Fleet Planning: The Right Aircraft at the Right Time

Fleet decisions are the biggest financial commitments you make in Tailwinds. This guide covers the lease-versus-buy question, old versus new generations, fleet commonality, and how your fleet should evolve from startup to global carrier.

The golden rule: routes first, fleet second

Never lease an aircraft and then go looking for something to do with it. Every aircraft should be the answer to a question your route map is already asking: "what's the cheapest machine that can fly this mission with seats I can actually fill?" Fleet planning done in the other direction — falling in love with a jet and hunting for routes to justify it — is how hangar queens are born. An idle or half-utilised aircraft still pays its full weekly lease and maintenance.

Lease or buy?

In Tailwinds, leasing costs roughly 9–14% of an aircraft's purchase price per year, charged weekly, plus a refundable deposit of twelve weeks' rent when you sign. Buying pays the full price up front. The arithmetic gives clear guidance:

• Lease when you're growing. Early on, cash is your scarcest resource and flexibility your best defence. Leasing keeps money free for routes and lets you hand back a mistake — though returning an aircraft before its lease is up costs half the rent still owed (the deposit does come back). With $10M of starting capital, buying anything meaningful is off the table anyway.
• Buy when cash is piling up and the aircraft is a keeper. Once an aircraft type has proven itself on routes you'll fly for years, buying eliminates the lease line forever. Over a long enough horizon, ownership wins — at typical rates, about eight years of rent adds up to the purchase price, with nothing to show for it. An owned aircraft can also be sold (at its depreciated value, less a 5% fee) or pledged for Aircraft Finance, the cheapest loan the bank offers.
• Era games change the menu. In a game that starts in a historical year, lessors only carry a type once it has been in service for ten years (war-surplus types excepted), so a brand-new design has to be bought. And a type that is out of production today, and so listed at a used-frame price, costs two and a half times that while its line is still open, easing back over the twelve years after the line closes.
• Mixed fleets are sensible. Own the stable core (your hub workhorses on proven trunks), lease the experimental edge (new markets, seasonal capacity, anything you might regret).

Lease terms, renewals and buyouts

A new lease runs one year for a turboprop, eighteen months for a regional jet, two years for a narrow-body (and most other types) and three years for a widebody, at a rent fixed the day you sign. As a lease runs down, the aircraft card gives you three ways out: Extend Lease +1yr (free, at the same rent), Buy Out Lease (the aircraft's current value plus a 10% premium, less the deposit you already paid), or Return Aircraft — and an aircraft that goes back takes its routes with it. If you'd rather not watch expiry dates, tick Auto-renew leases on the Fleet screen: every lease is renewed for one, two or five years when it has four weeks left, at the rent it was signed at, and you can mark individual aircraft to let expire.

Ordering: lead times and bulk discounts

Nothing arrives the day you pay for it. Every aircraft, bought or leased, is an order with a delivery date: the first frame of a type takes twice that type's lead time, and each further frame of the same type follows one lead time after the last. Turboprops come quickest; jumbos are slowest — the first 747 or A380 takes ten weeks and each one after it five more. Order capacity for a new market before you need it, not the week the route opens.

• Bulk orders are cheaper — when you buy. Ordering several of one type in a single order earns a manufacturer discount on every frame: 3% from three aircraft, rising in steps to 20% for a hundred. Leases get no bulk discount.
• Cancelling is cheap, mostly. In a game without production lines, a lease order cancelled before delivery refunds its deposit in full, and a purchase cancelled before delivery refunds 95% of the price. With production lines it costs more (below).
• Hire the crew to match. In a new game crews are hired and trained, and pilots take the longest — ten weeks. If you are badly short of pilots or cabin crew, aircraft you can't staff are parked, still paying their lease. Start recruiting when you place the order.

Production lines: sharing the factory with your rivals

In a new game (unless you switch it off at setup), every aircraft comes off a factory line that you share with the rival airlines. Each family has one line (the 737NG, the A320neo, the 777 and so on) building a set number of aircraft a week: four for turboprops, three for regional jets and narrowbodies, two for widebodies, and one for jumbos, Concorde and freighter conversions. A line that builds up a long backlog speeds up a little. The rivals order off the same lines and wait for their aircraft just as you do. A rival opening a route, adding flights or moving to a bigger type orders the aircraft first, and the change happens when they arrive. If they book up the weeks you wanted, your aircraft arrive later.

• Your own deliveries are spaced out. From one line, your aircraft arrive at least a set gap apart: a week for turboprops, two for regional jets, three for narrowbodies, four for widebodies and five for jumbos. Leases and purchases count together, and so do all the types on the line. A 737-700 and a 737-800 come off the same line.
• 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, down to the build time itself. Rivals with plenty of cash buy early weeks too when a line is busy.
• Look before you commit. Every aircraft in the market shows how many are flying and on order across the game, which airlines hold them, how busy its line is over the next six months, and the first week you can have one at list price. If your favourite type's line is full, a sister type on a quieter line can be the faster way to grow.
• Purchases are paid in stages. You pay a deposit when you sign, instalments 18, 12 and 6 weeks before delivery, and the remaining three quarters on the week each aircraft arrives. On a short wait most of the first quarter is due at signing. The balance is always paid in cash, so make sure the money will be there when the aircraft lands.
• Cancelling costs more. On a purchase you lose the deposit and a fifth of the instalments you've paid. On a lease you get the deposit back only if the aircraft is still 26 weeks or more away. Either way the slot goes back on the line for anyone to take.
• Launch customers (era games). A new type is announced two years before it enters service, and for the first six months you can sign up as a launch customer: at least 20 widebodies or 30 of anything smaller, paid in full when you order, for 8% off on top of the bulk discount and the first slots on the line from January of its first year. Each earlier launch programme with the same manufacturer adds 2%, up to 25% off in all. Launch orders are firm and cannot be cancelled.

Old classics vs. new generation

Almost every mission in the game has a budget option and a premium option: 737-800 or MAX 8, A330ceo or A350, CRJ or E2. The trade is always the same — the classic leases for much less, the new type burns meaningfully less fuel per seat. Which wins depends on utilisation and fuel:

• High utilisation favours new metal. The fuel saving is earned per kilometre flown, so an aircraft in the air all week pays back its lease premium fastest.
• Cheap leases favour patchy flying. If a route only supports a few weekly frequencies, the fuel savings never accumulate enough to matter — take the cheap classic.
• Fuel prices swing the maths. At a fuel index near the 0.55 floor, classics look brilliant. In a 1.9× crisis, efficient types are the only thing keeping long-haul alive. If you run classics, hedge more aggressively — and consider retrofitting winglets on types that offer them, a permanent cut in that aircraft's burn.
• Age raises maintenance. Line maintenance on a ten-year-old airframe runs about 1.5× a new one's, and about 3× at twenty, quietly eating part of the classic's lease advantage. Heavy checks add to it: a C check every two years and a D check every six (sooner if the aircraft flies hard), the C taking it out of service for a week or two and the D for three to six. A D check costs around a tenth of the aircraft's list price, but it also winds the running-cost clock back by up to three years.
• Out-of-production types arrive used. Once a type's production line has closed it is sold second-hand, delivered already years old — that is where the cheap price comes from, and why its maintenance bill starts high. In a classic game, types whose line closed fifty years or more ago arrive at least twenty years old and can only be bought, never leased.

How many types is too many?

Commonality in Tailwinds is counted in aircraft families (the 737s, the A320s, the E-Jets and so on), and it has a price. Every family you operate carries a fixed weekly maintenance-contract charge however few of them you fly, and each family beyond the first adds 2% to your pilot and maintenance overheads. Jet bases are certified family by family, and a reserve aircraft can only stand in for its own type. A practical progression:

1. Startup (1–2 types). One regional type (turboprop or regional jet) and at most one narrow-body. Master the weekly loop with a simple fleet. The turboprop and regional jet guides cover the candidates.
2. Regional carrier (2–3 types). Add a proper narrow-body workhorse as ring-two routes open. This trio can profitably serve most routes under 5,000 km.
3. Going long-haul (3–4 types). One widebody family, chosen for your specific trunk missions. Resist collecting one of each — depth beats variety.
4. Mature carrier (4–6 types). Maybe a freighter line, maybe a flagship for your densest trunk. By now you have the cash and the data to justify exotic additions — or to know you don't need them.

Capacity discipline

The most expensive seats in the game are the ones flying empty. Signals to act on:

• Persistent load above ~85% — you're leaving demand on the table. Add frequency first (it also defends the route), then consider a size step up.
• Persistent load below ~60% — downsize the aircraft or cut frequency before touching fares. Cost per seat drops immediately; revenue usually barely moves.
• The wrong cabin mix — refit rather than replace, but don't churn layouts: a refit sends the aircraft to the shop for a week or more, and its routes earn nothing while it's there.
• An aircraft with no good mission — return it, sell it, or station it as a reserve at a hub, where it stands in for others of its exact type on that hub's routes while they're grounded or in a check. Paying a lease to avoid admitting a mistake is the sunk-cost fallacy with wings.

Planning the fleet's future

Your fleet ages, your network grows, and fuel prices wander — so revisit fleet strategy every in-game year or so. Questions worth asking on the review: Which types earn their keep per airframe? Is maintenance creep on older jets changing the classic-vs-new maths? Which leases are coming up, and which should I buy out instead? Does the next stage of the network (second hub, long-haul push, cargo) need a type I don't fly yet — and can I enter it with one aircraft, prove it, then scale? The airlines that fail in Tailwinds usually don't die of one bad decision; they die of a fleet assembled by accident.

Further reading

Every aircraft mentioned here is covered with full in-game stats in the aircraft guides. For the demand side of the equation, read route economics; for where those routes should point, hub strategy.