in every month the route flies and sorted by its average week. On a seasonal lane the aeroplane that wins the peak is not always the one that earns the most across twelve months — the big cabin buys its summer with a winter the small cabin never has — and the strip beside each row already showed that; now it can decide the order. Months outside the route’s operating window are left out of the average rather than counted as zero, so a summer-only route is not marked down for flying the schedule you gave it.

The business jets are listed at the foot of the regional jet guide; what a season does to a market is in route economics.

September 16, 2026

The 1960s get their short-haul jets: the DC-9 and the first 727s

An era game started in the mid-sixties had no 727 until 1972 and no DC-9 until 1975 — the catalogue only carried the late variants of each. Three types fill the gap, and one date is corrected.

• Boeing 727-100 (1964–1972). The original trijet: 131 seats, 4,100 km, and the triple-slotted flaps that let a jet use a 5,800 ft runway. Smaller and thirstier per seat than the stretch that followed, and it still needs a flight engineer.
• Douglas DC-9-10 (1965–1968). The 90-seat original: two crew, rear engines, 5,000 ft of runway. Short-legged and small, but the cheapest jet of its decade to put on a thin route.
• Douglas DC-9-30 (1967–1982). The definitive DC-9 — 662 built — at 115 seats, sitting between the One-Eleven and the 727-100 and outlasting both. The DC-9-50 of 1975 is unchanged.
• The 727-200 now enters service in 1967, not 1972. The entry was the -200 Advanced, which did arrive in 1972, but the stretched 727 first flew for Northeast in December 1967. It is now listed as the 727-200 and dated from the start of the line; its numbers are unchanged.

September 14, 2026

Charters on the map, and a plane finder that knows what month it is

Two requests from Discord, both about seeing something the game already knew.

• Charter contracts now show on the network map, in yellow. From TheCookiesGuy: “would be cool if charter contracts showed up on the map as a different color”. They do now — dashed yellow, because a contract is a commitment with an end date rather than a route you have opened, with a toggle in the map legend beside Cargo. Hover one for the customer, the weeks left, the weekly fee and what it is actually clearing. A contract still flying out to its pickup is drawn too, with the empty leg dotted back to the station the aeroplane is coming from: that leg costs fuel, crew and a week of hours and earns nothing, and it is the difference between a job out of your own hub and the same cheque out of a city you have never served. An airline flying nothing but charters gets a map now as well, instead of being told it has no routes.
• “Best aircraft for this route” can be asked about any month of the year. From ASAS: “for the best plane finder for each route, you should make it so we can customize which season the planner is looking at”. The ranking has always been priced at the month the world is in, and never said so — on a ski lane in February and the same lane in June those are different questions with different winners. There is now a Ranked for picker above the table, and every shortlisted aeroplane carries a twelve-month profit strip beside its weekly figure: one bar per month, green above the line and red below, all drawn to the same scale. That is the part a dropdown on its own hides — the aeroplane that wins the month you happen to be looking at and sits deep in the red for the other eight is an aeroplane you will be parking. Months outside a route’s operating window are left blank rather than quoted, because a summer-only route does not lose money in January; it does not fly. Picking a month changes the season only — it does not wind the world forward, so what you are comparing is the calendar, not four months of growth.

What a season does to a market is in route economics, and matching the right aeroplane to the right lane is in fleet planning.

September 12, 2026

Era games now end: the horizon closes in 2050

Pick a start year and you are no longer flying an open-ended sandbox — you are flying a run. Every era game now closes at the end of December 2050, and when it does you are ranked on market cap against every carrier still in the air. Start in 2000 and that is a 51-year run. Start in 1950 and you have a century to build something that lasts.

• Week 52 of 2050 is the last week flown. It runs in full — a real final week, with a real result — and then the clock stops.
• You get a placing, not just a number. The final call tells you where you finished and who finished above you, alongside your market cap, cash, fleet, routes and airports. Finishing first is now something you can do without having to bankrupt every last rival on the board.
• Carriers that went under during the run are not in the standings. You are ranked against the ones still flying at the bell. Finishing above a company that folded in 2031 is not a placing.
• Classic games are unchanged and still endless. No calendar, no closing date, nothing taken away. If you want the sandbox, it is exactly where it was.
• Games already in progress are safe. A save that has already flown past 2050 keeps going as it always has — the horizon applies to runs begun from here on, and nothing is going to drop a verdict on a game you are in the middle of.

The custom-year picker now stops at 2040, so the shortest run you can start is still eleven years. If you want to know what a long run actually rewards, the compounding is in route economics and the fleet side of it is in fleet planning.

September 12, 2026

Charter contracts: the fee is fixed, the cost is yours

There is a new Charters page under Company. Brokers post fixed-fee flying jobs — a tour operator’s weekly programme, a relief rotation into an awkward field, outsize freight that will not wait, a rival short of lift who needs a wet lease. You pick which ones to take, and which of your aeroplanes flies them.

The thing to understand before you sign anything: the cheque is the same whoever flies it. Every contract is priced against the cheapest current aircraft that could legally do the job. Send something thirstier and the difference comes out of your pocket. A 160-seat rotation out of San Francisco is priced as a 737 job; fly it with a 787 and you will lose money on a contract that looked generous on the board.

• Where the work starts matters as much as where it goes. A contract out of an airport you already serve is nearly free to begin. One out of a city you have never flown to costs you two empty legs to position the aeroplane — fuel, crew and a week of block hours for no revenue — plus ground handling every week at a station where you have no staff and no contract rates. You do not need a gate at the far end, but you do pay for the privilege.
• Some contracts are not worth taking, and they do not look any different. Roughly a quarter of the board is priced below what a competent operator can fly it for. There is no badge, no warning and no recommendation. Pick an aeroplane and the page shows you exactly what that aeroplane costs to fly the mission — fuel, crew, landing fees, handling, positioning, and the hours it eats. What it will not tell you is whether to sign. That is the game.
• A wet lease hands the fuel bill to the customer. On an ACMI contract you supply the aircraft, crew, maintenance and insurance, and they buy the fuel. Thinner margins than flying it yourself — and the right answer when fuel is spiking, which is exactly when more of it appears on the board.
• Signing is a commitment. If the assigned aeroplane is in the shop when the week runs and nothing can take its place, you have breached the contract: you pay a penalty, and your reputation and your charter record both take it. A same-type reserve stationed at either end of the contract will step in and save it, which is the best reason yet to keep one standing by.
• The board is earned. Brokers post work to carriers they have heard of. A brand-new airline sees two thin offers; one with real awareness, a solid reputation and a record of delivering sees a full board, better paid. Break a contract and that goes into reverse.
• It follows the season and the world. Ski programmes in winter, Mediterranean series in summer, sub-service cover when a disruption is running, and a thinner board with tighter fees in a downturn.

A contract or two is a good way to earn from an aeroplane with spare hours, or to fly through the months your leisure routes are dormant. A schedule you run well still beats charter work per hour in the air, so this is a complement to your network rather than a replacement for it — the arithmetic behind that is in route economics, matching the right metal to the job is in the aircraft guide, and what your block-hour budget will actually take is in fleet planning.

September 12, 2026

Rivals stop growing into the same airline, and the era picker stops before the aeroplanes do

Two reports from Discord, a week apart, that turned out to be about the same thing: the game was handing out numbers it had no business handing out.

• Rival airlines no longer all end up the same size. From wj: “why do all ai airlines have 62 planes and 30 routes”. Because every carrier of a type had the same network ceiling and grew straight to it. Five game-years in, every full-service rival was sitting on exactly thirty routes and a fleet clustered around one figure, which made a board of twenty airlines read as one airline printed twenty times. Each rival now has a ceiling of its own, set by its character, the size of its home hub and a little luck — so a hungry carrier out of a mega-hub builds something three times the size of a cautious one out of a smaller city, and the two of them stop at different places. Open a second hub and a carrier earns room to grow again, which is what keeps the top of the table moving after the pack has settled. The ceilings are fixed per airline, so a rival you know will keep the shape you know it by.
• A custom era start now begins in 1950 at the earliest. From Lancelotbronner, playing a 1930 world: “there are no planes available so I can’t create routes but my competitors are somehow creating very profitable routes with no planes assigned.” Both halves of that were the same bug. The custom year accepted anything from 1930, which was a round number rather than a modelled one: the oldest airliner in the catalogue is the 1936 DC-3, so a 1930 start opened on an empty aircraft market — nothing to buy, nothing to lease, no first route — while rivals, who do not have to go shopping the way you do, carried on flying. The floor is now 1950, which is where the game actually begins: the fuel price history starts there, the whole era economy is balanced from there, and it is the first preset. It is also a real opening market — seven airliners to choose between, against exactly one in 1936. Any saved world that began earlier is lifted to 1950 with your cash, your network and your game year intact.

Worth saying plainly about the first one: this is a variety change, not a difficulty increase. The typical rival is now a little smaller than it was and only a handful — the ones that stack a big hub, an expansionist streak and a second base — end up bigger than the old flat thirty. What that means for who you actually have to fight on a given lane is in competition and alliances, and picking your ground against them in hub strategy. Which aircraft exist in which decade is in the aircraft guide.

September 11, 2026

The southern hemisphere gets its own summer

From Dave: the seasons were Northern-hemisphere standard everywhere. The game picked each route’s seasonality from a list of countries, and that list named seven of them as southern. There are 344 airports below the equator across fifty-one countries — so Montevideo, Windhoek, Harare, Antananarivo, Suva and Papeete all peaked in July, the middle of their winter. Seasons now come from each airport’s latitude instead, and three things follow from that.

• Christmas does not move. The climate flips across the equator; the calendar does not. So the southern curves are not the northern ones shifted six months — December lands on the summer peak instead of the winter trough, which makes the southern year more lopsided than the northern one, not merely offset. Sydney in January is now what London is in July, but busier, because the holidays land on top of the sunshine.
• The tropics get neither hemisphere’s summer. An airport three degrees off the equator has no thermal season worth modelling, and handing it either July was equally wrong. Past 25 degrees the local hemisphere governs completely; inside 15 degrees the year flattens out; between the two they cross over gradually, so there is no cliff down the middle of a country. Rio and São Paulo are a hundred kilometres apart and stay a hundred kilometres apart.
• A country is no longer one season. Brazil, Indonesia, Ecuador, Kenya and Colombia all straddle the equator. Manaus used to fly Sydney’s calendar; it now flies its own.

Nothing in the northern temperate world moved — not one airport — and Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg and Buenos Aires were already right. What changed is 418 airports in the tropics and the southern hemisphere, so if you fly to São Paulo, Lima, Honolulu or San Juan, expect your peak months to have shifted under you. Singapore, Hong Kong, Bali and Nairobi keep the profiles they had, because monsoon and Chinese New Year do not mirror. How seasonality feeds a route’s load factor is covered in route economics, and running a route only part of the year in strategy.

September 10, 2026

You can drop a jet base certification you no longer need

From a Discord question by Ringwraith: how do you remove a certification from a jet base? You couldn’t. Certifications were add-only, so an airline that retired a fleet type kept paying for its certification week after week, and the only way out was closing the whole base and rebuilding it. Each certified family now carries a small × on the base card.

• Dropping one stops the weekly charge immediately — but only for certifications beyond what your base level includes, since the ones inside the allowance were never charged for. The card tells you which kind you are about to drop, and what it is worth, before you confirm.
• There is no refund. What you paid to certify is spent. Dropping buys you the weekly saving and a free slot under the eight-certification ceiling, nothing more, and certifying that family again later costs whatever it costs then.
• You are warned about what still relies on it. If aircraft currently send their maintenance through that base, the card says how many before you drop it — after that they go outside at full price, at full downtime.

A base may now end up certified for nothing at all, which is legal and expensive: it keeps its running costs and covers no aircraft. Which types are worth keeping certified where is part of the same commonality question as the fleet itself — see the fleet planning guide.

September 10, 2026

Buying an airline no longer thins out the rest of your network

From a Discord report by wj: demand sliding across the whole map right after a buyout. Two things were behind it, and both are fixed.

• A nonstop only takes the connecting passengers it can seat. When you fly a market nonstop, travellers stop connecting over your hub — that part is real. But the game was treating every nonstop as a daily flight at the standard fare, so a once-a-week regional emptied your hub legs just as thoroughly as a four-times-daily jet, and the passengers it displaced had nowhere to sit. A nonstop is now judged on the frequency it actually flies and the fare you actually charge, and it can only pull the traffic it has seats for. The rest keep connecting.
• You inherit the schedule you paid for. A rival flying a route with four aircraft used to arrive as one thin route with three planes parked on the ramp. Those routes now come across with every aircraft that flew them, splitting the old schedule between them. Aircraft are only left idle once the schedule is fully covered.

Net effect: an acquisition adds traffic instead of quietly deleting it, and buying a big carrier that overlaps your hub is worth what it looks like it is worth. How connecting traffic and nonstops trade off is covered in the hub strategy guide, and what a route earns per seat in route economics.

September 9, 2026

Rival connections get a name; two planes on one route get two departure times

Two display fixes from Discord reports, thanks to LtFrosty and Mariaklinga.

• The market-share chart names rival connections properly. A rival selling your city pair as a one-stop over its hub showed up in the route’s market-share pie as a string of internal gibberish. It now reads as the airline’s name plus the hub it connects over, e.g. “Rhine Air via FRA”, matching the competitors table beneath it. The route planner’s estimated-share list now shows those one-stop rivals too, so the projection you see before launching matches what the week actually books.
• Two aircraft on the same route no longer leave together. On the departure board, a second aircraft assigned to a pair you already fly printed the same times and gate as the first. Departures on a pair are now spread across the day as one combined schedule, with each aircraft keeping its own type on the rows it flies.

How connections over rival hubs compete with your nonstop is covered in the hub strategy guide.

September 9, 2026

Keeping a leased aircraft is now an actual button

Renewing a lease was hiding behind a ten-pixel link on the fleet list, and the aircraft card — the page you open to manage a plane — offered two ways to end a lease and none to keep it. Thanks to ASAS on Discord.

• Extend Lease +1yr sits on the aircraft card, next to Buy Out Lease and Return Aircraft. It adds a year at the rate the lease was signed at, costs nothing, and never throws away time you have already got.
• The card tells you when the lease runs out. The Lease / wk box now carries the weeks remaining, in amber inside eight weeks and red inside four.
• The fleet-list button is a real button. Bigger, outlined, and reading “Extend +1yr” so it is obvious what it does before you click it.
• Lease costs everywhere now quote the rate you signed. Short leases carry a premium and long ones a discount, but the aircraft card, the fleet totals and the early-return penalty quote were all reading today's list price instead — so the numbers on screen could disagree with what you were actually charged.

See the aircraft guide for lease rates by type, and route economics for how a lease weighs on a route.

September 8, 2026

Rival airlines stop flying aircraft from the future

In a 1962 world, one of the AI carriers was operating A321neos — an aircraft that entered service in 2016. Thanks to wj on Discord for the screenshot.

• Rivals now shop the catalogue of the year they are in. When an AI airline opened a route it already picked period-correct metal, but when it filled that route and moved up to something bigger it was choosing from the modern catalogue — so a carrier that filled a Vanguard stepped straight onto a neo. It now up-gauges within what is actually on the market that year: bigger, but built.
• Worlds already in progress clean themselves up. Any rival holding an aircraft that had not been designed yet is re-equipped with the closest period type its route can support, capped at the seats it was flying, and its aircraft keep the hours they had. No new game required — it happens on your next week.
• Genuinely old aircraft are left alone. A 1962 airline flying a DC-6B built in 1950 is not a bug, it is the era. Only aircraft from the future get pulled.

See the aircraft guide for what each type can do, and route economics for how capacity feeds into a route.

September 5, 2026

No Wi-Fi on a Constellation

The order form would happily sell you a Wi-Fi and streaming package for a Lockheed Constellation, and let you specify satellite connectivity from the factory on a Boeing 377 — a factory that closed in 1950. Thanks to Kat the Fox and CorporalSimmons on Discord for spotting it in both games.

• Wi-Fi now needs an airframe that can carry it. Aircraft whose production line closed before 1970 — the propliners and the first generation of jets, from the DC-3 and the Constellation through the Comet and the 707-120 — can no longer be ordered with connectivity or retrofitted with it. They were built decades before anyone put an antenna on a fuselage, and nothing was ever certified to go in one. Everything from the 727 and 737-200 generation onward is unaffected.
• The order form says so, instead of hiding the option. Pick a vintage type and the connectivity section tells you which year the line closed and why there is nothing to buy. On the aircraft page, those tails show No Wi-Fi possible in place of a retrofit button.
• Fitting a mixed selection no longer quotes you for the impossible. Select a hangar full of aircraft and hit Fit Wi-Fi and the price covers only the tails that can actually take it — the rest are listed as unfittable rather than silently skipped.
• Era worlds: the factory respects the calendar too. Onboard internet arrives in 2004. Retrofits already knew that; new orders did not, so a 1950s airline could order a brand-new DC-6 with streaming Wi-Fi. It can't any more.
• Flying vintage metal still costs you. An aircraft that cannot be fitted still takes the no-Wi-Fi quality penalty on every route — passengers judge the flight they got, not the engineering that made it impossible. See route economics for how cabin quality feeds into demand.

September 7, 2026

A stop is disliked twice as much

With every airline now selling connections, the question came up: shouldn’t most passengers prefer the nonstop when there is one? They did — but not by enough. At equal fare a one-stop over a major hub could take more than 40% of a city pair from a nonstop, and on thin routes two rivals’ one-stops together could out-sell the direct flight. Airlines’ own forecasting models put a one-stop at a fifth to a third of a nonstop’s appeal, so the connection penalty is now doubled for every carrier’s connections alike: a typical stop takes about a third of a pair at equal fare, a stop that doubles the trip about a sixth.

On a dense, full network this changes almost nothing — there, connections are limited by the seats left after direct passengers board, not by preference. Where it matters is a young airline flying half-empty aircraft against a hub carrier’s one-stops: on the test network for that case, rival connections fell from taking half of each pair to about 40%, and the nonstop carrier kept 10% more of its passengers.

September 7, 2026

Rivals right-size their schedules

An AI airline’s capacity on a route used to be set the day it launched — one aircraft type, three to twenty-one flights a week — and never touched again. On a busy lane that meant a rival sat full for years while the overflow it could not carry walked to whoever else flew the pair, which since last week has been you. Real airlines do not leave a sold-out route alone, and now neither do these.

• A route that keeps selling out gets more flights. Every few weeks a carrier reads its own loads. A route that has been full for two months and makes money gains about a quarter more frequency, up to four a day; once the schedule is that dense it moves to a larger aircraft instead — chosen on what the route would earn, not just on seat count, and never a widebody on a shuttle. Every step has to project more profit than the schedule it replaces, and the carrier has to be able to afford the aircraft.
• A route flying empty is trimmed before it is dropped. A route under 55% for two months, or losing money without being full, loses about a third of its flights at a time, down to three a week, with the surplus aircraft sold off. A carrier now shrinks a loser to size before it withdraws — and only withdraws if the smallest schedule still bleeds. Routes in a fare war are left alone; those losses are on purpose.
• The news feed says so. Added flights and up-gauges appear as capacity additions, trims as a new rolled-up line, so you can see a rival re-shaping its network around you.

On the two-year contested test network you end about 15% less well off than you did last week, and about 25% better off than before this whole run of changes began — the overflow you now keep is the overflow a rival genuinely cannot serve. Rivals also carry fewer chronic losers to bankruptcy, so the field you compete against stays a little larger. See competition.

September 5, 2026

A stop costs what it costs, and connections are priced like connections

Two changes to how every connecting itinerary in the game is scored — yours over your hubs, your partners’, and rivals’ over theirs — so that no carrier’s connection plays by a different rule.

• The stop is penalised for the time it costs. A connection’s penalty used to be a flat number per hub tier, the same for a stop on a ninety-minute hop as for one on a nine-hour flight. It now scales with how much of the traveller’s trip the stop adds: a one-stop over Orlando on Miami–Atlanta roughly doubles the journey and is penalised accordingly; a stop in Frankfurt on New York–Amsterdam is a modest detour and barely moves. A backtracking routing pays more than one that is on the way, and anything over 1.5× the nonstop distance is still never sold.
• Through-fares. A connection used to be priced as the sum of its two leg fares, which on any triangle is well above the nonstop fare — so your own spoke-to-spoke connections were mostly priced out of their markets. Carriers do not sell connections that way. A connecting itinerary is now priced against the nonstop market: never above the nonstop reference fare, never above the sum of its legs. Your hub’s spoke-to-spoke markets become real business, limited by the seats you protect for connecting passengers and by what is left on board after your direct passengers.
• Connecting passengers sit in real seats. Alliance, codeshare and joint-venture passengers now board the aircraft that flies your leg of the itinerary and are scaled by the seats left after your direct passengers — a full flight carries no feed. Feed comes from carriers you have an agreement with; a stranger’s passengers do not through-connect onto you. And two aircraft on the same city pair now share the pair’s connecting passengers instead of each being credited all of them.

Hubs are markedly stronger for it. On the two-year contested test network a two-hub carrier ends up about 45% better off than before this change, almost all of it from spoke-to-spoke connections that now sell. That is the point of a hub, and it is why rivals’ connections now compete against yours. See hub strategy and route economics.

September 5, 2026

Rivals hub too — every airline now sells connections

Until today the only airline in the game that sold a connection was yours. Every rival flew point-to-point as far as the demand model knew, and a rival’s hub was represented by three approximations rather than by any actual itinerary. That asymmetry is gone.

• Rival one-stops are real offers. A carrier hubbed at Frankfurt with flights to New York and Amsterdam now sells New York–Amsterdam via Frankfurt, in the same demand model that books your passengers — on your nonstop pairs, and against your own connections over your hubs. A rival airport counts as a hub by the same rule yours does: four spokes make a Hub, twenty a Major Hub. A connection is penalised for the stop, priced as the sum of its two legs, and limited to the seats the rival protects for connecting traffic; anything that backtracks more than 1.5× the nonstop distance is never sold.
• The contested-route card names the routing. Each rival connection is its own via HUB column on the head-to-head, with its fare, quality, frequency, connecting seats and projected share, and the route page and airport page list them beside the nonstop carriers. When a connection is taking a meaningful slice of a pair, the card says so and says why.
• Over-priced offers no longer swallow demand. An offer priced past what the market will pay used to win a share of the softmax and then sell nothing; those passengers vanished. They now go to whichever carrier’s fare they will actually pay — and someone who refused $X at one airline is not sold $X at another.

On the two-year contested test network the net effect is small — you end within a few percent of where you started — but it is concentrated: secondary transatlantic pairs (New York to Amsterdam, Madrid, Rome) lose a quarter to a third of their passengers to Frankfurt and Paris connections, and West Coast pairs lose to Denver, Seattle and Los Angeles. Which is where a hub carrier should hurt you. See competition and hub strategy.

September 5, 2026

A sold-out rival no longer makes passengers vanish

When two airlines fight over a city pair, the demand model splits the travellers between them and then caps each airline at the seats it actually has. Until now the passengers a sold-out carrier could not fit were simply discarded — they did not fly you, they did not fly anyone, they ceased to exist. A rival with a great fare and a small aircraft could “take” thousands of passengers a week and carry a few hundred of them.

• Overflow now flies. Passengers a full carrier cannot carry go to whoever on the pair still has seats, in proportion to how attractive each remaining offer is. Demand is lost only when every aircraft on the pair is full.
• …but never more than you could sell alone. Overflow arrives at your fare and your brand, not the fare it was priced at: a full $300 rival does not fill your $800 cabin, and travellers who have never heard of your airline still stay home. You can never do better beside a sold-out rival than you would as the only carrier on the pair.
• Two unknown brands no longer reach the whole market between them. A start-up is considered by about half of travellers; two start-ups on the same pair were previously handed all of them. See route economics.

On a contested two-year test network the change is worth a few percent of revenue, concentrated on pairs where your rivals fly full. It is the groundwork for connecting itineraries: a one-stop over a hub is seat-thin by nature, and this is what stops it from deleting the demand it cannot carry.

September 5, 2026

Your smaller hubs were hiding their connecting traffic

Open the airport details for a busy hub and it could tell you nobody connected there last week — while the Hubs tab, on the same save, credited it with thousands of transfer passengers. The passengers were real and always were; the airport page just could not see them.

• Every hub keeps its own itineraries now. The weekly report stores a limited list of connecting itineraries, and it used to fill that list with the highest-earning markets anywhere in your network. One long-haul hub could take every slot, so a busy domestic hub was left with an empty list and an airport page that reported zero. The list is now shared out hub by hub — each of your hubs shows its own top connecting markets, whatever else your network is doing.
• Connecting passengers on the airport card. The Transit & Connectivity panel now shows what you actually carried over that hub last week, next to the gateway estimate for the market — the same figure the Hubs tab reports, so the two can never disagree again.

September 5, 2026

Three new destinations — Cardiff, Anglesey and Cayenne

• Cardiff (CWL). Wales is finally on the map. Note that Cardiff and Bristol are an hour apart by road across the Severn, so the game treats them as one surface market — there is no air demand between the two, exactly as in real life. Cardiff earns its traffic on the long thin routes Bristol does not serve.
• Anglesey (VLY). A 7,500 ft runway on the north Welsh coast with a catchment of seventy thousand people. It is a genuine thin-market puzzle: the demand is there to Manchester and London, but only for a small aircraft at the right frequency.
• Cayenne (CAY). French Guiana joins the map, and with it the last unserved corner of the South American north coast. Cayenne, Paramaribo and Georgetown now form a coherent three-country Guianas run — thin, remote, and a long way from anyone else’s hub. See route economics for how demand behaves this far out on the network.

September 3, 2026

The head-to-head card now tells you who actually wins

“Why am I losing this battle?” — a fair question when the contested-route card showed you ahead on price, quality and frequency, yet your planes flew half-empty. The card was only showing the rows where you were winning.

• Projected share. Every contested route now shows how the market actually splits between you and your rivals — straight from the same demand model that books your passengers each week, so the card can never disagree with your results.
• Brand awareness warning. A young airline simply isn’t considered by most travellers yet, whatever it charges — an unknown brand reaches less than half the market. When low awareness is what’s costing you the fight, the card now says so, instead of leaving you to blame your fares. See route economics for how demand splits.
• Business cabin warning. All-economy on a pair where a rival sells business class means the entire business segment books away from you. The card now flags it and tells you the share of the market you’re conceding.

September 3, 2026

Three more propliners — and cruise speed is on the card at last

All from one Discord thread, out of a save started in 1947.

• Curtiss C-46 Commando. The catalogue’s earliest freighter was the 1959 An-12, which meant cargo simply did not exist in a 1950 game. The C-46 fixes that: war-surplus, 6.8 tonnes, off a 3,600 ft gravel strip, slow and thirsty for what it lifts, and orphaned — Curtiss-Wright left the aircraft business in 1951, so it carries its own parts problem and its own maintenance family.
• Canadair North Star. A DC-4 airframe with a DC-6 nose and Rolls-Royce Merlins instead of radials: 520 km/h against the DC-4’s 365, 6,200 km against 4,000, and 55 seats against 44. You pay for it in fuel, in an overhaul bill no other type shares, and in a cabin so loud that passengers complained in writing.
• Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation. The stretched Connie as first delivered, four years before the 1049G already in the game: plain R-3350s, no tip tanks, 88 seats. In 1951 it is the only alternative to a Stratocruiser above 80 seats — and unlike the G it will not cross an ocean.
• Cruise speed is a listed specification. It always drove block time — how many rotations a week a frame can fly — but you could only infer it. It is now a stat on every market card, a sortable column in the comparison table, on the checkout header, and in the aircraft guide. A 350 km/h propliner flies a third of the sectors a jet does on the same route, and now the market says so before you buy.

September 3, 2026

Buying an airline buys its crews — and a DC-4 can’t lose a pressurisation system it never had

Two from the Discord, both fixed.

• An acquisition now comes with the staff. Taking over a rival handed you their fleet, routes, gates and cash and left every one of their employees behind — so the week the deal closed you were suddenly running twice the airline on the same payroll, watching your on-time rate fall while a ten-week pilot course caught up. Their crews now transfer with the aircraft, trained and on the line from day one. Being short-staffed before the deal still carries through it: an acquisition is not a way to fix your own hiring.
• Aircraft only break in ways they can. Mechanical failures were drawn from one list for every airframe in the game, which is how a Douglas DC-4 — an unpressurised 1946 propliner — ended up grounded a fortnight with a pressurisation fault. Faults are now matched to the systems an aircraft actually carries: no pressurisation failures on unpressurised types (the DC-3, C-47 and DC-4, the Twin Otter, Islander, Caravan and their kin), and no APU failures on aircraft built before airliners had an APU. Modern jets can still break in all eight ways. See the aircraft guide for what each type is.

September 2, 2026

Every aircraft is back on the classic market — the old ones arrive old

Reported on the Discord: the DC-4, DC-6, DC-7 and C-47 had vanished from a 2026 game. They had — the 1950s propliners added for era starts were showing up in present-day games as the cheapest seats in the catalogue by a mile (a Vickers Vanguard leased for a fifth of an ATR 72, per seat, with the same maintenance bill), so they had been hidden for a night. Hiding aircraft is the wrong fix.

• The whole catalogue is on the 2026 market again, propliners included. The only type you can never buy in a classic game is the Comet 1, whose certificate was pulled in 1954.
• Vintage metal now arrives at a vintage age. Out-of-production types have always been delivered used — sixteen years old at most. That was tuned for 1970s and ’80s jets; for a line closed in the 1950s it made no sense. A type whose line has been closed fifty years or more now arrives twenty years old, climbing a year per year to a ceiling of thirty, and the card says so. At thirty years the maintenance curve bills 5.5× base rather than 2.28×, which is what makes a DC-6 a labour of love rather than a business plan.
• Vintage types are bought outright. No lessor stocks a sixty-year-old airliner; the lease button says why. Anything with a younger line — the 737-200, the F27, the L-1011 — leases as before.
• Frames already in your fleet keep the age they were delivered at. Nothing you own changes.

September 2, 2026

Back to $10M

The site has always said you start with $10 million; since July’s rebalance the game had quietly been handing out $15 million. The game now matches the site: founders’ equity is $10M for a new classic start, and era starts scale down from that figure as before. Existing games keep whatever they started on — the balance sheet remembers your original paid-in capital, so retained earnings still reconcile.

September 2, 2026

The C-47, and new-metal prices in era games

A player pointed out that most postwar start-ups didn’t begin with a DC-3 — they began with the surplus military version of it. So the Douglas C-47 Skytrain joins the catalogue: the same airframe with a cargo door and a bare cabin re-seated to 28, for less per seat than a DC-3. It’s the cheapest way into the air in a 1950 start (and the roughest to keep running).

• New metal costs new-metal money in era games. Every catalogue price is a present-day figure — for a long-closed line, a used-frame price — and era games were selling factory-fresh 1950s aircraft at it. While a production line is open a type now sells and leases at two and a half times its catalogue figure, easing back down over the twelve years after the line closes. War-surplus types (the C-47, the DC-4) stay cheap, which is the whole point of them. Classic games are unchanged.
• “Not yet in service” is on the card. Types listed ahead of their entry into service — the Viscount in 1950, say — carry a badge saying so, rather than only a locked button. See the aircraft guide for the full catalogue by era.

August 31, 2026

Start in 1950 — and fly the century

A new option on the launch screen. Pick an era instead of “Classic” and your first week is January of a real year — 1950, 1958, 1970, 1978, 2000, or any year you type — and the game walks the calendar from there. Classic games are untouched: same catalogue, same demand, same everything.

• Aircraft arrive when they really did. A 1950 start has five types to choose from — DC-3, DC-4, Constellation, Convair 240 and the Stratocruiser — and the market fills in as history does: the Viscount and DC-6B in the mid-fifties, the Comet, then the 707 and DC-8 in 1958, the 727, the 747 in 1970, the 737 and A300, all the way to the neos and the 777X. Types announced for the next three years show as locked rows so you can plan the fleet you’ll be buying. Twenty-two piston and early-turboprop types have been added to the catalogue for this, and they’re available in classic games too.
• Production lines close, and eventually the used market runs dry. A type still in production arrives new; once the line shuts, frames arrive progressively older, and thirty years after the last one rolled out there are no airworthy examples left to buy. A 2040 airline cannot run DC-3s.
• Demand, fares and fuel follow their historical curves. The 1950 trunk routes carry a few thousand passengers a week, not thirty-five thousand; real fares are high early and fall through the jet age and deregulation; fuel is cheap in the fifties, doubles in 1973, spikes again in 1979 and 2008. Everything stays in today’s dollars, so a 1950 balance sheet is a smaller business, not a confusingly cheap one — starting capital, gate rents, wages, route launch costs, insurance and the board’s objective targets all scale with the era.
• Things you can’t do yet. Codeshares unlock in 1990, global alliances in 1997, onboard Wi-Fi in 2004, à la carte ancillaries in 2008 and the lounge network in 1985. The buttons say so, and the reducer refuses them, until the year they were invented. Events that need a concept — an IT outage, a pandemic scare — stay off the dice until it exists.
• The Comet. Buy the de Havilland Comet 1 in 1952 and you are flying the world’s first jet airliner. In April 1954, after the second unexplained crash, its certificate is withdrawn worldwide: your Comets are grounded permanently, hull insurance pays out on owned frames, and the jet age waits for the 707. It happens once, and only in era games that get there.
• The long view. Era games keep one row per completed year on the Statistics page, so the whole sweep of the century survives the weekly series’ retention window. Dates everywhere — the debrief, the news, the save slots, the hedge expiry — read as calendar years.
• Rivals fly the era too. The AI airlines you meet in 1950 fly Stratocruisers, not A321neos, and re-fleet as the catalogue opens up.

August 27, 2026

Multi-stop routes bend on the map — and can finally take more flights and more aircraft

Reported on the Discord: a rotation drawn as a straight line to somewhere it doesn’t fly, and a full multi-stop route with nowhere to grow.

• The map draws every stop. A rotation like MCI–JFK–ORY used to appear as a single arc from Kansas City to Paris, passing hundreds of kilometres from the airport it actually lands at. The line now bends through each stop in order and is drawn in the same purple the routes page uses for multi-stop, so you can tell a rotation from a direct service at a glance. Hovering names the whole chain and its leg count.
• A rotation is its own route on the map. If you fly both MCI–JFK–ORY and a plain MCI–ORY, they used to be merged into one line and one row with their numbers added together. They are two products and now read as two.
• Filtering the map by an airport finds rotations that stop there, not just the ones that begin or end there.
• Multi-stop routes have a flights-per-week stepper, the same one single-leg routes have. When it refuses, it names the airport that ran out of slots — including the one in the middle, which is usually the one that’s full.
• “+ Add Aircraft” puts a second aircraft on a rotation without rebuilding it. The stops are locked, and the fares it starts from are the ones that rotation already sells, so your two tails don’t undercut each other. See the route economics guide for what a second aircraft does to a shared market.
• Freight lanes get the same treatment. Flights and yield were already editable on the routes page; “+ Add Freighter” now opens the freight planner on that lane, so a freighter that has run out of block hours isn’t the end of the lane.
• Slot arithmetic counts the stops in the middle. A rotation calling at an airport uses two movements there per cycle — an arrival and a departure. The gate-slot checks now count them everywhere, so a busy connecting airport can no longer be quietly oversold. Passenger and freight also count against each other now: a freighter occupies a gate exactly like a jet, and the two halves of your airline were previously able to book the same slot twice.
• Regulations follow the aeroplane. A one-stop used to be a way around a rule: the legs of a rotation were checked, the market it actually sells was not, so a service into a restricted airport could be flown at any frequency by adding a stop. Each leg is now judged on the departures it operates, and the route on the market it sells — and where an airport gives a limited number of exemptions, a nonstop and a one-stop on the same city pair share one. More on the rules in the route economics guide.
• A refused route now tells you which rule refused it, in the regulator’s own words, and on a rotation it names the leg.

August 27, 2026

Find any airport in the world from the Airports tab

• A search box at the top of Airports now reaches every airport in the game. The old one only searched the region you had opened, so looking up Honolulu meant knowing it was filed under Oceania first — or going to the route finder to see its numbers. Type a code, a city, an airport name or a country and click through to the full airport page: gates, slots, who else flies there, runway and connectivity.

August 27, 2026

Every hub you build now wears a gold pin on the network map

Reported on the Discord: a map showing four hubs as ordinary spokes.

• The map was only ever pinning the airport you founded at. Hubs and focus cities you designate later — the ones you bought gates for, paid the construction bill on and now run connecting banks through — drew as plain blue dots like any spoke. Every station you have designated is now gold-pinned, and the pin grows with the tier, so a focus city, a hub, a major hub and an international gateway are told apart at a glance. Hovering one names its tier.
• A brand-new hub shows up before its first route does. An airport you have designated but not yet flown from was missing from the map entirely; it now appears the moment the designation is live, which is rather the point of looking at the map while you plan. More on what each tier buys you in the hub strategy guide.

August 27, 2026

Cabin refits take the aircraft into the shop — and checks tell you when they’re due

Reported on the Discord: a refit screen making a promise the game never kept, and a maintenance panel answering the wrong question.

• A refit is real work now. The cost banner has always said the aircraft comes out of service for refitting. It never did — seats moved between classes instantly, mid-schedule, for nothing but the money. Reconfiguring a cabin now sends the aircraft to the shop: one week for most narrowbodies and regionals, two for widebodies and up, plus a week when you’re moving a quarter of the seats or more. The screen quotes the exact number of weeks before you commit, and any routes the aircraft flies stop earning until it’s back. Churning layouts to chase demand is a decision with a price attached.
• An aircraft already in the shop can’t take a cabin job. Select a tail that’s in a C or D check, or grounded by a failure, and the refit screen says so and leaves it out of the batch instead of quietly charging you for work it can’t do.
• Refitting aircraft say “Refitting” on the fleet list and the route tables, not “Grounded — in repair”. Nothing is broken; it’s in the hangar because you sent it there.
• Maintenance checks now show time until due, not time flown. The check panel used to print hours accrued — the same number under both C and D on a young airframe, which is why it read as total time. It now reads due in ~6w (766h left), estimated from how hard that particular aircraft is actually flying, so a hard-worked jet shows a nearer date than a spare. Thresholds and check costs are unchanged; the panel just stopped making you do the arithmetic. More on planning downtime in the aircraft guide.

August 27, 2026

The market’s efficiency bar now admits it only measures fuel

Reported on the Discord: two aircraft whose store cards seemed to contradict each other.

• “Seat efficiency” was only ever fuel. The green bar on every aircraft card scored fuel burn per seat and nothing else — no maintenance, no crew, no cost of owning the thing — but it printed a dollar figure under a heading that read like the total cost of a seat. That is how a 767-300ER could sit one point above a 737-800 on the bar while billing three times the maintenance. The bar now says Fuel per seat, and the number beside it is labelled as fuel.
• Cards and the comparison table now show maintenance per seat. The weekly maintenance figure was already there, but comparing a 351-seat widebody to a 189-seat narrowbody meant doing the division yourself. Every card carries a Maint/seat figure next to the weekly bill — Maint/tonne on freighters, which never had a comparison number of their own — and the table has a sortable column for it. Nothing about what aircraft cost or how they fly has changed; the screen just stopped hiding half the answer. More on picking metal in the aircraft guide and route economics.

August 27, 2026

The Add Flights form now counts every hour your aircraft is already flying

Reported on the Discord: a planner that offered flying hours the game then refused.

• “No spare flying hours” on a route the form said would fit. The utilisation bar in Add Flights was reading the aircraft wrong in two ways. A multi-stop rotation was charged only its end-to-end hop instead of every sector it flies, and a route a standby aircraft is temporarily covering counted as nothing at all — so the bar could sit in the green at 136 of 140 hours while the aircraft picker on the same screen said 11 hours free, and the route came back refused. Both readings now come from the same place the game itself uses, so the bar, the picker, the flights-per-week ceiling and the answer you get on submit all agree.
• An aircraft’s intermediate stops count as airports it serves. A jet flying a tag route through a city was told it couldn’t start a route there — “aircraft can’t teleport” — at an airport it lands at every rotation. It can now, and the aircraft turns up in the picker where it belongs. More on how block hours limit a schedule in route economics.

August 26, 2026

Your head office now costs what your aeroplanes are worth

If you have ever started an airline on turboprops or regional jets and found it impossible to make money, this entry is for you. It was, and the reason was one line in the overhead formula rather than anything about the aircraft.

• The head office was billed per airframe, not per aeroplane. Overhead counted how many aircraft you had and nothing about what they were, so two turboprops and two A380s were charged exactly the same $68,495 a week. Weekly revenue spans about fifty times from the smallest gauge to the largest; overhead spanned less than two. A two-turboprop startup flying one round trip a day grosses $48,734 a week against a $68,495 head office — 141% of gross revenue before a litre of fuel.
• Fixed costs now follow a curve through seat count. Head-office overhead and all four crew groups read a curve anchored at the same medians every calibrated figure in the game was set against, so nothing that was already right has moved. What has gone is the cliff at each category boundary: a 290-seat 767-200ER used to pay 72% more fixed cost than a 295-seat 757-300, which had quietly handed the 757-300 the lowest break-even load factor in the game.
• The curve now reaches the bottom of the catalogue. It used to stop at 39 seats and clamp, so a nine-seat Islander was charged a 39-seater’s head office and crew, and every type under about 21 seats lost money with every seat sold at the maximum legal frequency. Incapable, not uncompetitive — and it stranded the 25 airports in the game with runways under 4,000 feet, which exist for exactly those aircraft. A Twin Otter on the St Barths shuttle goes from −$4,275 a week to +$12,638, and now wins more missions across the route grid than any other small aircraft. Saba, Lukla, Barra and the rest are open for business.
• Who this moves, and by how much. Extending the curve to the bottom of the catalogue is a pure reduction — nothing under 39 seats got dearer. Replacing the category steps with a curve cuts both ways: a fleet of small turboprops can be several per cent of revenue better off, a fleet of double-deckers about two per cent worse.
• Small aircraft still ask something of you. The way to make a turboprop pay is very high frequency on very few short routes — at four times the utilisation, its head office falls from 141% of revenue to 35%. That lever was always there and nothing in the game taught it. Worth a read of fleet planning before writing off a small gauge.

August 25, 2026

Crew are hired and trained now, not conjured

Labour has been a wage bill with a pay dial on it. In a new game it is a workforce: people you recruit, pay to train, wait for, and lose if you underpay them. Games already in progress keep the old model for their whole life — nobody’s established airline wakes up short of pilots.

• Hiring pays for training up front and delivers later. Each group has its own lead time and its own bill per crew unit: pilots ten weeks at $45,000 (a type rating and line training), maintenance six weeks at $18,000, cabin crew five weeks at $12,000, ground staff two weeks at $4,000. Ordering aircraft and ordering the people to fly them are now two lead times you have to line up.
• Pay is a retention decision, not just a cost. Every week a fraction of your people leave, at a rate set by what you pay them and how they feel about working for you. Cutting pay to survive a bad quarter now costs you the crew as well as the morale.
• Short-handed degrades long before it grounds. Under 15% short, the operation simply gets worse — on-time performance slips and satisfaction follows it down; see on-time performance for what that does to your fares. At or past 15% on the flight-crew groups, aircraft you have nobody to fly stand down for the week. The crew-hungriest tails park first, so the largest possible number of aircraft keep flying, and a parked tail flies again the moment its crew arrive.
• Your first two aircraft crew instantly, so a new airline can start flying rather than spending its first ten weeks watching a training queue.
• Operations shows the whole picture: crewed against required, how far short you are, who is in training and how many weeks until they are on the line, and hire buttons that quote the bill and the wait before you commit.

August 25, 2026

The 737 family, priced like a family

A catalogue pass over the most-flown aircraft in the game. Every figure here is a correction to something that was wrong, and some of it reaches aircraft you already own.

• The MAX 8 was carrying the MAX 8-200’s seat count. 210 is the -200’s certified maximum, not the MAX 8’s — which made the -200 dead weight in the catalogue: worse per seat for a discount that never paid back. The MAX 8 is now 189 seats, the 737-800 fuselage it shares; the -200 is 202 and now costs more than the MAX 8, which is the right way round.
• The MAX 7 burns what a stretch of the -700 burns. It had been given the -700’s burn with the re-engine factor applied, which left it beating the MAX 8 per seat — a smaller aircraft undercutting a larger one on unit cost, which does not happen.
• The 737-900ER arrives at the age it should. It was the only NG banded off its own 2007 service entry rather than the production line it was built on, so it turned up on the used market older than it is.
• Classics are a real cheap-entry tier now. The -300 at $9.5M, the -500 at $10.5M and the -200 Advanced at $6M — the -200 had somehow become dearer than a strictly better -300. The -400’s burn and maintenance are corrected, and the 737-300F’s burn was 15% above published block fuel, which had the 18-tonne freighter out-burning the 20-tonne one.
• Store cards quote maintenance as delivered, not factory-fresh. A ten-year-old Classic bills about 1.5 times the base rate from its first week with you. The card showed you the base rate and let you find out afterwards. Full figures on the narrow-body pages.

August 25, 2026

Three from the Discord

• A freighter’s route breakdown said the aircraft was idle. The aircraft detail panel read passenger routes only, so a 767F with ten lanes showed the empty “idle” state directly under a utilisation box reading “10 routes”. Freight lanes now appear where they should, priced in tonnes a week and dollars per tonne-kilometre rather than passengers and ticket price.
• Puerto Rico is US soil. San Juan was being read as a foreign country for hub upgrades, the foreign focus-city cap, international destination counts and even tail numbers — a US carrier’s aircraft registered under an invented prefix. There is now a proper table of territories that fly under a mainland registry: US, French, Danish and Dutch territories and the British crown dependencies. Deliberately unchanged for now: whether San Juan to Miami is a domestic demand pair, which is a balance decision rather than a bug.
• “No cover — 1 route idle” with a spare aircraft sitting at the origin. Both halves of that badge were wrong about how a week runs. Breakdowns are rolled at the end of a week, so a tail that has just gone tech cannot be covered yet; and the downtime countdown runs before the reserve pass, so a tail with one week left takes its own routes back and correctly needs no cover at all. The badge now runs the real pass against your projected fleet and tells you which it is: “back in service next week”, “cover starts next week” with the reserve named, or the actual reason there is none.

August 24, 2026

Cargo lanes are now contested — and the fleet gets a rebalance

The freight market used to treat every lane as yours alone. It doesn't any more, and a handful of aircraft got the price and stat corrections they were due.

• Rival freighters now compete for tonnage on your lanes. Cargo demand on a city pair was split only among your own routes — a competitor running freighters on the same lane took nothing off your load. Now they do: the tonnage you win on a contested lane depends on how much freighter capacity flies against you and at what yield. Get undercut and you hold less; run a premium, reliable operation and you keep more of the pool. Lanes only you serve are completely unchanged. See route economics for how yield and capacity split a market.
• The A380 is priced like the flagship it is. The double-decker was quietly one of the cheapest wide-bodies to buy, which made no sense for the largest airframe in the game. Its purchase price and weekly lease now sit at the top of the table — a route-filling monster when a trunk route can feed 500 seats, and an expensive mistake when it can't. Nothing about how it flies changed, only what it costs to put on the books.
• Three wide-bodies that were strictly worse than a rival got small corrections. The stretched 787 is cheaper to maintain, the C929 costs a little less to buy, and the 777X-8 gains a few seats — each just enough that it's no longer a plane you'd never rationally pick over its neighbour. Full figures on the aircraft pages.
• The biggest aircraft now crew their layovers properly. Double-deckers and the supersonic were being charged for fewer flight-deck crew on overnight layovers than an ordinary wide-body — never right for a three-pilot flight deck. They now cost what they should when they lay over.

August 22, 2026

Set every cabin's fare before you open the route — and fly the range your aircraft actually has

Two from the Discord, both about the route planner telling you less than it knew.

• All four fares are now set in the route planner, before the route opens. The planner had a single Ticket Price box; the premium cabins were filled in for you at fixed multiples of it and could only be changed afterwards, on the Routes tab. You now price First, Business, Premium Economy and Economy individually — only the cabins your chosen layout actually has — each showing the market reference fare, how far off it you are, and the ceiling. The forecast below updates as you type, so the profit you decide on is the profit at your fares. The Add Route dialog on the Routes tab does the same. Joining a pair you already fly still inherits that pair's fares, because pricing belongs to the route, not the aircraft — the planner now says so instead of offering a box that would have been ignored.
• The planner counts the range your aircraft really has. If you fitted sharklets, or fly a premium-heavy cabin that trades payload for fuel, your aircraft goes further than the catalogue figure — and the game has always known it: the route would have opened fine. The planner was the one screen still measuring the lane against the brochure, so a jet that could comfortably make the trip simply never appeared in the aircraft list. It appears now, labelled with the reach your modifications actually buy, and the freight planner was fixed the same way. Going the other way, an aircraft is no longer counted as "ready" for a lane it cannot reach.
• Repricing an open route now previews honestly. The fare panel on the Routes tab showed projected load, break-even and weekly profit "at these fares" while quietly computing them at the fares the route was already flying — the numbers did not move however far you dragged a fare. They move now.
• One small change to a number you may recognise. The "% vs ref" figure under each cabin used to compare against a different set of reference multiples than the game itself uses, so routes sitting exactly at the default fares showed as well below reference. Every screen now uses the same yardstick. Nothing about what your passengers pay has changed — only the percentage next to it, which is now the true one.

August 19, 2026

Buy your leased aircraft and keep them

Leases used to be a one-way street: renew, extend, or watch the aircraft go back and its routes close. Now there is a third option.

• You can buy a leased aircraft outright. Open any leased aircraft in Fleet and there is a Buy Out Lease button. You pay its market value plus a 10% early-buyout premium, less the security deposit you already put down, and it becomes yours: no more weekly rent, no return date, no scramble to replace it when the lease runs out. It keeps its routes and its crew, and you can sell it later like any aircraft you bought new. The confirmation shows the arithmetic before you commit.
• Or buy out a whole batch at once. Tick several aircraft on the Fleet list and a Buy out button appears next to Extend leases, with the total. If your cash only covers some of them it buys the cheapest first and tells you exactly how many it skipped, rather than failing silently.
• The lease-expiry warning now offers you all three ways out. The alert at eight and four weeks used to mention renewing and returning only — it now quotes what buying the aircraft costs, so the option is in front of you at the moment you need it. Same on the Dashboard alert and in the weekly debrief.
• Sale prices now match what you are actually paid. The sell confirmation and the bulk-sell total were valuing airframes with a simpler sum than the one the game settles on. For aircraft that arrive to you already several years old — most out-of-production types — the quote came in under what you received; for anything with a heavy check overdue it came in over. Both dialogs now quote the real figure, maintenance history and all. Nothing about what you are paid has changed, only what you are told beforehand. See the aircraft guide for how airframe age drives value.

August 18, 2026

The route finder learned what your fleet can actually do

The finder ranked markets by demand and knew nothing else. That turns out to be several problems wearing one coat.

• It searches with an aircraft attached. It used to offer you airports the aircraft you had in mind cannot land at — there are 774 airports inside a Concorde’s range with too little runway for it. It now runs the same checks the game runs when you actually open the route, with the aircraft in hand, so a row you can click is a route you can fly.
• One row per market, not one per airport. A city with three fields was three rows competing for your attention over what is one pool of travellers; it is now one row, with the sibling fields named.
• Its numbers come from the same projection the planner uses, so the screen you land on can no longer disagree with the row you clicked to get there.
• And it knew nothing about the airport next door. With a carrier flying JFK–LHR and you pricing up EWR–LHR, the finder promised 6,160 passengers at a 100% load and $3.13M a week and reported no competition — against a week that then booked 4,633 at 75.2% and $1.64M. Sibling airports share one market, and the preview now runs the same single contest per city pair that the weekly result does.
• A second fault on the same path, affecting every pooled forecast: it was not carrying uncapped demand, so its spill model saw demand exactly equal to seats and trimmed routes the weekly result does not — measured at 7% on a two-airport lane.
• Your fleet is listed first, at your best-equipped aircraft’s range, instead of buried in a catalogue dropdown — and the planner now explains why a second aircraft on a pair earns less than the first. More on how a market splits in route economics.

August 18, 2026

A grounded aircraft stays grounded

Two fixes from the Discord, one of which had been quietly handing out free repairs.

• Clearing an aircraft's flights no longer ends its technical issue. When a jet goes tech and is grounded for repair, the sensible response is to take its flights off it — or move them onto a spare so your passengers still travel. Doing either used to cancel the grounding outright: the aircraft came straight back into service and the remaining downtime vanished. Groundings and heavy checks now run their full course no matter what you do with the schedule, and you can pre-assign routes to an aircraft that is still in the shop — they simply start flying when it is released. Aircraft that lost a grounding this way will return to the shop for the time they still owed.
• The idle-aircraft warning no longer invents a lease. The Dashboard alert told you that a parked aircraft was "paying lease with no revenue" even when you owned it outright. It now says lease only when every idle aircraft is leased, and otherwise talks about fixed costs — which is what an owned aircraft on the ground is actually burning. See route economics for what a parked airframe costs you either way.

August 13, 2026

Your deposit comes back, your hub connects, and a failed save says so

A fixes release. Four things that were quietly wrong, three of them about money.

• Lease security deposits are refundable again. Ordering a leased aircraft takes twelve weeks of rent up front. That money is now returned in full when you cancel the order before delivery — which is what the "free to cancel" prompt always promised — and returned when the aircraft goes back to the lessor, whether the lease runs its full term or you hand it back early. The redelivery fee and the early-termination penalty are unchanged: those are what make an early return expensive. A deposit is a deposit. It now appears as its own line on the weekly P&L when it lands, and it is not taxed, because it is your money coming home rather than income.
• Connecting traffic no longer depends on which way round you typed the route. Passengers connecting between two of your own flights at a hub are worth real money, and the model was only finding them when your routes happened to be stored in opposite directions. Build every spoke outward from your hub — the natural way to build a hub carrier — and it found none at all. It now sees every pair of spokes regardless of orientation, so a four-spoke hub forms six connecting markets instead of four, or none. If you run a hub, your connecting revenue goes up, in some cases from zero.
• Statistics agrees with the P&L about cargo. The Weekly Revenue tile and the revenue-mix chart on the Statistics tab were adding freight revenue on top of a total that already contained it. A cargo-heavy airline's headline revenue read close to double what its P&L said, and the chart's Passenger band absorbed the difference. Both now read the same figure the rest of the game does. Weeks already recorded in your save keep their old numbers, so expect a step in the chart at this update rather than a redrawn history.
• A save that fails now tells you. When a browser's storage for the game filled up, the autosave stopped writing and said nothing — you found out on your next refresh. Saving to a slot could fail the same silent way. Both now say so plainly, and tell you how to free up room.

August 13, 2026

One city, one market: metro areas now share their demand

A structural change to how the model thinks about cities served by more than one airport — and to what a secondary field is actually worth.

• A metro area is one market. New York to London is a single pool of passengers, whether you fly it out of JFK, Newark or LaGuardia. Routes on sibling airports now split that pool and compete inside it, rather than each being priced as a market of its own. If your network flies the same city pair from two fields, those routes will settle lower than they read last week — the combined figure is the honest one, and it is the one the planner has been quietly disagreeing with.
• Airports have appeal. A secondary field pulls fewer passengers than the primary, and how many fewer depends on the trip. LaGuardia is a perfectly good domestic airport and a poor long-haul international one; Newburgh is a long way from Manhattan whatever you are flying. Cheap slots at a quiet field are cheap for a reason, and the model now says so. Where a metro has one meaningful airport, nothing changes.
• Freight lanes pool the same way. Two freighters working sibling airports on the same city pair now draw one lane's tonnage between them. Cargo is scored on freight handling and customs throughput rather than passenger convenience, so airport appeal does not apply to it.
• Rivals live under the same rules. Competing carriers on a metro lane now feel each other across sibling airports, and their home fields are scored for appeal exactly as yours are. A rival at the secondary airport is a real rival, and a weaker one.
• The planner previews the pooled lane. Forecasts are run against the same shared market the weekly tick books, so opening a second field on a city pair you already serve previews the share it will actually carry.

This one moves numbers. Networks built on a single strong gateway are largely unaffected; networks that spread the same city pair across several fields will see those routes converge on what the city can actually supply. Hub strategy and route economics are both worth a re-read this week.

August 13, 2026

Full is full: a better model of oversubscribed routes

A second accuracy wave, this one deeper in the demand model. The theme: what happens on a route where more people want to fly than you have seats for.

• Genuinely oversubscribed routes now fill further. The load model distinguishes a route where demand roughly matches capacity (which settles in the high 80s, as before) from one drowning in demand, which now climbs toward the structural ceiling of 95%. Previously both looked identical — a route with ten times the demand it could seat filled no further than one scraping parity. If you run small metal on fat trunks, your loads and revenue will step up. See route economics for where the extra points come from.
• Seasonal one-way skew no longer penalises routes that are full both ways. The directional model docks a route when the peak direction runs out of seats and the off-peak direction flies light — but a route with deep demand in both directions stays full in both, and now loses nothing. Seasonal leisure routes (think northeast to the Caribbean in winter) were being trimmed a few points they should have kept.
• Business travellers on all-economy pairs buy economy tickets. When no carrier on a pair offers a business cabin, that demand now folds into economy — matching what already happened on uncontested routes. Competitive all-economy markets were losing those passengers entirely, which made head-to-head LCC flying look worse than it should.
• A multi-stop route and a nonstop on the same pair now share the market. Fly JFK–ORD as a nonstop and also as the first leg of a tag rotation, and the two split the pair's demand the way two nonstops always have — each previously drew from the pool independently. If your network leans on that pattern, those routes will come in lower; the combined figure is now the honest one.

Alongside the model work: market-share panels on Route Details use your real brand reach, lease costs in projections use the rate each aircraft actually signed at, the Dashboard's network load factor handles multi-stop routes correctly, and the Marketplace's "weeks of cash" figure now reflects your whole weekly burn rather than lease rent alone — it was the most optimistic number in the game.

August 12, 2026

The route planner does the harder sums now

An accuracy release, aimed squarely at the gap between what the planning screens promise and what the following week delivers.

• The launch forecast accounts for the aircraft you already fly on the pair. Open the planner on a route you already serve and the forecast now splits the market the way the weekly tick does, instead of sizing the new aircraft on its own. A second or third aeroplane on a busy pair will preview a smaller share than it used to — that is the share it goes on to carry. See route economics for how frequency and fares trade off once a pair is full.
• Forecasts use your airline’s actual brand awareness. Previews are now scored with the same reputation and awareness the real week applies, rather than assuming an established name. Early-game routes will read more conservatively, and more accurately — beginner mistakes has more on building awareness before you build a network.
• Freighters and one-off variants now belong to maintenance families. Seventy-two aircraft types, freighters among them, were not attached to a family, which left them outside the fleet-commonality model entirely. They now carry family costs like every other airframe, contribute to fleet complexity, and — the part worth having — can finally be covered by a certified MRO base, which was not possible for a cargo fleet before. Standardising still pays: adding a variant of an airframe you already operate costs nothing extra, while a one-of-everything fleet is expensive. See fleet planning.

The first two changes will make some routes you already fly look less attractive on the planning screens. Those routes are not earning less than they were — the weekly result has always been the number that counts. The forecasts have simply caught up with it.

August 12, 2026

Chengdu finally has two airports, and Hainan has a gateway

Two new fields on the map this week, both in China, and one long-standing mix-up put right.

• TFU — Chengdu Tianfu. The newer of Chengdu’s two airports, out to the south-east of the city, with 13,100ft of runway — enough for anything in the catalogue, fully loaded, on the longest sectors it can reach. If you have been eyeing western China as somewhere to put a hub, you now have a proper widebody gateway to build one on.
• HAK — Haikou Meilan. Hainan’s way in, at the northern end of the island, and a genuinely busy field — the tourist traffic through it runs far ahead of what the city’s own population would suggest. It pairs naturally with Sanya at the southern tip, and it opens up short leisure hops from Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Hanoi that had nowhere to land before.
• CTU is now Chengdu Shuangliu, which is what it always was. It had been carrying Tianfu’s name and, more to the point, sitting on Tianfu’s coordinates — so with a second Chengdu airport arriving there was no way to keep both honest. CTU has moved about thirty miles north-west to where Shuangliu actually is. If you fly to CTU today, your distances and block times on those routes will shift very slightly; nothing you need to do anything about.

Both new airports count as major, which means the AI carriers see them too and will build around them rather than leaving them to you. Expect competition on the obvious pairs sooner than you would get at a quiet regional field — see hub strategy for how to pick between them, and route economics for what the extra runway at Tianfu is worth on a long sector.

August 12, 2026

Next week’s forecast was predicting a week that could not happen

A player sent in a screenshot of the weekly P&L: route operating profit of $674m last week, $624m forecast for this one, and nothing on the card to explain the fifty million. “I don’t have any major checks or anything,” he said — and then, in the same breath, “I make more than it estimates.” Both were true, and they were the same fault.

The forecast was being run over your airline exactly as it stands right now, rather than as it will stand on Monday morning. Everything the game does to your airline at the start of a week — before a single aeroplane pushes back — was missing from it.

• An aeroplane on the last week of a check was written off for a week it spends entirely in the air. When a C or D check has one week left, or a grounded airframe is due back, it returns to service before the week is flown. The forecast still had it in the hangar, so every route it operates showed as earning nothing. On a big fleet that is easily eight figures, appearing from nowhere and vanishing again seven days later.
• Reserve cover was invisible. A spare standing in for a broken aeroplane starts flying the moment the week begins. The forecast showed the covered route dead, which made a reserve you were paying for look like it was doing nothing.
• An event in its final week was still being charged against you. A demand slump with one week left is over before the week runs, but the forecast kept applying it.
• A fuel hedge did nothing in the forecast. During a fuel price spike the projection showed you the full unhedged price no matter how much of your burn was locked in — the one moment a hedge exists for. The week itself always charged you the hedged price; only the forecast was wrong.

All four are fixed, and the forecast now runs over exactly the airline the week will be flown by. What remains uncertain is only what is genuinely uncertain: an event that has not been rolled yet, a breakdown that has not happened, a rival that has not moved. The heavy-check line still reads “—” rather than a number, because a D check landing on a given week is not something anyone can forecast.

If your projections have been reading low and then coming in fine, this was why. See route economics for how a week’s profit is put together, and fuel hedging for what a lock actually buys you.

August 12, 2026

A reserve aircraft can stand in for more than one aeroplane

A player reported two aircraft grounded at the same hub, two reserves stationed at that hub doing nothing, and no cover on either — and they were right. A reserve was only offered a breakdown while it was sitting completely still. The moment it picked up its first cover it dropped out of the pool entirely, so the next aeroplane to break down at that base was told there was no spare available, while a fully qualified spare flew nine hours a week of a hundred and forty hour limit.

Standing by has always been something you pay for — parking plus a readiness premium, every week. Paying for a cover that never turns up is the worst version of that.

• One reserve now covers as many broken aeroplanes as it has hours for. That was always the intent: cover is decided route by route, in order of what the route earned last week, and the only limit is the block-hour ceiling.
• The limit is still a real limit. A reserve already flying a heavy rotation for one grounded aircraft will refuse a second one it cannot fit, and the hours it is already carrying are counted before it is offered anything else — no aeroplane quietly ends up scheduled past the week it has.
• The reason you are given is now the true one. “No same-type reserve at that base” used to be reported when there was one and it was simply busy. A busy spare now says its hours are full, which is a different problem with a different answer — station another one, or accept the gap.
• An out-of-service aeroplane says when nothing came for it. If you keep reserves of that type and a grounded aircraft is still sitting on its own routes, the Fleet list says so on the row instead of leaving you to work it out from an empty schedule.

Nothing about stationing a reserve has changed — same identical-type rule, same hub scope, same costs. See fleet planning for when a spare airframe pays for itself, and route economics for what an uncovered week actually costs.

August 10, 2026

Wi-Fi is fitted to an aeroplane, and a lounge is a room you build

Two of the à la carte products on the Ancillaries tab were pretending to be things they are not. Ticking “offered” on Wi-Fi gave every aircraft in your fleet connectivity that afternoon, free of any hardware. Ticking “offered” on Lounge Passes sold day passes into a lounge you had never built, at an airport you might not even serve. Both were policy switches standing in for capital you had never spent.

They are now the two things they were always describing: an antenna bolted to a particular airframe, and a room with your name over the door in a particular terminal.

Wi-Fi is a fleet decision now, not a policy one.

• Fit it when you order the aircraft, for $750,000. There is a Wi-Fi package on the order form alongside the engine choice and the wingtips. Lease instead of buy and the lessor amortises it into the weekly rate rather than taking it up front.
• Or retrofit later, for $1,050,000. Same kit, more money — a hangar slot, fresh paperwork and an aeroplane earning nothing while the work is done. That gap is the entire reason the checkbox on the order form is worth thinking about. The Fleet page will do one aircraft or a whole selection at once, and quotes the price on the button before you commit.
• It costs $1,500 a week per fitted aircraft, flying or not. The airtime commitment and the support contract are bought by the airframe, not by the flight, so a jet sitting on a reserve stand or in a D check still pays. Over-fitting a fleet quietly costs money.
• You still set the price, and you still set it once for the whole airline. Nothing about the Ancillaries tab has changed there. What has changed is that setting a price does nothing on routes flown by an aircraft that cannot deliver it.
• An unfitted aeroplane sells no Wi-Fi and takes the penalty for not having it. Connectivity is expected now; an aircraft without it loses quality on every route it flies, exactly as before — but now it is the metal that decides, not the policy screen. The Ancillaries tab tells you how much of your fleet is fitted, weighted by seats, because that is the fraction of your passengers who actually find it on board.

Lounges are built, at one airport at a time.

• $12,000,000 to fit out, ten weeks before the doors open, $85,000 a week to run. You can build one at any airport where you already hold a gate — it does not have to be a hub. Close it and you get 20% of the capex back for the fittings and the lease exit, which is deliberately not very much.
• It moves business travellers, and only business travellers. A lounge at one end of a route lifts your standing with the business segment by around 14%, and again at the other end if you have a room there too. A leisure passenger buying the cheapest fare in the market is completely unmoved, because they cannot get in. This is not a quality bonus dressed up — it sits outside your route quality score and acts directly on the segment it applies to, and Route Detail shows it as its own line.
• The money back is the ground bill. You have always paid $60 for every business passenger and $110 for every first passenger for lounge access and premium ground service — that was you renting somebody else’s room. At an airport where you own the lounge that drops to about a third, because you are still feeding and staffing the place but no longer paying a contractor’s margin per head. It scales with premium traffic, which is why a lounge pays for itself at a hub pushing real business volume and slowly bleeds at a thin outstation.
• Day passes need a room. The Lounge Passes product on the Ancillaries tab now sells only on routes that touch a lounge you own. One end, half the passes.
• Two switches decide who gets in free. Letting your own loyalty members walk in costs you on every guest and earns no pass revenue from them; what you get back is a stronger pull with exactly the travellers who choose an airline on the ground experience. Letting an alliance partner’s members in costs slightly more than the settlement fee you collect for hosting them — what you are really buying there is the reciprocal right for your business travellers to use partner lounges at every station where a partner has a room and you do not. You have to run at least one lounge yourself to trade on that; you cannot swap access you do not have.

• Your existing fleet starts with no Wi-Fi, and your Lounge Passes stop earning — read this one. There was no honest way to hand every aircraft in every save a million dollars of hardware it never bought, so nothing in your fleet is fitted. Every aeroplane you own is now an aeroplane without Wi-Fi, taking the penalty for it, and Lounge Passes earn nothing until you have built somewhere for them to be used. On a typical route that is about four quality points off until you spend the money. It is a real hit and it is deliberate: the whole point of the change is that these things now cost something. The Ancillaries tab shows you where you stand on both, and the Fleet page will retrofit a whole selection in one go.

Whether a lounge is worth building is a genuine question rather than an obvious yes — $85,000 a week is a lot of route profit, and the ground-cost saving only arrives if you are actually carrying premium passengers through that station. Route economics covers how those costs work, and demand and quality covers what business travellers weigh. Come and argue about the numbers on the Discord.

August 9, 2026

The numbers on screen now match the numbers you are charged

A player sent in a screenshot of the Weekly P&L on their dashboard: last week’s operating profit less last week’s tax came to more than the net profit printed underneath it, by eighteen million dollars, while the projected column beside it reconciled perfectly. Their words: “I made less and had more costs and yet somehow I’m making more money.”

The bottom line was right — it has always been the real change in your cash balance. What was missing was two rows above it.

• Heavy checks and AOG repairs now have their own line. A C or D check falling due, or an unplanned repair after a mechanical failure, is real cash leaving the airline in a single week, and it never appeared anywhere on the card. It does now, net of any insurance recovery. Because that spend is lumpy and event-driven, the projected column shows a dash rather than forecasting zero — the game will not pretend to predict a D check.
• Strike weeks show the net damage. The card used to show only the revenue you lost to cancelled flights, not the fuel, crew and service cost those cancelled flights never incurred. The line is now the difference between them, which is what the walkout actually cost you.
• Corporate tax explains what it is charged on. Tax is worked out on earnings before tax, not on the operating profit sitting directly above it — fleet depreciation, loan interest, one-time charges and heavy-check spend all come off first. Depreciation is deducted for tax but costs you no cash, which is why the bill usually reads as less than 21% of the profit on screen. There is now a greyed memo line below the total showing that week’s depreciation, so the gap is visible instead of mysterious. It changes none of the totals.
• A lease being handed back is no longer dropped from the forecast. In any week an aircraft reaches the end of its lease, the redelivery charge is subtracted from your projected profit — but the projected column’s one-time charges row was leaving it out, so that column stopped adding up too.
• Alliance and codeshare carriers had a phantom cost. The Finance page’s cost bridge was counting partner revenue once as income and once inside route revenue, which surfaced as a mystery “Other” row worth exactly your partner earnings. Gone.

Both cards now carry a guard: if the simulation ever moves cash that the breakdown cannot name, an “Other” row appears and says so, instead of the money disappearing between two subtotals. It should always be zero. More on where the money goes in the route economics guide.

Two more fixes in the same vein — places where the game told you one thing and did another.

• The fuel desk was quoting a price it did not honour. When hedging changed to price contracts off where fuel is expected to average over the term, the panel you buy from never got the memo — it kept quoting the old figure, your spot price plus the premium, and then locked you in at the correct, different rate. With fuel cheap the two drift a long way apart: one player was quoted 0.873× and charged 0.991×. The quote and the contract are now the same calculation, so the number on the button is the number you get. The blurb no longer claims you are locking in today’s price, because you are not — you are locking in a fixed rate against where fuel is heading, which is the whole point of the hedge. Your existing contracts were always charged correctly; only the quote was wrong.
• “vs Market” on an active contract was understating the gap. A contract at 0.991× against a market at 0.794× was reported as 19.7% over market. It is 24.8%. The figure was subtracting two multipliers and printing the result as a percentage.
• The route planner could go blank when picking an aircraft. Selecting an aircraft type you already operate could grey out the screen instead of showing the aircraft list. Types you did not own were unaffected, which is why it looked so arbitrary. Fixed.
• Route detail could go blank on your busiest routes. Opening the detail page for a city pair you serve with two or more aircraft greyed out the screen. Ironically it only affected routes you had invested in enough to fly more than one plane on. Fixed — and both this and the route planner fault were the same kind of mistake, so the test suite now checks every screen for it automatically before anything ships.

And one more, from a player who sorted her Fleet list by utilisation and found eight aircraft flying more hours than a week contains. The top one read 278h against a 140h limit.

• The utilisation column was adding up your whole year. An aircraft is limited to 140 block-hours a week, and that limit is checked month by month — which is exactly why a summer route and a winter route can share one airframe. The Fleet list ignored the calendar and added every route together, so a plane legally flying 138h in its busiest month was reported at 264h. It also priced a multi-stop route as if it flew straight from first stop to last, ignoring the sectors in between. Both are fixed: the column now shows what the aeroplane actually flies this month, the same figure the weekly simulation charges you maintenance for, and it says so in the tooltip when your peak month is busier.
• The bar meant nothing above the limit. Every over-limit aircraft drew the same full bar, so 145h and 278h looked identical — the one thing on screen that should have shouted was silent. An over-limit aircraft now reads “278h / 140h” and draws the illegal part of its bar hatched, so the size of the problem is visible at a glance.
• An aircraft in the hangar reports no flying. A grounded aeroplane used to show a full week of utilisation for a schedule it was not operating. It now shows nothing, and the tooltip tells you what it picks back up when it returns.
• And the real fault underneath: a reserve covering for a broken aircraft made that aircraft look empty. While a standby aircraft flew your routes, the grounded one it was covering for read as having no schedule at all — so the route form offered it as spare metal and let you load a second full week onto it. When the original came back, the routes came home and it was flying double its limit, permanently. Every path that assigns a route — new routes, multi-stop routes, freight routes, frequency increases, transfers and reassignments — now counts the hours an aircraft is on the hook for, including the ones a reserve is holding for it. Counter-seasonal routes still share an airframe exactly as before; see the route economics guide and the aircraft guide for how block hours are worked out.
• Aircraft that were already over the limit have been trimmed back — read this one. Fixing the fault above stops any new aircraft going over 140 block-hours a week. It does nothing for saves that already had one, and some of you have aircraft flying nearly double their limit right now — hours that were never physically possible, earning money that was never really earned. So the next time your save loads, any aircraft above the limit is brought back under it automatically, once. It reduces frequency, it does not delete your network: the game gives up your least profitable flying per block hour first, so you keep the most money per hour of schedule surrendered, and it only closes a route outright if every route on that aircraft is already down to a single weekly flight and it still does not fit. Nothing on an aircraft that is within the limit is touched — including counter-seasonal routes sharing an airframe, which are legal and stay exactly as they are. Every aircraft affected gets its own entry in your News tab, naming the aircraft, the route, and the old and new frequency, so you can see precisely what changed and put the capacity back where you want it. This runs once per save and never again.

August 7, 2026

Your planes stop being permanently full, and the other airlines start flying against you

This is the biggest change to the simulation since the hub overhaul, and the first thing you will notice is that your load factors went down. That is the point. Twenty-eight items from a full audit of the game landed over the last two days — most of them are quiet corrections, but two of them change what the game is.

Every aircraft was flying 100.0% full, forever. Demand was pooled into one weekly number and compared against one weekly seat count, so the moment a route had more passengers than seats, every single seat sold — in both directions, every week, for the life of the save. Real airlines run about 83% full across their network while their best flights sell out, because passengers arrive on particular days in particular directions and you size the aircraft for the peak. Friday is full; Tuesday is not.

• Only 95% of a week’s seats are now actually sellable. That gap stands in for the day-of-week and directional imbalance that no amount of extra demand can fix.
• Demand meets that ceiling as a spread, not a total. A route sized correctly for its market sells about seven-eighths of its seats. A route with far more demand than seats climbs toward the ceiling without ever reaching it. A route that is half empty loses essentially nothing — this only bites aircraft that were already full.
• Each week wobbles slightly. A sold-out route now breathes between roughly 92% and 97% instead of reading the same number forever. It is deterministic, so reloading a save gives you the same week back.
• Freight is not exempt. A lane’s outbound is a Tuesday-to-Thursday business with a lighter return, and it is now modelled that way.

Across a twelve-route network this lands mean load factor between 82% and 87% depending on how hard you work the fleet, with nothing pinned at 100% any more. Revenue on a saturated network falls between 12% and 20%. Your costs were never the problem — the denominator was.

The twenty-five airlines in your world were not competing with you. They had real networks, real fares and real fleets, and the simulation was reading them from the wrong place: a catalogue of airlines that could exist rather than the ones that do. Measured before the fix, the tick built zero competing offers on all 156 city pairs those carriers actually fly. Every route in the game was scored as an uncontested monopoly.

• They fly against you now. Roughly half the pairs out of a major hub already have somebody else on them.
• The route planner stops contradicting itself. It has always built its market-share panel from the live carriers, so it would tell you that you’d take 58% of a market directly above a profit forecast that quietly gave you all of it. Eleven screens that forecast route economics now read the same market the weekly tick does.
• Multi-stop routes are contested too, and a rival that already flies a pair can no longer also “enter” it as a new competitor — which would have had the same airline competing against you twice with two different fares.
• The map will show you all of it. A new Rivals toggle on the network map draws every carrier’s live network, coloured by what kind of airline they are: solid where they are on a pair you fly, faint everywhere else. The count beside the toggle is how many of your own routes you are sharing.

Numbers on different screens now agree with each other. Several of them did not, and each disagreement was quietly costing somebody a decision.

• Route profit has one definition. There were four different ways the game split an aircraft’s lease and maintenance across its routes, so the same route could show four different profits under near-identical labels — the health strip could say “3 losing” over a screen of green cards. There are now two named numbers, and you choose which one you are looking at: Contribution (should I keep flying this with the plane I already have?) and Fully-loaded profit (is this route worth the aeroplane?). Your choice is remembered and every screen honours it.
• The Weekly P&L opens on the number in the table above it. Its first row summed route revenue less direct flying costs while its tooltip claimed to be the Top Routes figure, which also subtracts the aircraft. The gap was the entire flying fleet’s ownership cost. The ladder now starts where the table ends, itemises every corporate cost beneath it, and checks itself — anything it cannot account for appears as its own row instead of vanishing between two subtotals.
• Aircraft that flew nothing get their own line. An idle jet, a tail in a heavy check, a reserve on standby — they still owe lease and maintenance and no route absorbs it. That is a cost of a real decision and it now says so.
• The brand positioning chart plots the airlines that exist. It drew three carriers from fixed coordinates that never moved. They were real airlines — which was worse, because a world only samples 25 of the 70 in the roster, so most games were plotting at least one competitor the player would never meet. Every rival with a network is now placed from that network, and the ones flying against you are the ones that get named. Your own dot could not see a fare change either; it can now.

The economy got a serious pass. Most of this is invisible until you go looking, and all of it moves money.

• Fuel hedges are priced properly. Twenty of the eighty-one combinations of fuel price and hedge length were free money — the lock cost less than the expected average it was insuring against. Meanwhile hedging into a spike, the one time you actually want to, was terrible value. Locks are now priced off the expected average over the term plus a stated premium, and the contract preview shows you that expected average beside the locked price so you can see what certainty costs.
• Fuel shocks reach the hedged and unhedged differently. An event spike used to bypass hedging entirely; a fully hedged airline paid the spike anyway. The shock now moves the fuel index itself, which means your hedge does what you paid for — and the fuel chart finally shows the price that was actually paid.
• Disruptions hurt punctuality. Not one event in the game affected on-time performance. Strikes, severe weather, technical outages, volcanic ash and natural disasters now do, network-wide, because a closed hub cascades through the whole rotation.
• Crew costs scale with the aircraft. A 51-seat turboprop and an 853-seat double-decker both cost $58,000 a week to crew. Pilots barely scale with size, cabin crew scale almost linearly, ground staff scale with turn size, and freighters carry no cabin crew at all. Turboprops are 51% cheaper to crew, widebodies 82% dearer, double-deckers 131%. Cost per seat now falls as aircraft get bigger, where it used to be seventeen times higher for a turboprop than a double-decker.
• Unions remember. Refusing a pay demand raised unrest that faded completely long before the next contract round, so a strike was mathematically unreachable no matter how many times you said no. A refusal now leaves a standing grievance: a floor that unrest never falls below, a lower ceiling on morale, and slower recovery. Refuse once and they are restless. Refuse three times and you have a walkout.
• A strike stops charging you for flights that did not operate. Fuel, crew, catering, ground handling and landing fees are refunded in proportion to the disruption. Lounges, hotels and passenger compensation are not — if anything those go up. The fixed costs still run, and that is the pain of a strike.
• Freight has a calendar. Air cargo was the one market in the game with no seasons at all — identical revenue in February and November. It now peaks in the pre-Christmas retail build and troughs around the Chinese New Year factory shutdown, on a curve deliberately out of phase with the passenger season. Annual tonnage per lane is unchanged.
• Freight lanes are directional. Every lane in the world charged the same return-leg imbalance. It is now the lane’s own: Memphis–Las Vegas and Hong Kong–Frankfurt are not the same business. Calibrated so the world-wide average is where it always was — this is differentiation, not a buff.
• Hubs reward the network you actually built. A one-route “hub” and a forty-spoke complex scored identically. The bonus now grows with the destinations you connect there, saturating as it should — the first few spokes are what turn a station into a connecting point at all, and the fiftieth adds almost nothing. Calibrated so a twelve-spoke hub earns exactly what the old flat number gave.
• Seasonal routes are lopsided. When the two ends of a route are in different seasons the traffic runs heavier one way, and symmetric seats cannot carry a lopsided week. A January London–Geneva narrowbody went from 100% full to 90%. Routes with the same season at both ends — nearly everything domestic — are untouched.

Borrowing became a real decision. The interest rate was previously whatever the client asked for, and the largest loan on offer was $20 million over one year — against a $135 million widebody. Debt could not buy an aeroplane, so “own or lease” had exactly one answer after the starter fleet.

• Your credit rating is computed from what actually happened — four weeks of realised revenue and profit — rather than a forecast. The grades are unchanged, so nobody’s rating moves for an invisible reason, except that an airline with no trading history is now priced like one: a lender with no financials to read assumes the worst.
• Aircraft Finance. A new secured product: eight years, a rate below every unsecured loan, borrowing up to 70% of the book value of the aircraft you own outright. Pledged aircraft cannot be sold or retired until the loan is repaid, and repaying releases them.
• Borrowing capacity is total exposure, not a per-loan allowance. Three separate $20M loans no longer stack on an airline with no revenue.

Fleet and route management got the tools it was missing.

• Move a route to a different aircraft. Previously you closed it and opened it again — which reset the route’s maturity from 61 weeks to zero and charged the launch cost a second time. The route now keeps its identity, its ramp-up, its fares and its schedule, and the game tells you which aircraft can take it and why the others cannot.
• Batched fleet actions. Sell, retire, schedule checks and extend leases across a selection in one go. If one aircraft cannot be actioned — not enough cash for the twelfth check — it is skipped and reported, rather than aborting the lot.
• Lease expiry is visible before it bites. Aircraft within eight weeks of the end of their lease carry a chip on the Fleet screen, the dashboard alerts you, and the weekly debrief lists them along with how many routes close if they go back.
• Two aircraft on the same route stop answering a different question. When several of your aircraft share a city pair they pool their demand, and that pooling had four separate faults: the pooled result was filed under the aircraft rather than the route, so it leaked into every other route that aircraft flew; how mature the lane was came from whichever route happened to be stored first; the supersonic fare premium silently vanished; and an unpriced business cabin was given a fare that existed nowhere else. In one legal hub schedule this was the difference between a route running 100% full at a healthy profit and the same route running 19% full at a loss.

Coming back after a break. The weekly debrief could only ever describe the most recent week, so a player away for a month came back to a single week’s numbers and no idea what had happened — even though the data was sitting in the save the whole time.

• A while-you-were-away digest covering everything you missed: total cash movement with a week-by-week strip, revenue, costs, passengers and load factor, how the network and share price moved, your best and worst weeks, and which cost line dominated.
• The Alliances tab is a dashboard rather than a list of names: combined market cap, revenue, departures and airports; which airports a partner reaches that you do not, which is what an alliance actually buys you; and where a partner is flying against you. Interline revenue is now the figure that went through your P&L, not an estimate that disagreed with it.

Everything above is covered by tests — the suite went from 26 to 42 files over these two days, and every balance change was measured before and after rather than eyeballed. If your numbers look different this week, that is why. Route economics explains how a route’s costs land on its bottom line, and the Discord is the place to tell me what feels wrong.

August 5, 2026

“Open Route” now tells you why it will not

From the Discord: “when clicking open route, nothing happens.” The reporter worked it out himself — he had not leased a gate at the destination yet — but the game never said so. The button simply absorbed the click.

• A blocked route now explains itself. Click Open Route when something is standing in the way and a notice names it: no gate at the far end, gate slots already full, the aircraft out of flying hours, the lane beyond its range, the plane not connected to either airport, or not enough cash for the launch. No more dead buttons.
• Missing gates show up before you click. The planner now displays your gate and slot position at both ends of the route, in red when you have none and amber when you are short of slots — each with an Add gate button right there, so you can fix it without leaving the page. The Routes tab has done this for a while; the planner had not caught up.
• The planner and the engine can no longer disagree. Every reason a route can be refused now lives in one place that both the planner and the simulation read from. If the engine will refuse a route, the planner knows the reason and shows it.

Gates are the thing most new airlines forget: you need one at both ends of every route, and each gate only carries so many departures a week. Route economics covers how gate costs land on a route’s bottom line.

August 2, 2026

The map stays where you put it

Straight from the Discord: “when you zoom in and pass your mouse over a route, it resets your zoom.” It did, and it should not have.

• Hovering a line snapped you back out. Zoom into a corner of your network to read two lanes, brush a route with the cursor, and the map jumped straight back to a view of everything you fly. On a big network that made the map close to unusable at any zoom above the default.
• The weekly tick did it too. Advancing a week re-drew the map, and the re-draw re-framed it — so any zoom you had set was gone as soon as time moved. Focusing a route and then panning away had the same problem: the next week yanked the camera back onto the focused route.
• Now the map only moves for a reason. It frames your network when the network actually changes — a route opened, a route closed, or a map filter narrowed what is on screen — and it flies to a route when you click it. Hovering, re-drawing and the passage of time leave your zoom exactly where you left it.
• Lines and tooltips are steadier as a side effect. The map was rebuilding every line on screen each time your cursor crossed one; it no longer does.

Clicking a route still frames it, and “Clear focus” still returns you to the whole picture. Route economics covers the numbers behind each line on the map.

July 31, 2026

Unions no longer demand the pay you are already giving them

Pay your pilots the maximum and, sooner or later, their union would sit down at the table and demand… the maximum. A whole round of contract talks over a raise of exactly nothing.

• Three choices, none of them real. “Accept” cost $0 a week and handed you a morale bonus for free. “Counter” offered the union its own number and could still be thrown back in your face — a morale hit and a spike in unrest for agreeing with them. “Refuse” punished you for declining to hand over nothing, and letting the clock run out did the same.
• Now they stay at their desks. A group already on the top pay setting has nothing to ask for, so no demand is tabled at all. The union simply looks in again later — and if you have cut pay by then, they will have plenty to say about it.
• If one of these is open on your airline right now, it will clear itself. The next week you play, a demand for the pay you are already on is quietly taken off the table — no morale hit, no unrest, and it will not lapse into a refusal on you.
• A counter that meets the demand is a deal. Splitting the difference sometimes rounds up to the full amount the union asked for. That is not a gamble any more: give them their number and the deal closes, every time. Where the split is genuinely lower, countering is the gamble it always was.

Everything else about labour is unchanged — low pay still drags morale down, unrest still builds, and a militant group will still walk. On-time performance covers what crew morale does to your operation, and route economics covers where the payroll lands on each route.

July 31, 2026

The route map was reporting the wrong load factors

Straight from a player: “why in one screen does it say my loads are 100% and then in two others it says they aren’t?” A fair question, and the map was the screen that was wrong.

• Network was simulating your routes on its own. The map and the route list underneath it ran their own quick estimate instead of reading the same weekly forecast the rest of the game uses — and that estimate handed you every passenger on the route, as though no competitor had ever entered it. It also ignored your fuel bill, your labour agreement, how hard your fleet is being worked, your on-time record and any live events.
• What that looked like. Busy routes pinned at 100% with fat profits on the Network tab, while the Dashboard and Finance → By Route showed the truth — often ten to fifteen points lower, and sometimes a loss where the map showed a gain. Nothing about your airline was actually wrong; only that one screen’s arithmetic was.
• Freight had the same problem, twice over. Cargo lanes on the map also missed the shared-lane demand pool, so two freighters on one lane each looked like they had the whole market.
• Now they all agree. The map reads the same forecast as everything else, cell for cell — load factor, profit, tooltips and all. Uncontested routes that genuinely run full still say 100%.

If your loads look lower on the Network tab than they did yesterday, that is the honest number and it always was — the other screens have been showing it all along. Route economics covers what actually moves a load factor, and competition covers what happens when someone enters your route.

July 31, 2026

Jet bases can be certified for more of your fleet

Straight from the Discord: “maintenance hub upgrades don’t allow additional certifications.” Quite right — and worse than it sounded. A base could only ever be certified for the aircraft families you ticked the day you built it. Upgrading a Line Station to a Maintenance Base bought a second certification slot that there was no way to spend, and paying for a bigger hangar to bring a second fleet type home simply did not work.

• Certify a base whenever you like. Every base now lists the families you fly but aren’t certified for, one button each. Click it and the base covers that type from then on — heavy checks come home instead of going to a third party, and the outsourced contract for that family is offset.
• The price is on the button before you spend. While the level’s included allowance lasts, another certification is free. Past it you pay once up front and a little every week, both shown up front — and the button greys out with the figure if you can’t cover it.
• An upgrade now delivers the allowance you paid for. A Line Station includes one certification, a Maintenance Base two, a Heavy MRO four. Whatever a level includes and you haven’t spent, the card tells you.
• Eight families, one hangar. That was always the engine’s ceiling; now the card shows where you stand against it rather than stopping you at the level’s allowance.
• Build one broad from day one. The build form lets you tick up to eight families, and the quoted price includes the extras instead of quietly dropping them.

If you have a base that has been stuck on one type, open the Maintenance page — the families it could be covering are waiting there. Fleet planning covers how many types are worth flying, and on-time performance covers what grounded aircraft do to your schedule.

July 31, 2026

Old jets stop being free money

A look through the aircraft market turned up a problem hiding in plain sight: a 1971 trijet was arriving brand new. Every out-of-production airliner in the game was delivered at zero hours with a full service life ahead of it, at a 1970s price — so a $4M Trident earned roughly six times the return on capital of a 737 MAX that cost fourteen times as much. Vintage metal is meant to be the cheap-and-thirsty rung on the ladder, not the best aircraft in the game.

• Classics now arrive used. 92 out-of-production types are delivered already 6 to 16 years old, depending on vintage — so they start on a higher maintenance curve, have fewer years of value left, and depreciate from what you actually paid. Freighter conversions have worked this way for a while; the passenger fleet had simply never been given the same treatment.
• The oldest airframes cost what they are worth. Twenty-three vintage types were priced off scrap values while still earning modern-day fares. Prices and lease rates on the worst offenders — the Trident 3B, 727-200, DC-8-63, 707-320B, A300B4, A310, 737-200/-300/-400/-500, MD-80 and others — have gone up, most of them doubling. They are still much cheaper than new metal; they are no longer a licence to print money.
• New metal finally earns its price. The re-engined generations were only about 4–5% better on fuel than the aircraft they replace, against a real-world 13–14%. The 737 MAX family and the A320neo family now deliver the full gain, which means they break even at a genuinely lower load factor than the classics they sit beside in the market.
• The Embraer line makes sense again. The E175 was listed as needing more runway than the heavier E190 — backwards, and it left the E175 with no reason to exist. Runway figures across the E-Jet family now match the real numbers, so the smaller jet does what it is actually good at: getting into airports the bigger ones can’t.
• 737-500 seat count corrected. It was carrying as many passengers as the longer -300 despite being three rows shorter. It now seats 140, in line with its certification.

If you are flying classics today, expect your lease bill to rise and your maintenance to climb faster than it used to — and expect a modern narrowbody to out-earn them per aircraft and per gate slot, which is how it should have been all along. Route economics and the aircraft guide have the updated numbers.

July 31, 2026

Reserve aircraft stop pretending to be idle

Another Discord catch: a jet you deliberately park at a hub as a reserve was still counted as an idle aircraft and still sat at the top of the route planner, ready to be deployed by accident — which quietly ended the standby cover you were paying for. Reserves now have their own place everywhere they are counted.

• A Reserve tab on the Fleet page. Next to All, Idle and Grounded there is now a 🛡 Reserve filter with its own count. Aircraft on standby have been pulled out of the Idle chip, the Idle Aircraft stat, the per-type and per-category breakdowns, the dashboard’s “idle aircraft, paying lease with no revenue” alert and the Routes header — a plane doing a job shouldn’t nag you to put it to work.
• Fleet utilisation counts them separately. The dashboard’s utilisation breakdown has a Reserve bucket, so standby aircraft no longer read as slack in the schedule.
• The route planner labels them. The aircraft type list now splits “3 ready” from “1 on reserve”, tails on standby are marked with their base in the aircraft list, and reserves sort to the bottom — so the one-click Open Route button reaches for a free aircraft first, never your cover. The same goes for the cargo planner, tag flights and the Transfer Routes screen.
• You can still fly one when you mean to. Nothing is hidden or blocked: pick a reserve and the planner tells you which aircraft it is, where it stands by, and that opening the route takes it off standby.

New to reserves? Station an idle aircraft at a hub or focus city from the Fleet page and it will automatically cover same-type aircraft based there during breakdowns and heavy checks. Fleet planning covers how much spare metal is worth carrying.

July 31, 2026

Freight lanes share one market — and cargo gets a Route Finder

A sharp catch from the Discord: putting several freighters on the same city pair created what were effectively separate copies of the route, and each one claimed the full cargo market. Fifteen 747Fs on a single lane, fifteen full loads, week after week. That exploit is closed — and freight planning got the tool passenger routes have had for a while.

• One lane, one pool of freight. All of your freighters flying the same city pair now share a single weekly demand pool, split by each aircraft’s share of the lane’s capacity — exactly how passenger routes have always shared a market. Two 747Fs on a lane with 800 tonnes of demand now carry ~400 tonnes each, not 800 each. Adding aircraft to a busy lane still makes sense right up until the demand runs out; past that point you are just flying empty decks.
• Your rate card still matters, per aircraft. Price one freighter above the market rate and that freighter’s share of the lane shrinks — underpricing a second aircraft can’t conjure new tonnage out of the same market.
• Joining an established lane skips the ramp-up. A lane you have served for months is already on forwarders’ books: a freighter added to it joins the mature pool instead of starting from zero. (Closing and reopening a route can’t reset or game the shared pool either.)
• The planner tells you the truth before you commit. Opening a lane you already fly now projects that aircraft’s share of the pool, with a note showing how much capacity you already have on the lane. Shared lanes are badged in your routes list so you can spot overserved pairs at a glance.
• New: Cargo Route Finder. The freight planner now has the same discovery tool as the passenger side — scan every lane from any airport, filter by distance or a freighter’s range, and sort by tonnage or revenue potential. Cargo demand follows trade, not tourism, so the best lanes look nothing like the best passenger routes; the aircraft guide covers which freighters fit which stage lengths.

If your freight network leaned on stacked lanes, this is a real rebalance — spread those freighters across new pairs (the Route Finder will point you at unserved ones) and check route economics for how demand, yield and load factor set a lane’s ceiling.

July 31, 2026

Takeovers are priced on what you actually get

A player spotted a carrier with a $500K market cap sitting on $67M in cash — and buying it for $625K handed over the whole $67M, plus ten routes and nineteen jets. That is fixed, and the way acquisitions are valued has been rebuilt around a simple rule: you can never buy an airline for less than the things it hands you.

• An airline is never worth less than its bank balance. Valuations are built from profits, so a carrier losing money badly could be priced below the cash it was sitting on. Losses still drag a valuation down — they now stop at the cash pile instead of falling through it.
• Takeover prices have a break-up floor. The price is whichever is higher: market cap plus the usual 25% premium, or the target’s cash plus what its aircraft would sell for. A struggling carrier can be worth less as a business than the jets it owns, and no board sells below the value of the metal.
• Distressed carriers are still a bargain — the discount just moved. A fire sale marks down the business, not the airframes. What a takeover still gets you cheaply is the network: the routes, gates and slots come with the deal, and that is where the real prize was all along.
• The confirmation screen shows its working. When the break-up floor is what sets the price, the Acquisition Summary says so and shows the number, so a deal can never cost more than the screen led you to expect.
• Rival airlines play by the same rule. AI-vs-AI mergers were priced the same loose way. They now respect the same floor, so no carrier can inflate itself by swallowing a cash-rich rival on the cheap.

Worth reading alongside route economics if you are weighing a takeover against simply opening the routes yourself — buying a network is now much closer to a fair fight with building one.

July 29, 2026

Small fixes

• The fuel gauge tells the truth. On the Fuel & Hedging screen, the “1.0 (normal)” marker sat in the middle of the bar while the needle for a perfectly normal fuel price sat a third of the way along — so normal fuel always looked cheap. The scale runs 0.55 to 1.9, which puts 1.0 at a third, and the label and a new tick mark now sit exactly there. Nothing about fuel costs changed; the gauge just stopped disagreeing with itself. See route economics for what fuel actually does to a route.

July 28, 2026

Maintenance gets its own page — and you can build your own hangars

Maintenance used to be a slider buried in Operations and a queue of checks you booked one aircraft at a time. It is now a place you go, with a network you build. Company › Maintenance holds the whole picture: what you spend keeping the fleet flying, what is in the shop right now, what is coming due, and where the work gets done.

• Breakdowns cost money now. An engine fault or a hydraulics leak used to ground an aircraft for a few weeks and charge you nothing. Every unscheduled failure now carries a repair bill scaled to what the airframe is worth and how badly it broke — and the bill climbs steeply with age. A twenty-year-old jet costs three times what a new one does to fix.
• Old metal can be written off. If a repair would cost more than the aircraft is worth, it doesn’t get repaired. The airframe leaves your fleet, its routes close, and hull insurance pays out if you owned it. It takes a genuinely elderly jet and a bad fault, but it happens — and it is the strongest argument yet for retiring aircraft before they retire themselves.
• Build jet bases. A base sits at one airport and is certified for specific aircraft families. A Line Station ($4M) handles breakdowns; a Maintenance Base ($25M) brings C checks in-house; a Heavy MRO ($90M) does D checks too. Work routed through your own base is cheaper and the aircraft is back in the air sooner.
• Bases need gates, and the hangar keeps them. One, two or three gates depending on the level, and those gates stop being available for flying. Putting a heavy maintenance base at your most congested airport is a real trade, not a free upgrade.
• Shop slots are the constraint. A base can only hold so many airframes at once — two, four or eight by level. Your own aircraft take priority; anything that overflows goes to a third party at full price and full downtime, and the shop board tells you exactly which jobs those were.
• Most of the outsourced contract goes away. Every aircraft family you fly carries a fixed weekly MRO contract whatever your fleet size. Certify a base for that family and up to 85% of the contract is offset, because you are now doing the work yourself. Concentrating one family through one base goes a long way toward paying for that base.
• A base takes time to bed in. New bases open at 60% effectiveness and reach full strength over about six months. Building one the week your fleet starts falling apart is too late.
• A spares dial. Each base holds a parts pool you can set from 0.5× to 2.0×. Deeper inventory ties up cash every week and gets grounded aircraft flying again sooner.
• Maintenance is more expensive overall. Family MRO contracts and heavy-check costs have roughly doubled, and breakdowns now cost money where they were free. Line maintenance per aircraft is deliberately unchanged, so no existing route’s economics move — the increase lands on airline-level overhead, where building bases and standardising your fleet are the answers.
• Reserves and bases work together. A reserve parked at one of your own bases is cheaper to keep on standby — your mechanics are already standing there.

The short version: a standardised fleet flying through a couple of well-placed bases is cheap and resilient, and a scattered nine-family fleet with no infrastructure bleeds. See the aircraft guide and route economics for where this sits in the wider cost picture.

July 27, 2026

Reserve aircraft — station a spare, and breakdowns stop costing you the week

When an aircraft blows an engine or disappears into a D check, its routes have always just sat there earning nothing until it came back. Requested by the community: you can now station an idle aircraft as a reserve, and the game does the airline thing — rolls the spare out of the hangar and onto the broken plane’s routes, then hands them back when it returns. No clicks, no gap.

• Station a spare at a hub. Any idle aircraft’s card in the Fleet tab now has a Reserve Standby section — pick one of your hubs or focus cities and hit Station. From then on it automatically covers any same-type aircraft whose routes touch that airport the moment one is grounded or goes into a heavy check, starting the very first week the revenue would have been lost.
• Identical type only. A 737 can’t stand in for an A320 — the reserve must be the same aircraft type as the plane it replaces, so the swap is genuinely like-for-like: same capacity, same range, no surprises. Running a common fleet quietly got more valuable; one spare A320neo can back up every A320neo at its base.
• Standing by costs money. A stationed reserve pays a readiness premium on its weekly line maintenance (crew on call, systems warm) plus a weekly parking fee that scales with the aircraft’s size and the airport’s — a widebody stand at a mega hub costs real money, a turboprop at a regional strip almost nothing. Parking is suspended in any week the reserve is actually out flying covers. Both show as their own line in the aircraft’s standby summary.
• Best effort, honestly reported. Coverage is per-route: the reserve takes the most valuable routes first and stops at its weekly block-hour limit, and multiple reserves can split one broken plane’s network. Anything left uncovered is called out — in a toast, in the Weekly Debrief, and in a new Reserve Coverage card in Operations — along with why: no same-type reserve based where those routes fly, or the spare is out of hours.
• Spares aren’t free hours. A covering reserve accrues wear toward its own C and D checks while it flies, and the broken plane’s clocks freeze in the shop. Fly your spare hard and it will need its own overhaul sooner.
• The edges behave. Sell or retire the broken plane mid-cover and the reserve simply keeps the routes as its own. Retire the reserve and the routes go home first. Strikes are deliberately not covered — a spare airframe doesn’t fix a picket line.

The old advice about idle planes still stands — but now “idle” has a job title. For where spares fit in the maintenance loop, see the aircraft guide and route economics.

July 27, 2026

Change a route’s frequency without closing it

Flying six a week when the load factor says you should be flying seven used to mean closing the route, freeing the aircraft and opening the whole thing again — paying the launch cost a second time and losing the route’s standing on the city pair for the sake of one extra departure. Frequency is now something you nudge.

• A −/+ stepper on every route. Expand a passenger route and the Freq column has controls next to the number. One click adds or removes a weekly flight, in place, with the seats, load factor, revenue and block hours on the row updating as you go.
• Adding is checked before it happens. The + knows everything the game would have refused after the fact — the aircraft’s weekly block-hour limit, free gate slots at both ends, and regulatory frequency caps on the pair. When one of those is what’s stopping you, the button says so instead of doing nothing.
• Reducing is always allowed. Taking a flight off only frees capacity, so it never needs permission. The floor is one a week — below that you’re closing the route, which is still the Remove button.
• Seasonal routes count properly. The check looks at the busiest month the route actually operates, so a summer-only route and a winter-only route can share the same aircraft and gates without blocking each other.
• Freight explains itself too. The cargo frequency + used to sit there doing nothing when the freighter was out of block hours or the gates were full. It now tells you which one it is — and on long-haul lanes, that a second freighter is how you add frequency.

For how frequency trades off against load factor and fares, see the route economics guide.

July 27, 2026

Point the Routes page at one airport — and a proper table for freight

Once a network passes forty or fifty routes, the Routes page stops being a list you read and becomes a list you scroll. The question you actually want to ask it is almost always about one airport: what am I flying out of Denver, and is any of it losing money? Now you can just ask.

• Filter by airport. A new Airport dropdown covers every airport your network touches, with the number of routes at each one shown next to it. Your hubs are pinned to the top of the list and marked with a star, so the airport you care about most is the first thing you see rather than something you hunt for alphabetically.
• One click for a hub. A row of hub chips sits above the routes — tap one to scope the whole page to that hub, tap it again to go back to the full network. No dropdown needed for the case you'll use ninety percent of the time.
• It scopes everything at once. Passenger pairs, multi-stop tag flights and freight all narrow together, and a multi-stop route counts as touching an airport if it's any stop on the chain, not just an endpoint. The filter also survives flipping between the passenger and cargo views, so you can compare both halves of a hub without re-selecting it.
• Direction doesn't matter. Filtering on JFK gives you everything with JFK at either end — the outbound and the return have always been one row, and the filter treats them that way.

Cargo gets the table view

Freight routes have been stuck as a stack of cards while passenger routes got a sortable table months ago. That's now fixed: the cargo list has the same Table / Cards toggle, with sortable columns across the figures that matter — tonnage, load, revenue, cost and margin — so you can sort your freighter network by margin and see the worst offender immediately instead of scrolling for it. Expand any row to get the fare and frequency controls without leaving the table.

For what those cargo margins should look like, see the route economics guide.

July 27, 2026

The aircraft picker now only offers aircraft you can actually use

Opening a route meant scrolling a dropdown that listed your entire passenger fleet — including aircraft that the game was always going to refuse. An aircraft can only pick up an extra route that touches an airport it already serves, so a 737 busy on a European network was never going to fly Los Angeles–Denver, however tempting it looked in the list. You found that out after filling in the form.

• Only eligible aircraft are listed. The picker now shows aircraft that are idle — a full 140 hours free, so they can go anywhere — plus any aircraft whose existing schedule already touches the origin or destination. Everything else is out of the list rather than waiting to reject you.
• Change the airports and the list follows. Pick a different destination and the picker re-evaluates, moving you to the best remaining aircraft instead of leaving an impossible one selected.
• Nothing eligible? It says so. Instead of a dropdown full of dead ends you get a plain explanation of the rule, so you know whether to lease another aircraft or route one through the airport first.
• “Spare hours” means useful spare hours. An aircraft with an hour left on its weekly limit was being counted as available, on the Routes header and in the picker alike. Anything with 5 hours or less now reads as having no spare hours — because it hasn’t got enough left to fly anything.

The same filtering applies to the multi-stop tag-flight planner. For how block hours and the weekly limit shape what your fleet can carry, see the route economics guide.

July 27, 2026

Hub congestion was measuring against the wrong gate

A gate in Tailwinds physically holds 50 departures a week — that's the hard limit the game enforces when you add a route, and it's the number the Airports tab has always shown you. The congestion warning on the Hub panel, though, was quietly measuring against a completely different figure: 16 departures per gate at a Major Hub. Two numbers for the same gate, roughly three times apart.

The effect was that congestion switched on at about a third of a hub's real capacity. If you were using your gates at all, the meter said “Congested” — and because the penalty bottoms out quickly, most congested hubs sat at the maximum debuff regardless of how far over they were. A hub at 110% and a hub at 400% got the same treatment, and the percentage in the warning didn't correspond to anything you could see elsewhere in the game.

• Thresholds now track the real gate. Congestion begins at 30 departures per gate at a Focus City, 35 at a Hub, 40 at a Major Hub and 45 at an International Gateway — 60% to 90% of the 50-slot physical limit. Better hubs work their gates harder before connections start to slip, which is the point of upgrading one.
• The curve has room to ramp. A hub 10% over capacity now loses about 5% of its connecting traffic; one filled right to the physical wall loses around 11%. It scales with how overloaded you actually are instead of jumping straight to the worst case.
• Buying gates does something immediately. Under the old numbers a badly congested hub needed a huge gate order before the meter moved at all. Now every gate you add shows up.
• The percentage means something. “% of slots” on the Hub panel is now readable against the 50 slots per gate the Airports tab quotes, rather than against an invisible second number.

If you've been staring at a hub flashing 284% and wondering how that squared with having plenty of slots left, that's why — it wasn't your reading of it. See the hub strategy guide for how tiers and gates fit together.

July 27, 2026

A News tab — your world now has a memory

The simulation has always generated far more story than you got to see. Rival airlines start fare wars, open second hubs, invest in cabins, run out of money and merge; the world economy moves through fuel spikes and recessions. All of it appeared briefly in the Weekly Debrief — the first six competitor lines, no more — and then vanished the moment you clicked through. There was no way to ask when a fare war had actually started.

The new News tab keeps it.

• Competitors — fare wars opening, ending and being capitulated, marketing blitzes, second hubs, route launches and withdrawals, capacity matched against your schedule, quality investment and service cuts, financial distress, mergers, failures and new entrants.
• World — economy events starting and ending, so you can see how long that recession has left to run.
• Fleet — aircraft arriving, heavy checks completing, unplanned groundings and mechanical faults.
• Company — board objectives completed with their reward, and your best trading week so far.

It groups the busy parts. In a healthy market several carriers launch routes most weeks, almost always one each — listed individually they'd bury everything else, so a week's launches collapse into one line you can open for the full list. Rare events always stand alone. Two filters help: big moves only, and near my network, which shows only what touches an airport you serve or a pair you fly. A rival opening a route into your hub is promoted to the top either way.

Your save keeps the most recent 250 items, which works out at roughly two game years of ordinary weeks. News starts accumulating from your next week — earlier history was never recorded, so existing saves begin with an empty page and fill from here.

See route economics for what a competitor's move on your pair actually does to your load factor.

July 26, 2026

Contested routes now count your whole operation

If you flew a city pair with more than one aircraft, the Competition tab was only showing one of them. A route worked by an A220 at 47 flights a week and a turboprop at 18 reported a grand total of 18 — so a rival looked like they were burying you on a route you were actually winning.

• Every aircraft counted. Flights per week on a contested route now add up across all the planes you have on that pair, in both directions.
• Seats per week added. A new row shows total weekly capacity, weighted by each aircraft's own seat count — a widebody and a regional jet on the same pair no longer get averaged into nonsense.
• Blended fare and quality. When your aircraft on a pair carry different fares or cabins, the comparison shows the frequency-weighted blend rather than whichever plane happened to be listed last.
• Seasonal routes respected. A summer-only schedule no longer gets added to a winter-only one — you see what's actually flying this month.

Thanks to Kat on the Discord for the report. See route economics for how frequency and capacity drive your share of a contested market.

July 26, 2026

Hub congestion now tracks flights, not routes

Gate congestion at your hubs used to count routes — so a twice-a-week regional spoke weighed exactly as much as a ten-a-day trunk route. That quietly punished the sensible move of building out domestic feed before going long-haul. It now measures the thing that actually fills a gate: weekly departures.

• Slots, not route count. Each gate handles a set number of departures a week — roughly 12 at a Hub, and more at Major Hubs and Gateways. Congestion only bites once your flights exceed that capacity, so a fistful of low-frequency routes barely registers.
• Gentler when it does bite. Even a hub run well over capacity keeps most of its connecting traffic now — the worst-case penalty eased from roughly −45% to −20%.
• Clearer meter. The Hub panel reads your weekly departures against gate capacity (“% of slots”) instead of a routes-per-gate ratio. Buying gates — or trimming frequency — still relieves it.

Building domestic before international is no longer a trap, and congestion is back to being a light nudge to spread flights across enough gates rather than a wall. See the hub strategy guide for how tiers and gates work.

July 25, 2026

Fleet tab: jump straight to a plane, service the whole fleet at once

Two quality-of-life upgrades for anyone running a large fleet. Opening an aircraft is faster to get around, and keeping your planes airworthy no longer means clicking through them one at a time.

• Click a plane, land on its details. Selecting an aircraft now scrolls its detail panel into view instead of leaving it buried below a long roster — no more hunting for it.
• Jump between sections. The detail panel has a new row of quick links — Routes, Cabin, Maintenance, Actions — so you can jump straight to the part you want. A warning dot on Maintenance flags any plane with a check coming due.
• Do all due checks in one click. When any aircraft need heavy maintenance, a bar at the top of the Fleet list offers Do all due C checks and Do all due D checks — each showing how many planes and the total bill before you commit.
• Or pick and choose. Tick a few aircraft and send just those in for a C or D check from the selection bar. Planes already in the hangar or with a check booked are skipped automatically.

Checks still take a plane out of service only for the work itself — it keeps its routes and resumes flying the moment the hangar is done. Pairs naturally with the fleet planning and aircraft guides.

July 24, 2026

Heavy maintenance: your fleet now visits the hangar

Aircraft don’t fly forever without care. Tailwinds now models the real airline maintenance calendar: your planes build up wear as they fly, and periodically they have to come out of service for a heavy check — the multi-week hangar visits every real carrier plans its fleet around. The light A- and B-checks stay folded into your weekly maintenance budget; the two big ones, the C check and the D check, are now yours to schedule.

• Wear comes from flying, not just the calendar. Every block-hour an aircraft flies brings its next check closer. Work a jet hard nine times a day and it comes due in months; keep it as a spare and it ages on the calendar instead. A C check lands roughly every two years, a D check every six — and a D covers the C.
• Checks take planes out of service. A C check is a week or two in the hangar; a D check is a month or more on a widebody, and it isn’t cheap — cost scales with the aircraft’s value. Time it for a demand trough with a spare ready to cover the route and it barely registers; get caught in the summer peak with no cover and it hurts.
• Schedule it your way. Open any aircraft and start a check now, or book one for a future week when the timing suits your network. The Fleet list flags every airframe — due soon, due, overdue, or in the shop.
• Miss the deadline and the regulator acts. Blow past the grace window and your aircraft is grounded on the spot: longer than a planned check, half again as expensive, and a hit to your reputation.
• Fresh checks pay you back. A checked airframe breaks down far less often, a D check knocks years off its running costs, and a well-kept plane holds its resale value — while one that’s overdue sells at a discount.
• Your crew and hubs help. A happy maintenance team and an in-house base at one of your hubs both bring check costs down.

It’s the call every real fleet planner faces: pour money into a 22-year-old airframe’s D check, or sell it and move on. Now it’s yours to make.

July 24, 2026

Order big, pay less: bulk fleet discounts

Buying aircraft now works the way it does in the real world, where nobody pays sticker price and a launch order of a hundred jets is a very different conversation from buying one. The more of a type you order in a single deal, the deeper the discount — scaling all the way to 20% off a 100-aircraft order.

• Volume is the lever. A small top-up earns a few percent; commit to a fleet and the manufacturer sharpens its pencil. Single orders now run up to 100 frames, and the discount applies to every aircraft in the deal.
• Order, don’t hoard. This replaces the old discount that simply rewarded already owning a lot of a type. Now it’s the size of the order in front of you that counts.
• A pricing tune-up, too. We went back through the whole catalogue against real 2026 market values and corrected the outliers — most notably the COMAC C919, which had drifted well above what the world’s most heavily-discounted narrowbody actually sells for.

July 24, 2026

The home page is the front door again

Coming back to Tailwinds used to drop you straight onto your airline’s dashboard. Now every visit opens on the home page first — a calmer starting point before you dive back into the numbers.

• Returning players land on the home page instead of being thrown right into the game. One tap on Play Free Now picks your airline up exactly where you left it — nothing about your save changes.
• In a hurry to get back to it? Bookmark tailwindsairlinegame.com/?play to skip the home page and jump straight into your game, the way it used to work.

July 23, 2026

The aircraft picker now leads with your free planes

A small tweak to the route-planning form that saves a lot of scrolling once your fleet grows.

• When you open or add flights to a route, the Aircraft dropdown is now ordered by spare capacity — the planes with the most free block hours sit at the top, and fully-booked ones sink to the bottom.
• Each option still shows exactly how many hours are free, so it's easier to grab the right aircraft without hunting. See route economics for how utilisation feeds profit.

July 22, 2026

See your quality score everywhere

Quality has always decided how passengers split between airlines — business travellers weigh it heavily — but until now you had to open each route to see yours. No longer.

• The Routes tab now shows a colour-coded, sortable Quality column for every city pair: green is 70+, red means your product is costing you passengers. The phone card view carries the same number.
• Scores are seat-weighted across every aircraft flying the pair, so mixed fleets show the blend passengers actually experience. Click any route for the point-by-point breakdown of where its score comes from.
• New guide for the theory-minded: How Demand & Quality Actually Work opens the hood on the passenger-choice model — segment weights, every quality factor, and the cabin-space tradeoff behind route profitability.

July 21, 2026

A polish pass across the whole game

A full sweep of the interface — every screen reviewed on desktop and phone, and twenty rough edges smoothed out in one go.

• Big money finally reads like big money: balances past a billion now show as $1.49B instead of $1485.34M, everywhere amounts appear.
• Phones behave: the page no longer wiggles sideways, the top bar fits, and the date and next-week countdown now live in the ⋮ menu. Menus opened from a scrolled tab bar stay on screen too.
• Finance is more honest: the weekly P&L comparison now shows real signs on EBITDA and net cash instead of stripping the minus, and its history math includes loyalty and partner costs so past weeks reconcile with the waterfall.
• Fleets with older duplicate aircraft names (two “#18”s) tidy themselves up automatically on the next week.
• Lots of small polish: charts in Statistics fill their cards, manufacturer filters wrap instead of running off screen, the airports-in-progress list is a compact grid, expand arrows in the Routes table are actually visible, and a handful of confusing labels got rewritten.

July 20, 2026

Runways matter now

Until today, any aircraft could serve any airport it could reach. No longer — every airport now has its longest runway on record, every aircraft has a minimum runway it needs, and the two have to agree before a route can open.

• Airport pages now show the longest runway in feet, and every type in the aircraft guide and the in-game Marketplace lists the runway it requires. Shop accordingly.
• You can no longer open a route — or swap in a different aircraft — if either airport is too short for the type. Routes you already fly are grandfathered: they keep operating, marked with a Runway waiver badge.
• The numbers reflect real operations, not brochure figures. LaGuardia’s 7,002 ft handles the A321s and 737-900ERs that really fly there; John Wayne’s 5,701 ft takes a 737-800 with room to spare; short strips in the islands and mountains stay turboprop and regional-jet territory, which makes fleet choice on thin routes matter more — see route economics.
• London City gets the full treatment: its 4,948 ft runway and steep approach admit only certified types — regional jets, turboprops, and now the A220-100 and A318, matching their real-world certification.

July 20, 2026

A proper pass for phones and small screens

Players told us the game felt cramped on a phone — the setup screen most of all. Here is a focused pass on small screens. Nothing about the desktop game changes.

• Setting up your airline fits the screen now. The new-airline screen — name, logo, colour and home hub — was squeezed on phones, with the logo picker crushed and its labels cut off. It has been rebuilt for narrow screens: the logo grid reflows, every name is readable, and the whole flow is comfortable to tap through.
• Your routes open as cards on a phone. The wide route-comparison table is awkward on a small screen, so on phones the Routes page now opens in card view by default — still one tap to the full table when you want it.
• Tables stay readable. Where a table still scrolls sideways on a phone — your fleet, the finances — the first column (the aircraft, route or line item) now stays pinned while you scan the numbers, and the filter chips scroll in a single row instead of wrapping into a jumble.
• Sized for fingers, and notch-safe. Buttons, tabs and menus are bigger tap targets, and if you add Tailwinds to your home screen it now keeps clear of the notch and home indicator.

Spotted something that still feels off on your phone? Let us know on the Discord.

July 20, 2026

A table view for your gates

Player feedback strikes again: once an airline holds gates at thirty-plus airports, the Gates tab turned into a very long scroll. It now scales the same way the Routes page does.

• New table view for Your Gates. The Gates tab now opens as a compact, sortable table — airport, region, gates held, slots used, a utilisation bar, and weekly cost, with add/remove and details buttons on every row. Click any column header to sort; the default order still puts your busiest, most congested airports first. Prefer the old look? A toggle switches back to cards, and phones keep the card view by default.
• Airport search survives region switches. When browsing airports to buy gates, switching between regions no longer clears the search box — type a city once and hop between regions to find it. More on gates and slots in the route economics guide.

July 19, 2026

Codeshare partnerships are now unlimited

The cap on bilateral codeshare agreements is gone — you can now partner with as many carriers as you like.

• No more six-partner limit. Sign a codeshare with every worthwhile carrier on the board; there's no longer any ceiling on how many agreements you can hold at once.
• Build the network you want. Feed traffic in from partners across every region without cancelling one deal to make room for another. Each agreement still carries its own weekly fee, so weigh that against the connecting revenue a partner brings — see the competition & alliances guide.

July 17, 2026

Easier aircraft shopping and cabin planning

A round of quality-of-life upgrades driven by player feedback, focused on the Market and the cabin configurator.

• Search the aircraft market. A search box now sits above the filters — type a model or manufacturer and the list narrows instantly.
• New table view for comparing aircraft. Switch the Market between photo cards and a compact table with sortable columns (seats, range, fuel per seat, efficiency, maintenance, lease and purchase price, delivery time). Click any column header to sort. Your choice is remembered.
• Faster cabin configuration. Every class now has plus/minus steppers and a Max button that fills the remaining floor space with that class in one click — an all-first-class cabin is now one tap away. Each class also shows its revenue per unit of floor space so layout trade-offs are easier to judge; see the aircraft guide.
• Flight frequency now shows its real limit. The route planner caps the flights-per-week slider at what one aircraft can physically fly on that distance (each airframe has 140 flying hours a week), and labels 7× as what it is: daily service. Freight routes get the same treatment; details in the route economics guide.
• Sliders are actually draggable. The pay, maintenance, price, and frequency sliders had a tiny grab area that often started a text-selection drag instead. They now have a proper hit area and drag reliably.
• Copy cleanup. Aircraft descriptions and interface text were rewritten to be shorter and plainer.

July 15, 2026

Put idle hours to work: fly one plane on several routes

An aircraft with spare weekly flying hours can now open additional routes straight from the route planner — you no longer need a brand-new, fully idle plane for every route. If a jet or freighter is only lightly used, the planner offers it for your next lane instead of telling you to lease another.

• The aircraft-type dropdown now shows how many planes are “ready” for the lane you’re viewing — counting idle aircraft and ones with hours to spare — not just fully-idle airframes.
• Reused planes are labelled “shares hours,” so it’s clear when a route will run on an aircraft that’s already flying elsewhere.
• Clearer guidance when a plane can’t be used. If your only spare-capacity aircraft are working a different part of the map, the planner now explains that a plane can only add a route touching an airport it already serves — rather than just saying “lease one.” Aircraft still cap out at 140 flying hours a week; see the route economics guide.

This applies to both passenger and freight routes, and nothing changes for routes you already run — you simply have more ways to get value from the fleet you own.

July 15, 2026

Route demand rebalanced against real-world traffic

We audited passenger demand on dozens of real city pairs against published airline traffic data — and the model needed work. The world's busiest real routes were tiny in the game, while some pairings that barely support a daily flight in reality were oversized. Demand between cities has been recalibrated from the ground up, so the map now rewards the same instincts that work for real airlines.

• Captive corridors are now the giants they should be. Where flying is the only practical option — island routes like Seoul–Jeju and Tokyo–Sapporo, and no-rail trunks like Sydney–Melbourne or Jeddah–Riyadh — demand is dramatically higher. The busiest routes in the game now mirror the busiest routes on Earth.
• Borders and wealth matter. Domestic markets outdraw international ones of the same size, strong ties (UK–Ireland, Australia–New Zealand, Gulf worker corridors) keep demand high across borders, and routes between cities where few people fly no longer punch above their weight.
• Tourism finally counts. Destinations like Cancún, Orlando, Bali and Jeju now draw demand from their visitor traffic, not just their resident population.
• Very short hops got a reality check. City pairs under ~200 km where driving is easy support far fewer passengers — but island hops with no road alternative, like Hawaii inter-island flying, keep their full demand.
• Markets are bigger overall. Popular routes carry roughly 1.5–2x the passengers they used to, so expect higher demand on your existing network and room for more frequency — see the route economics guide for how demand, fares and load factors interact.

Existing saves pick up the new demand the next time you play a week — no reset needed. If a route suddenly looks much busier (or quieter), that's the world getting more honest.

July 11, 2026

Your airline, charted over time

The Finance tab has a new Statistics page that turns your airline's history into charts — and lets you zoom from the last few weeks all the way out to decades.

• Where your passengers come from. A stacked view splits every week's traffic three ways: travelers flying you point-to-point, passengers connecting over your own hubs, and the feed your alliance and codeshare partners hand onto your flights.
• The numbers that matter, tracked. Revenue, costs and net profit; active routes, weekly departures, destinations served and fleet size; load factor, yield and capacity — each on its own chart, with details on hover.
• Any window you like. Filter from the last 4 weeks up through 6 months and a year, and on out to 3, 5, 10, 20 or 30 years. Longer views smooth the line so a decade of flying still reads at a glance.
• Builds as you fly. Your airline starts keeping these records the moment the update lands, so the picture grows richer with every week you play.

July 11, 2026

World events now actually ground passengers

Until now, a pandemic scare or recession quietly skimmed a percentage off your total revenue while every flight still showed a full cabin — confusing, and impossible to manage around. World events now shrink the passenger pool itself, so the impact shows up where you can see it and act on it: fewer passengers, lower load factors, and softer revenue on each affected route.

• Load factors tell the truth. During a demand shock your Routes page, route details and Finance breakdowns all agree — if demand is down 30%, you'll see emptier cabins, not a mystery gap between your route table and your weekly revenue.
• Regional events finally bite. Volcanic ash clouds, regional unrest and other localized disruptions now hit only the routes touching the affected countries — and demand-boosting events like expos and sporting championships lift the host region for real. Check the event banner, then check the map.
• Fortress routes ride it out. A route where demand far exceeds your seats can absorb a moderate shock and stay full — spare demand is a buffer. Thin routes with no cushion feel the full force, so a diversified network matters more than ever.
• Planning tools match reality. The route planner and forecasts now include active event effects, so a route you scout mid-pandemic shows what it would really earn this week.

July 10, 2026

Transfer routes between aircraft

By popular demand: you can now move an aircraft's entire schedule to another plane without tearing it down and rebuilding it. Open an aircraft on the Fleet page and hit Transfer Routes to pick a compatible open tail — every route moves across with its maturity, pricing and seasonal windows intact, and the old aircraft goes idle, ready to sell or return.

• Perfect for new deliveries. When an owned aircraft arrives, swap it in for the leased plane flying your network, then return the lease — no relaunch costs, no demand ramp reset.
• Compatibility checked for you. The picker only offers aircraft that can actually fly the schedule — enough range for the longest leg, within weekly block-hour limits, airport restrictions respected, and freighters stay on cargo work. Incompatible tails show why.
• Free of charge. Transfers cost nothing — the whole point is keeping the route maturity you've already paid to build.

July 10, 2026

The great rebalance: running an airline is supposed to be hard

Money came too easily. Routes broke even at load factors no real airline could survive on, full planes at premium fares never attracted competition, and a profitable network became a money printer with no way to lose. This update rebalances the whole economy toward something closer to real airline economics.

• Flying costs what flying costs. Crew operating costs are up substantially across every aircraft type, fixed staff overheads per aircraft are higher, and lease rates have risen. A typical route now breaks even around a 70–80% load factor instead of 50% — pick your aircraft and frequencies like it matters, because it does. See the route economics guide for how the cost lines stack up.
• Fares tightened. Market reference fares are trimmed a few percent, squeezing yields on every route.
• Full planes attract rivals. Competitors now move in on routes you run near-full — even at fair fares — and the threshold for punishing premium pricing is much lower. A monopoly route at fat margins is an invitation, not an annuity. Keep an eye on your busiest markets.
• A gentler runway for new routes. New routes now start at a higher share of their mature demand and ramp up in about four months instead of six, so opening a route is a manageable investment rather than a black hole — important now that margins are thinner.
• More starting capital. Founders' equity is up from $10M to $15M to fund the leaner early game.
• Rivals configure their cabins properly. Competitor airlines no longer all fly the same one-size-fits-all cabin: premium carriers now dedicate up to 22% of long-haul seats to business class, legacies up to 15%, and budget carriers stay all-economy. Expect tougher competition for high-yield passengers on long-haul trunk routes — and easier pickings against a low-cost rival's all-economy cabin.

Net effect: careful network planning, sensible pricing and watching your fleet costs are now the difference between an airline and a bankruptcy filing. Existing saves keep working — but expect your margins to tighten.

July 10, 2026

Loyalty rework: a long game with real money on the line

Frequent-flyer programs used to be a vending machine — fund one for a quarter, collect a permanent bonus. No longer. Loyalty is now a genuine long-term investment: expensive up front, compounding for years, and painful to abandon.

• Program maturity. Alongside member sign-ups, your program now builds maturity over roughly 18 months of continuous funding. A young program delivers only a quarter of its potential — the full demand shield, price-sensitivity protection and reputation prestige unlock as members build status and history worth protecting.
• Points are a real debt. Members earn points on every flight, and those points accrue as a visible points liability you repay over the following months as award seats. A growing program looks cheap before the redemption bill arrives — budget for it. About 20% of points quietly expire unused, which is where a well-run program eventually finds its margin.
• Expect years, not weeks. Enrollment is slower and early effects smaller: a well-funded program typically runs at a net loss for its first year and breaks even after two to three. After that it's one of the strongest moats in the game.
• Killing a program hurts. Defund a mature program and elite members defect fast, trust unwinds four times quicker than it was built — and every outstanding point must still be honoured.
• Elite tier matters now. Higher investment tiers no longer just enrol members faster — they raise the effect ceilings. Gold caps the hub demand boost at +10%; Elite pushes it to +12.5% with a stronger price shield, and matures fastest.
• Members who stop flying stop counting. Membership is measured against a rolling average of your recent passengers, and can't exceed ~85% of a month's flyers — shrink your network and lapsed members drift away over the following year rather than propping up an inflated "100% enrolled" figure.

The in-game wiki's Loyalty section has the full numbers. Existing saves carry over: established programs are credited with partial maturity rather than starting from zero. See also the strategy guide on when a loyalty program fits your airline's stage.

July 8, 2026

Two new alliances: the value bloc and the emerging-market network

The alliance map grows from three global blocs to five, giving more carriers — and more playstyles — a network to call home.

• Horizon Coalition. A low-cost carriers' alliance with cheap dues, an easy entry bar (just 5 routes and a 35 quality score), and the strongest revenue lift on contested routes. For the first time, running a budget carrier doesn't mean going it alone.
• Meridian Alliance. A fast-growing bloc of carriers across Africa, South Asia and Latin America, coordinating schedules to open connecting demand through emerging-market gateways the legacy alliances underserve.
• More room to choose. With five alliances competing for members, rivals spread across a wider map and your own membership decision carries more weight. Benefits still track live membership as carriers join and leave over time.

See the full lineup and eligibility on the Alliances page in-game.

July 8, 2026

The hub overhaul: focus cities, real connections, and fortress hubs

The biggest network update Tailwinds has shipped. Hubs are no longer a passive checkbox — they're a system you build, defend, and feel in every line of your P&L.

• Focus cities. A new starter designation below Hub: 5 gates and $1M gets you a small connecting operation with modest cost savings — active immediately, and allowed anywhere, including abroad (one per foreign country). At home, grow one to 10 gates and promote it to a full hub.
• Connections are real now. Connecting revenue comes from actual one-stop itineraries sold over your hubs — every spoke you add opens new city-pair markets, and the route screen shows exactly which markets feed each flight. Connecting passengers occupy real seats too, so feed can fill an underperforming spoke.
• Hubs cut your costs. Routes touching your hubs get cheaper ground handling and catering (your own staff and kitchens), much cheaper crew layovers (crews sleep at home), and — at Major Hub and above — discounted maintenance from on-site line stations. The Hubs page totals the weekly savings.
• Earning your tiers. Hub upgrades now cost real capex and construction time: $5M and 4 weeks for a Hub, up to $100M and 16 weeks for an International Gateway. And money alone won't cut it — a Major Hub demands 20 routes at the airport, a Gateway 50 routes, 6 international destinations, 1,000 connecting passengers a week, and half a year's service as a Major Hub. The upgrade button is now a checklist, so you always know the path.
• Hub competition and fortress hubs. Rivals hubbing at your airport now siphon connecting traffic — the new dominance bar shows your share. Dominate an International Gateway with over 60% and it becomes a fortress: +2 quality and pricing power on every route touching it.
• Congestion you can fix. The old hidden big-hub penalty is gone. Congestion is now about routes per gate — exceed what your tier's facilities handle and connections suffer, visibly, until you buy more gates. When gates run short at your fortress, that's the game telling you to open a second hub.

The in-game wiki's Hubs section covers all the numbers, and the route economics guide explains how connecting demand feeds route revenue. Existing saves carry over cleanly — your current hubs keep their tiers.

July 7, 2026

Unions arrive: strikes and contract negotiations

Underpaying your people is no longer a slow, quiet drag on quality — labor relations now have teeth.

• Union unrest. Each labor group — pilots, cabin crew, ground staff, maintenance — now builds unrest week by week while its morale sits below 50, and the deeper the deficit the faster it climbs. Watch the new unrest bars on the Operations page: cross the strike threshold and a walkout is only a dice roll away.
• Strikes ground your schedule. When a group walks out, a large share of your flights are cancelled for one to two weeks — pilots hit hardest at over half the schedule — while your fixed costs keep running. Settle instantly with a 15% raise, or hold the line and eat the losses. Either way there's an industrial truce before the next walkout can start.
• Contract talks every couple of years. Each union periodically tables a pay demand — bigger after profitable years, and a snap back toward market rate if you've been paying below it. You get four weeks to accept, counter at the midpoint, or refuse. Counters are a gamble: content crews usually take the deal, angry ones pocket the raise and come back sooner. Ignoring the demand counts as a refusal.
• Strike losses on the books. Cancelled-flight revenue losses show up in the weekly debrief and your revenue history, so you can see exactly what a labor dispute cost you.

The full mechanics are documented in the in-game wiki under Operations. Cost-cutters, consider this your two-week warning — the strategy guide's advice about not gutting pay just became load-bearing.

July 8, 2026

Fixed: quality investments now count on multi-aircraft routes — and the Alliances page stops lying

Players reported being unable to push their quality score past ~60 — thanks for flagging it, and for the follow-up reports. It turned out to be TWO bugs:

• The Alliances page's "Product quality" was hardwired to 60. It read a per-route quality field the engine never actually reported, so every route fell back to a default of 60 — the number literally could not move, no matter what you flew. Since that same figure gates alliance eligibility, premium alliances with a quality requirement above 60 were impossible to join. The engine now reports real per-route quality scores and the page (and eligibility checks) use them.
• On routes flown by two or more of your own aircraft, the combined offer competing for market share ignored your catering, cabin-space, ground-staff and hub-investment quality bonuses (up to ~30 points!), plus the price-sensitivity shield from reputation and loyalty. All bonuses now apply everywhere.

Also worth knowing: a standard-everything product genuinely tops out in the low 60s by design. To go higher, upgrade seat and service quality, fly a younger fleet, invest in hubs and catering, keep morale high, and leave slack in your schedules — the quality breakdown on each route's detail page shows exactly where your points come from.

One more refinement in this update: spacious cabins now build lasting goodwill. Floor space you deliberately leave unfilled already boosted per-route quality — it now also feeds your passenger-satisfaction track record, so a roomy fleet earns its reputation over time just like good catering and punctuality do.

And we simplified the scoreboard. Six overlapping labels ("overall brand score", "product quality", "quality score (demand)", "passenger satisfaction"…) are now three clear scores, each answering one question: Quality — how good is the product? (wins market share and business travelers; satisfaction is a component inside it), Reputation — how much do travelers trust you? (demand nudge + price power), and Awareness — how many people know you exist? (demand reach). The Reputation page shows all three with their exact effects, and the Wiki explains the model.

July 7, 2026

Quality overhaul: earned reputations and cabins that matter

The quality system got a deep rework — your product choices now do exactly what they say, and your customer rating is something you earn.

• Passenger satisfaction is now a track record. A new satisfaction stat drifts each week toward the experience you actually delivered — punctuality, crew service, cabin product, catering, fleet age — and your customer rating comes from it. Gut your service to save money and the rating erodes over the following weeks; rebuilding trust is just as slow. Watch it on the Reputation page.
• Seat AND service quality now both count. Service quality (the soft product) previously cost money without moving demand — it now adds its own quality points alongside seat quality. And basic tiers are a real low-cost play: they save weekly cost per route in exchange for a quality penalty, instead of being a pointless label.
• See exactly where your quality score comes from. Route Detail now has a full breakdown — points from on-time performance, customer rating, cabin product, fleet age, cabin space, catering, ground staff and hub investment — so you know which lever to pull. The Competition page now shows the same score the demand engine actually uses.
• Quality now captures business travelers — even on monopoly routes. Business passengers have alternatives (rail, another hub, a video call), so the business demand you can capture scales with quality: roughly −12% for a bare-bones product up to +12% for a flagship one. On contested routes the whole market's business pool grows or shrinks with the quality on offer, so a premium product pays twice: a bigger pool and a bigger slice of it.
• Flagship products can charge flagship fares. Quality now stretches the business fare travelers will tolerate (about ±7%) before demand collapses — a luxury cabin holds a fat premium, while premium pricing on a bare-bones product gets punished sooner.
• Service moments make the news. New random events shock passenger satisfaction directly: a catering contractor meltdown or baggage-system failure dents it, a viral crew moment or industry service award lifts it — and the effect fades gradually over the following weeks, like real reputations do.
• Route forecasts got honest. The route planner now forecasts with your real on-time rate, fleet utilization and earned satisfaction instead of fixed averages, so projected quality matches what actually happens after launch.

More on how quality shifts demand share in the competition guide.

July 7, 2026

On-time performance: it takes a whole airline (and a rested fleet)

Your on-time rate used to depend on pilot morale alone. Now it reflects how airlines actually run:

• Every frontline team matters. Punctuality now blends the morale of pilots (50%), ground staff (30%) and cabin crew (20%). Underpaying your ramp agents finally shows up where passengers notice — late departures.
• Overworked fleets run late. Push your average aircraft utilisation past roughly 60% of the weekly block-hour cap and schedules lose the slack to absorb delays — a fleet flown flat-out loses up to 12 points of on-time rate. Idle spare aircraft act as a buffer that protects punctuality, so a standby jet is no longer pure dead weight.
• Late flights cost you twice. A weaker on-time rate lowers your quality score (hurting demand on contested routes) and raises passenger compensation payouts. See the route economics guide for how quality feeds demand.

July 7, 2026

Freighters now look like freighters

Several cargo aircraft in the market — the 757-200PF, MD-11F, DC-10-30F, 727-200F, A321P2F, and 767-200SF — were showing photos of their passenger cousins. They now show proper freighter photos, windowless fuselages and all. Browse the full fleet in the aircraft guide.

July 7, 2026

Add Flights fixed, and no more silent dead ends

A player on Discord reported that "Add Flights" sometimes did nothing — thanks for the report! The button could look ready while the game quietly refused the request. All of those dead ends are fixed:

• Add Flights works reliably. The form now pre-selects an aircraft that already flies the route (which merges frequency for free), and freighters no longer appear in the passenger aircraft list — picking one was silently ignored.
• Every blocker is now visible before you click. Regulatory limits (like perimeter rules and per-route frequency caps) and the one-time route launch cost now show right in the form, instead of the request quietly failing. See the route economics guide for how launch costs work.

July 6, 2026

Smarter passengers, real marketing, and big-network tools

This update makes demand feel much more alive, and gives players with large networks the management tools they've been asking for.

Demand & marketing

• Loyalty and reputation now feed directly into the demand engine. Loyal passengers are less price-sensitive, and your airline-wide reputation shifts demand share on every contested route — quality investments finally pay where it counts.
• Marketing reworked from the ground up. Campaigns now build awareness over time using an adstock model instead of an instant, flat boost. You can target campaigns at specific airports, and share of voice matters — competitors run their own marketing, including aggressive blitzes you'll need to answer.

Quality of life for big airlines

• Route management is now table-first — sort, scan, and edit a 100-route network without endless scrolling.
• Bulk fleet actions: select multiple aircraft to configure, sell, return, or retire in one pass.
• Orders & Deliveries: a new Market subtab tracks incoming aircraft, and you can now give aircraft custom names.
• Route planners show an inline "Add gate" button when a hub runs out of slots.

Balance

• Economy rebalance: thinner route margins, slower route spool-up, and competitors that arrive earlier. Easy money is over — plan accordingly. The route economics guide reflects the new reality.

July 5, 2026

Competitors that actually compete

The biggest AI update since launch. Rival airlines are no longer static route lists — they run their businesses:

• Full competitor AI. Rivals expand into profitable markets, defend their hubs, and respond to your moves.
• Fare wars. Undercut a competitor on their turf and expect retaliation on price — sometimes sustained, sometimes ruinous for both sides.
• Quality investment. AI carriers upgrade their product over time. You're no longer the only airline that can win on quality.
• Dynamic alliances and second hubs. Competitors form alliances and open new hubs as they grow, reshaping the map mid-game.
• Route finder. A new tool that scans the map for underserved opportunities from any airport.
• Cabin template picker for faster, consistent fleet configuration.

Strategy implications are covered in the updated competition & alliances guide.

July 4, 2026

Bulk pricing tools

• Reprice routes in bulk: filter by occupancy (find everything under 60% load in one click), select route cards, and adjust fares together instead of one dialog at a time.
• Dashboard and Routes screens now share a single projection engine — the numbers you see are the numbers the simulation uses.
• Cleaned up the site: new content pages and footer navigation, plus fixes to duplicate aircraft photos.

June 24, 2026

Double deckers arrive

• The A380 and 747 family are now in the marketplace, with a Double Decker filter to find them. Can your network actually fill 500 seats? The flagship guide will help you decide.
• Fuel rebalance: base fuel price stepped up to $1.20/litre over several patches, making fuel efficiency — and hedging — meaningfully more important.
• Fleet-complexity surcharge: each additional aircraft family adds ~2% to pilot and maintenance overhead. Fleet commonality is now a real strategy, not just a tip.
• Fixed capacity caps on multi-aircraft routes and capacity-limited load factor display, with a new "capacity-limited" badge.

June 21, 2026

Branding & freight polish

• In-game branding editor: upload your own logo, or use the built-in system — neutral greyscale bases with your accent colour driving the motif. Rename and recolour your airline any time.
• Freight UX: open cargo routes straight from the Routes page, a freighter-only checkout flow, and cargo flights auto-resume after mechanical delays.
• Your airline's real mark now shows in the setup screen and header.

June 19, 2026

Tailwinds goes mobile

• Install it like an app. Tailwinds is now a progressive web app: add it to your home screen for a full-screen experience, with offline start once cached.
• A proper mobile layout: responsive route map, scrollable tables, a compact top bar with overflow menu, and touch-friendly inputs throughout.
• Groundwork for further mobile improvements — if you play on a phone, feedback is especially welcome on Discord.