The airline

A virtual airline (VA) is a crew, a shared account and a shared fleet. A line pilot only needs to take flights off the schedule; everything else is management's job.

Join an existing one

The catalogue shows each airline's size, its fleet and how active it is. Applying takes one click, and the owner or a manager decides. It is the easiest way in: the aircraft are bought, the schedule is written and salary is paid from day one.

Start your own

That capital covers either one aircraft outright or several on lease — with something left over for running costs. For a young airline leasing is almost always the wiser call: the money stays available for fuel and salaries.

Airline logo

A logo sits next to your name in the catalogue and in your page header. If you named a real airline under “Operating as”, its mark goes there; if you did not, a three-letter monogram is shown by default. Upload your own from Edit details on the Overview tab: PNG or WebP, 240 to 1024 px wide, no heavier than 256 KB, landscape or square. Named a livery but want your own mark shown? There is a checkbox for that in the same place. The logo appears at once, but it remains user content: other companies’ marks and forbidden symbols are removed by a moderator.

Who does what

• Owner and managers — fleet, schedule, hiring, finance, hubs, loans. An executive is the owner's deputy: the same rights, except handing the company over or appointing other executives.
• Pilots — take flights, fly them, collect salary and bonuses.
• AI crews are hired computer pilots. They fly the schedule on their own and bring in money while your live pilots are offline; they draw a salary too. The next section is about them.

AI crews: composition and duty

How many people an aircraft needs before it can fly at all is set by the TYPE, as in real life. Below the minimum it does not fly — that is a ban, not «fewer legs».

Crew work is measured in DUTY HOURS, not in the number of flights. Duty covers not only the flying but the ground part of every leg — preparation, turnaround, paperwork. A leg that does not fit into what is left of the shift is not taken: the crew goes on a long rest and starts counting a new shift afterwards. A leg longer than a whole shift is only unlocked by someone ABOVE the type minimum — augmented and double crews, as in real life.

They grow, they burn out, and they ask

Crews improve over time: flying hours add consistency and smoothness, and rank rises with seniority — for AI crews rank counts flight hours, not per-flight experience as it does for live pilots. Everyone has their own ceiling, and the dossier shows whether there is headroom left: «the examiner notes room to grow» means still rising, «flies exactly as they did five years ago» means the ceiling is reached.

They also have morale: whether they are paid on time, whether they have an aircraft, whether they actually fly, what condition the machine is in. The reasons are shown on their card. A contented crew flies more carefully and earns more; an unhappy one lands harder and turns down extra legs, and if nothing changes it hands in notice and leaves two weeks later.

• A raise, when the salary has fallen behind a risen rank. Possible after three months of service, lifts pay by 5–10%, and the next one no sooner than six months later. Agreeing gives a strong month-long boost to flight quality. To avoid answering by hand, the «Salaries» block has «Automatic raise».
• A transfer to the airport where their aircraft now sits. Home base is where a person lives between flights, and while the aircraft works out of another city they never get home. The transfer is free and changes only the record: the morale factor moves from −5 to +4. The flip side is that the new point becomes home. You do not have to answer each one: the «Salaries» block has «Transfer requests» — transfer to your own base without asking, or always. New airlines have transfers to their own base switched on from the start.
• Leave, when burnt out.
• Congratulations with a bonus — for a thousand hours flown for your company.

The «Staff» screen

The whole AI fleet lives on its own screen. At the top a summary — how many aircraft are waiting for crew, what salaries cost and what the staff brought in over the month; below it a list with search and filters («no aircraft», «unhappy», «has a request»).

• «Seat the unassigned» puts people on the aircraft that are SHORT of them, in order of need: first the aircraft that cannot fly at all without a minimum crew, then long legs, then relief crews. Anyone with no work left stays in the pool, and that is an honest answer, not a glitch; when there is no work for ANYONE the button is simply gone, and the screen says how many people are sitting idle. Aircraft reserved for live pilots are invisible to the seating: they are never counted as waiting for crew. Neither the button nor the per-row selector touches an employee who is on a flight or already travelling to another aircraft: the first is mid-leg, the second has a trip already paid for.
• «Stand down the surplus» is the reverse: it returns to the pool those an aircraft cannot keep busy. The least experienced go first; crews in the air and people travelling to an aircraft are never touched — their trip is already paid for and the seat stays theirs. A stood-down person keeps drawing salary until you seat them elsewhere or dismiss them.
• You do not have to guess how many to hire: the fleet advisor works out each aircraft’s need from its own actual usage and gives a total for the fleet with a breakdown — to get an aircraft flying at all, for legs longer than a shift, or for a relief crew. It also names people beyond the work available, along with their salaries.

Company journal

Everything people do in the airline lands in the journal: lines created and real-world imports, aircraft bought and sold, maintenance jobs, hiring and firing, loans and ad campaigns. The journal sits next to the staff list and filters by section and by person. Management sees the whole company, a dispatcher sees only their own work, and pilots do not see the journal at all. The second feed on the same screen is the fleet dispatcher: which aircraft went where and why — a scheduled departure, a contract from the exchange, the line unflown the longest, a revenue leg to the maintenance base, or positioning because there is no work from that airport.

When nobody signs in any more

An airline that no live member has signed into for two weeks is frozen. The automated fleet finishes the legs already in the air and then stays parked; nothing leaves its account — no automated crew or pilot salaries, leases, loans, insurance, parking, overhead or hub upkeep; and the airline disappears from the catalogue and the standings. Nothing is sold, no crew is dismissed, the lines stay in place.

The schedule

Lines don't appear by themselves: management creates them by hand or imports the real route network of an existing carrier. The archive can be searched by carrier, aircraft type, airports, years and source; the worldwide archive adds historical schedules for 1950–2026 with real flight numbers. An empty schedule means pilots have nothing to take, and it is the first thing worth checking in an airline you don't know.

• A rotation is a line and its return line on one row. The game pairs them by reversed route and aircraft type, so the two numbers can be anything — they need not be consecutive. Each leg keeps its own schedule, bookings and button, and under them the row shows what the whole rotation earns. A line with no return is shown with an empty second half: the aircraft comes back empty. Pairing is judged per aircraft type, so a rotation can have a hole with both halves filled: if four types may fly the line but only two may fly the return, the line carries a «no return for…» mark listing the locked types. The «Paired / By leg» switch above the table brings back the old view, one line per row. On the flight board the return is a note under the flight: number, schedule and whether an aircraft is free at the destination.
• The departure time on a line is a schedule the NPC fleet keeps, not decoration. A crew that comes free shortly before a planned departure waits for it instead of flying off on another line; the staff list says so — «holding for its scheduled departure». Live pilots are not bound by it: they take a flight whenever they like. An aircraft that comes free shortly before a planned departure flies that line at once and closes the departure ahead of time — the schedule counts as kept, and the board shows the actual time. A planned departure nobody could operate on time is caught up until the end of that same day: an aircraft that comes free even eight hours later flies that line late, and the departure board shows one row — planned time, actual time and the delay. While the catch-up window is open the board says exactly that — «delayed» — with the reason the aircraft has not left yet next to it. If no one is found by the end of the day, the departure lapses and the aircraft goes back to its usual work. Picking the hour is no longer blind: the day strip sits in the form that creates a line and under the slot grid, its column height being the direction's demand and the fill the seats already placed in that hour by you and by other airlines. The same strip is on the airport card, but there it is per DIRECTION: an airport has no demand of its own, a pair does, and a single summary column per airport would mix Yakutsk with Yekaterinburg.
• A quick flight is a line with an expiry date: put together a departure for tonight instead of keeping it in the schedule forever. Once it expires it cannot be booked, and it removes itself — deleted outright if nobody flew it. The NPC fleet never takes these lines; they exist for live pilots, so a quick flight has no AI schedule. The kind of operation is picked the same way as for a line: passenger or cargo. The flight number is optional: leave it out and the pilot fills it in when booking.
• A quick flight can be opened for “any type”. The list of eligible aircraft is worked out from the airline's fleet at the moment you look, so an aircraft bought after the line was created still qualifies.
• An assignment is a flight handed to a named pilot. It shows up on their flight board and they can accept or decline it; assignments expire.
• Tying an aircraft to lines is how you tell the NPC fleet to leave that airframe alone: a tied aircraft only flies the lines assigned to it. A line beyond the aircraft's range cannot be selected; the form shows both the distance and the aircraft limit. Check the set for dead ends: if no pinned line departs from an arrival airport, the aircraft comes back from there empty at the full cost of a flight. The form names such airports and offers to add the return lines in one click; it also warns you when you pin an aircraft that is currently parked outside the set. An aircraft with no pinned lines flies the whole network, and its fleet row warns about network dead ends — airports its type is flown into with no line at all to fly it back out.
• The line screen — the flight number in the schedule is a link. It shows what the line returned over 30 days: net, passengers, average load and the load below which it runs at a loss. All of it is counted from flights actually made, live pilots included, not from a «typical load» estimate. Next to it is the day of the direction hour by hour: the column height is the pair's daily demand, the fill is seats, yours and other airlines'. The strip is built from actual autopark departures over a week rather than from the schedule: nine departures out of ten happen off it. The empty top of a column is not decoration but what a flight in that hour can still carry: the demand of the direction caps the load.
• Who actually flies a line — the “Who flies it” column in the schedule: the number on the left is how many different autopark aircraft went through the leg over the last week, and next to it stand the live pilots’ bookings for the same leg. Zero means the line exists but nobody works it: usually there is no aircraft of a matching type at the departure airport, no rested crew, or the leg does not pay off. The “Autopark idle” filter collects such lines into one list. A dash marks a line the autopark never takes by rule.
• The flight board is the pilot's “what can I fly right now” screen: airline flights weighted by where the pilot currently is, their own assignments and quick flights, all in one place.
• Aircraft types across lines is the whole network in one table: a row is a line, a column is a type, a cell is a clearance. Brought a new type into the fleet? Open it on every line in a couple of clicks via the menu next to the type code, instead of editing each line separately. Edits accumulate and save with one button; a type with a live pilot booking can't be removed from its line.

Departure board

The «Departure board» tab on the airline's Home page shows its whole day on one page: what has departed, what is airborne right now, what is selling tickets and what never left at all. Times are local to you — your browser does the timezone maths. Any member of the airline can see the board: it carries no money figures, and knowing what the company is doing today is useful to a line pilot too. A shortened board, without registrations and crew names, also sits on the airline's public profile: there it is collapsed to the day strip and the summary — enough to show the company is alive — and the flight list opens on a button.

• The scheduled time on the left comes from the timetable. If a flight left off-schedule, the struck-through planned time and the delay in minutes appear next to it; if it left on the dot, there is no second line at all, so it does not sit uselessly under every flight.
• An airborne flight shows the route track and the time left to landing; one that is selling shows how many seats are already booked. Both update on their own — nothing to press.
• 🔴 The key difference from a real airport board: a missed departure does NOT disappear. It stays as a row at its scheduled time, with the time struck through and hatched, together with the reason the aircraft never got off the ground. The reason comes from the decision log and is recorded at the moment of the miss; if the engine recorded nothing then, the board says exactly that — «reason not recorded» — instead of inventing an explanation. A miss is not confused with a delay: while the planned departure can still be caught up — until the end of that same day — the row carries a yellow «delayed» label, and the growing lateness is right there in the time column. The board calls it «did not depart» only once catching up is no longer possible.
• The «Operated by» column answers whose flight this is: an AI-fleet crew by surname, a live pilot by callsign, or a ferry. A scheduled departure that is still some way off shows a dash there: the dispatcher assigns the aircraft and crew shortly before departure, and promising an operator in advance would be untrue.

Line fare

Every passenger line carries its own ticket price — a multiplier on the market rate, from ×0.50 to ×2.00 in hundredths. It lives on the line screen and is moved by company management: it is the one money control you steer directly. The price does not work on its own but against your neighbours on the route: the daily flow of passengers is split between everyone flying that direction, and a cheap ticket takes you a larger share while a dear one hands it over. On top of that the price decides whether a person flies at all: with a dear ticket some simply stay home, and that works even where you have no competitors.

• The control sits on the line screen next to the hour strip. Below it you are told how much this price changes the number of people the line gets. That is a measurement, not advice: the game names no sweet spot, because it differs per line and depends on what your neighbours on the route do.
• The line screen works out what the price costs you: the profit curve of a single flight across the whole range, the mark up to which the cabin stays full, and the breakdown — how many people the flight gets and what is left of the tickets after the leg's costs. The departure hour gets its own card: it does not change the load of a full flight, but it sets how far you can raise the price and still fill it, and the departure can be moved from there.
• The route market is the average fare of other airlines' lines, weighted by the seats they put on that route. The snapshot is taken once a day at night, so you see their price as of yesterday and your own at once. The comparison is always against the market WITHOUT YOU: comparing yourself with a figure that includes your own price means nothing. If there are no scheduled lines on the route but yours, there is no one to compare with — but the price still works.
• The price applies to unsold seats only. A flight opens sales in advance — while the crew is still resting before departure — and every ticket bought is remembered at the price that stood at the moment of purchase. Raise the fare halfway through and only the remainder of the cabin is repriced. How much has sold is shown on the line screen as «N of M sold».
• You do not have to run the price yourself: hire a manager at a hub and hand him pricing with the switch on the hub card. He runs the lines departing from that hub and their return legs — once a day, in small steps. The manager is deliberately more cautious than you: he never raises the price above the mark up to which the cabin stays full, and he always stops short of the most profitable edge. Lowering a price that has drifted above the market he will do in full — a line with an inflated fare simply stops being scheduled. The control stays yours: set your own price and it holds until his next round.
• Not every line gets a fare. A personal charter is hired whole, an on-request flight and a quick flight are made for one particular pilot, a factory delivery ferry and a community day flight are outside the market, and on a cargo line a multiplier on the passenger rate does nothing. Such lines say why there is no control instead of showing one.

Hubs

A hub is an airport where the airline is established: handling is cheaper there, passengers are more plentiful and reputation grows faster. A hub has a level from 1 to 5: the higher it is, the more it costs to open and to run, but the more capacity it holds — how much fleet it can keep. Capacity is counted in units of operating muscle: a light aircraft takes a quarter of a unit, a regional one, a narrowbody two, a widebody up to five. Four units come free so a starting fleet has somewhere to sit, and the airline's first hub — its founding base — is free to run and cannot be closed. Fleet above capacity is neither seized nor blocked from purchase: it simply parks at somebody else's stand at commercial rates, and you decide what is cheaper — build a hub, sell the surplus, or pay. The second hub and every one after it costs 15% more than the last: the tenth is four times the first, the twentieth fourteen times. The surcharge is for the width of the network and applies only when opening — upgrading a hub you already have costs the same as before, so "wider or deeper" is a real choice. A hub can only be opened at an aerodrome: a terminal, a warehouse and a ground crew do not fit on a helipad. A helipad can still be an airline's home point — an aircraft parks there and departs from there — but it never becomes a hub, and an airplane can neither be parked nor delivered there.

Prices and returns are higher for large airports — roughly double, and four times lower at small ones. The office is where you hire ground staff.

• The hub manager (400,000 ₽ per month) keeps AI crews correctly distributed: working from each aircraft’s real need instead of empty seats. He crews the ones that cannot fly without people and stands down the surplus where an aircraft cannot keep that many busy. Anyone stood down goes to the pool and keeps drawing salary — so the same manager will send them on a paid trip to an aircraft in another city as soon as there is work there: for someone without an aircraft the travel is a one-off, the idling is not. He will not pull a working crew member off one aircraft for extra hours on another. Someone is sent ahead of time to an aircraft due out of maintenance within a day — travel takes hours. The company pays for it, and there is a daily cap. The higher the hub level, the more decisions he makes per hour.
• The mechanic (300,000 ₽ per month) clears low and medium snags right on the stand — the aircraft never goes in for a check, and the fix costs nothing. He only works on aircraft at his own hub: the aircraft has to be parked here, so anything airborne or in maintenance is out of reach. Heavy work stays paid: he does not touch a serious snag, and a critical one still grounds the aircraft until it is fixed. One snag an hour, so the hub card shows how many are queued — and says plainly when there is nothing to clear. His second job is scheduled checks and wear: an overdue check he books himself, and with your permission he also takes one marked due soon, plus any aircraft whose components are badly spent. An aircraft worn below the airworthiness limit he sends in regardless — a rescue needs no permission. The switch is on this page, below the hub cards; the company pays for the work and the aircraft goes into the hangar for its full downtime.
• All of their work is logged line by line in the company journal, the «Base staff» lens: who was assigned, who was stood down, why, and what the travel cost.

Airport reputation and advertising

The airline holds its own reputation at every airport, from 0 to 100, and it cannot be bought. It affects the load on flights through that airport: a reputation of 100 lifts the load by roughly 5 percentage points, averaged over the two ends of the leg. Four working contributions already add up to the full hundred:

Advertising is the only way to add reputation you have not flown for: pay up front and the campaign's contribution is added to the hundred for its term, capped at 20 points. It holds full strength for the first half of the term and then decays linearly to nil. A second and any further campaign at the same airport contribute only a quarter.

Ops room

Every so often an event lands on the airline: a storm over the hub, a route tender, a rival poaching one of your pilots. Before you choose, the “Your assessment” note lays out the facts and risks, so the answer can be reasoned out rather than guessed. A good result earns money or a temporary effect; a failed or missed event deducts nothing. The one real loss is a pilot you fail to retain leaving for a rival.

Flight comms

From the Operations room, under the «Comms» tab, management and the dispatcher see the company aircraft in the air and can send the pilot a short telex straight into the cockpit. Before sending, the platform asks the network whether the aircraft is reachable and says honestly what it found: «reachable», «online on the network but silent on the datalink», or «nobody answered» — and in the last case offers to send anyway, into the queue.

• The owner, executive, manager and dispatcher of the company may write.
• The screen is Operations room → Comms; a «Message» shortcut also sits next to each aircraft on the company map.
• The telex is sent from the company station — a callsign such as SVROPS, which the pilot sees in the cockpit. The owner or executive changes it in the airline settings.
• If the pilot's datalink is not set up, the message still arrives — as a notification on the site. It cannot be lost.