Fleet and money

An aircraft is the airline's main asset and its main expense. It wears out, it breaks, it physically sits at one specific airport, and it costs money even when it goes nowhere.

Getting an aircraft

• Buying new — expensive, but the airframe is yours with no monthly payment. Western types are priced in US dollars and converted to rubles at the live Bank of Russia rate, so the ruble price of an aircraft, its insurance and maintenance drift a little with the exchange rate.
• Buying used — cheaper, with the hours and the wear included in the price.
• Leasing costs roughly 0.75% of the aircraft value per month plus a three-month deposit. A fast way to grow the fleet, but the payment comes every month. You can lease a new airframe from the factory or a used one from the second-hand market — either way it flies to you under its own power, the airline pays for the delivery, and both the price and the time are shown before the deal. Leases start at a list price of 10 million ₽ for the type: a Cessna worth a couple of million is easier to buy outright than to pay off monthly.

A leased aircraft can be bought out at any time — the "Buy out" button in the lease block. The price is the residual of the new-aircraft price (age and wear bring it down, but it never drops below what this aircraft is worth on the used market and never rises above the shop price of the same aircraft new), minus the deposit you already paid. Buying out a fresh aircraft therefore costs about the same as buying that aircraft outright: a lease spreads the cost over time, it is not a discount on the airframe.

Types that are out of production

Part of the catalogue is no longer built anywhere: the Tu-134, 727, DC-9, MD-80, A340 and nearly two hundred more. Such a type carries its final production year, and it cannot be ordered new from the factory — nor leased from the factory, because there is no new airframe for a lessor to offer. They have not left the game: on the used market such a type is both bought and leased — there the lessor has something to buy. Aircraft already owned and leases already signed are untouched; the rule applies only to new deals.

The ban has an age limit, though. A type whose production ended no earlier than 2010 is still sold new and can still be leased: aircraft like these are young — thousands were built, they fly and they are maintained, and "you cannot order a new one" would sound made up. The rule covers the 737-800, the A320 and A321, the A330, the CRJs, the Embraer E-Jets, the 747-8 and several dozen more. They keep the mark showing the year production ended, and that is not a contradiction: the factory is closed — true; the shop is open — also true. The 757-200 and the CRJ-200 are opened separately, for the sheer number of routes they fly; they are older than the cut-off and their cards say why. The A380 has a reason of its own too.

The used aircraft market

Used aircraft live in the airline store under the "Used market" tab, and the same market appears in "My hangar" when you buy one personally. There is ONE market for the whole game: an aircraft you buy disappears from everyone else's listings at once, and a "Recently gone from the market" feed runs alongside. Around five hundred offers are kept available at any time, and the shelf stirs every half hour: the stalest listings are withdrawn and fresh ones fill the gaps, so a listing lives on the market for about four hours. The mix is stratified by category, so business jets and light aircraft do not drown in narrowbodies, and freighters get both a guaranteed share of the shelf and their own "Freighters" filter: a freighter's tag matches none of the size categories, so without the filter a 737-800BCF had to be spotted by eye. Aircraft are 3 to 30 years old, and the older the machine, the worse its condition tends to be. Those bounds are not unconditional, though: an airframe is never older than its type and never younger than the type's last delivery, so for out-of-production machines the shelf shows the real age. For vintage that means fifty years and up — no one will offer you a three-year-old Concorde when the last one was delivered in 1980.

Age sets the asking price first of all: every type has its own used-price range, and a fresh machine sits near the top of it while a thirty-year-old sits near the bottom. Condition only moves the price within a narrow band around that age position, roughly ±12 % of the range — the position cannot be bought back with repairs. The top of the range is capped by the price of a new one: a used machine never costs more than a factory-fresh one, however rare the type. On top of that base come the seller's pricing policy and a random ±5 %, which is why the same type in the same condition costs differently at different sellers — a lucky find on the market is a real thing.

• Leasing company — market price. The aircraft is back from a lease, and this seller's maintenance history is the most transparent.
• Broker — around 15 % below market. Acts on behalf of the former operator, so the aircraft's history is incomplete.
• Storage facility — the same discount. The aircraft sat for a long time and needs recommissioning before it flies.
• Bank — a distressed sale, up to 30 % below market. Repossessed after an operator default; this is the cheapest door into the market.

Every listing carries a deal rating — excellent, good, fair or weak. It combines how far the price sits below fair value (which weighs most), the aircraft's condition and the seller's rating, and the risks are spelled out next to it in words: heavy airframe wear, high age, low seller rating, opaque maintenance history, distressed sale. The rating is a hint, not a hidden mechanic: the seller springs no surprises after the deal — everything the aircraft brings with it is visible before it. The card also shows how many days the listing has been up, the reason for sale, the number of previous owners, the variant and the cabin layout: the former operator's cabin travels to you with the aircraft.

The condition in a listing is the airframe’s SURFACE condition, and next to it stands a second number, the structure: the listing derives it from the machine’s hours, and only a C-check will bring it back. Engines and cabin arrive in worse shape, and the older the aircraft the further behind they are: engines trail the airframe by roughly its age in percent (never by more than 20), the cabin one and a half times faster (never by more than 30). On a thirty-year-old machine at 60 % the cabin will arrive at about thirty — that is not a fault but an ordinary used aircraft that needs money spent on it straight away. Hours and cycles come along too, so the next maintenance check may already be due. Budget for this before you buy: a cheap aircraft is an expensive aircraft with a deferred bill.

A used aircraft can be leased as well as bought: the listing card carries a second column next to the price. The deal has three sides — you pick the machine, a leasing company buys it from the seller and leases it to you; its name is on the card and later on the contract. The lessor pays for the airframe; you pay the deposit, the first payment and the ferry from the seller’s ramp. The monthly payment is calculated from what THIS aircraft is worth on the second-hand market, not from the list price of a new one, so an old machine costs a fraction of a fresh one: it is the cheapest way to put a real airliner in the air without the money for one. The listing leaves the market afterwards — the aircraft has been bought, just not by you. It arrives with its own age, hours and wear, and the deposit refund is measured from the condition at handover: return it in the same shape and you get the deposit back in full. The rule is the same as for a factory lease: a type below a 10 million ₽ list price is not leased, however cheap the listing is.

Aircraft variant

Some types in the catalogue come in several factory variants — the same aircraft by ICAO code, but different machines by the numbers. The Tu-154 has eight: the mass-produced Tu-154B-2 takes the same 180 seats as the Tu-154M but at full load goes barely half as far. The 767-200 comes as the plain aircraft and the ER, which flies nearly twice as far on the same cabin; the A321neo comes as the neo, the LR and the XLR; the Superjet as the baseline and the LR, which bought its range with seats. In business aviation a whole family lives under one ICAO code: the Challenger 601 and 650, the Legacy 500 and the Praetor 600, the King Air 350 and 350ER, three generations of HondaJet. You pick the variant in the purchase or lease card before the cabin: price, lease payment and factory delivery all follow from it. A used aircraft comes in whatever variant it was listed in, and the listing says which. A breed of its own are the business variants of airliners: the Lineage 1000 is the same E190 with a nineteen-seat cabin, twice the range and the price of a business aircraft. Airbus has a whole family of them: the ACJ319 on the A319, the ACJ320neo on the A320neo and the ACJ TwoTwenty on the A220-100 — and the twenty-five seats of the ACJ320neo are the largest business cabin in the game. The game treats it as one, too: on the order exchange it earns its own hourly charter rate, and the more premium seats in the cabin the higher it is — the nineteen seats of the Lineage are worth more than the eighteen of a Gulfstream G650, while a scheduled route is the wrong place for it — nineteen premium seats on a route that expects a hundred passengers have no buyers. In the simulator it is still one type: the flight review matches the ICAO code, so you can fly a Tu-154B-2 even if the company owns a Tu-154M.

Cabin layout

A new or leased aircraft is built to your order: pick the cabin layout right in the purchase card at no extra cost, and it arrives with those seats fitted. The layout decides where the aircraft earns: high density wins on short legs, three-class and premium cabins on long ones, where a business seat really does sell for three times the price. But distance is only half the answer; the other half is the demand of the city pair. Where a flight draws more people than you have seats, the operator who fitted more seats wins — on long legs too; where the pair only fills half the cabin, the extra seats will not sell anyway, and it pays to sell expensive ones. The longer the leg, the larger the share of the cabin you can give to premium classes without hurting load: demand for them on an eighteen-hour flight is nothing like on a two-hour hop — which is exactly why ultra-long-range aircraft fly a sparse cabin. A used aircraft comes with whatever the previous operator left in it — the listing says which. You can reconfigure it at any time, but that costs money and grounds the aircraft. The VIP cabin of a business variant is the exception: it comes with the variant, and cannot be moved into an ordinary aircraft of the same type. What is fitted in your own aircraft right now is in the fleet list: every row shows the layout name, the total seat count and how many seats each class holds.

Ready-made layouts are not the whole choice: a custom one sits right next to them. Steppers per class build the cabin down to a single seat, and two limits keep the impossible out — how many passengers the type can evacuate through its exits, and how much room the cabin has. Room is counted honestly: a business seat takes as much floor as two economy seats, a first-class seat as much as three, and the cabin band shows it as you go, before any refusal. First class goes only to widebodies and to types that actually carry it; business-jet variants keep their factory VIP cabin — there the number of premium seats drives the charter rate directly, so a stepper would be a revenue tap rather than a trade-off. Name a layout you like and it stays in your list, ready to order for another aircraft of the same type. From the factory a custom cabin is free, just like a preset; on a flying aircraft it is an ordinary reconfiguration — paid, with the aircraft grounded.

Selling an aircraft

Market value is driven mainly by age — no amount of maintenance winds that back — and only nudged by condition, where condition means BOTH airframe numbers at once. The structure matters more of the two: surface condition comes back with a cheap A-check, the structure only with a C-check, so an aircraft that has been flown hard genuinely loses value rather than losing it until the next inspection. Whatever the market promises, though, an aircraft cannot be sold above what has gone into it: the purchase price plus maintenance, defect repairs and cabin refits. The sale dialog spells this out — "bought for", "put into the aircraft", "sale ceiling". Restoring an aircraft is fine and often necessary, but repairs never pay for themselves through a higher price: a rouble put in comes back as a rouble, and the 8 % commission comes off the top. Selling at a loss is always allowed, so you are never locked into a bad purchase. The rule closes off trading as an income source — an aircraft is a means of production, and the money in this game comes from flights and staff.

Unique airframes

A few entries in the catalogue are marked as a unique airframe: exactly one of these aircraft was ever built, and the game holds exactly one too. You cannot buy it new or lease it — there is no factory that would build a second one. It changes hands only on the used market, and an airline may hold no more than one. Selling a unique airframe returns exactly what you paid for it: no commission, no invested-value ceiling, no profit on the trade. An aircraft you sell does not come back to the listings: it leaves the game for good.

Keeping one is billed separately, and the bill grows faster than the count: the first is free, the second already costs real money, and a fleet of five does not pay for itself. The charge is taken daily alongside insurance and parking, and a warning with a grace period arrives before the first one. Maintenance checks on a unique airframe also cost more and keep it on the ground longer: an A-check takes a day, a C-check two, a D-check a week.

How the aircraft gets to your hub

If your airline has more than one hub, the purchase, lease and used-market cards start with where to deliver the aircraft: tiles with the hub code and the price of delivery to that particular hub. The headquarters is picked by default. The distance from the factory to different hubs varies several times over, so the choice drives both the price and the delivery time — the aircraft arrives where you actually need it instead of somewhere you would have to ferry it from later.

• Automatic ferry — the way it always worked: the aircraft flies itself from the factory (or from the seller), the company pays for the ferry, and a few hours later it is home.
• I will fly it myself — delivery costs nothing: the aircraft stays at the factory and is free to book, and a delivery line with no passengers appears in the schedule. Book it and fly the aircraft home in the sim; the line lives for a week and only accepts that one aircraft.
• Express delivery — the aircraft is at your hub immediately, but it costs 2.5 times the normal ferry.

An aircraft is always somewhere

You can only book a flight on an airframe that is physically at the departure airport. If it sits elsewhere, it needs a ferry flight first: an empty leg at the airline's expense, and it takes time. In the same booking dialog you can ask for the aircraft to be flown back after the flight: the ferry leaves on its own once you file the report, and its price and duration are shown next to the checkbox. The estimate uses the scheduled arrival airport — divert, and the return starts from there and costs a different amount. If the airline cannot afford it, the aircraft simply stays where it landed.

Where each aircraft stands is visible on the Fleet tab: the ICAO code, the city under it, a hub marker and — if the jet has been parked for over a day — exactly how long. Above the list there are two filter rows: «Types» — what the fleet is made of — and «Parked at» — the airports it spends the night at; both carry an aircraft count next to every value, and clicking one filters the list down to it. A row stays silent when there is nothing to choose from — the whole fleet is one type, or parked in one place. An aircraft a live pilot is flying right now is labelled «in flight» with its phase and time remaining — the same numbers the live map shows.

Your own aircraft groups

Once the fleet grows, the list stops reading: fifty rows look alike, and the divisions a real airline has are nowhere in the data. So you can label the fleet yourself — create groups like “Mainline”, “Leased from Aeroflot” or “In storage” and sort the aircraft into them. A group changes nothing: not the economics, not who may fly the aircraft, not maintenance. It is a label for your own eyes, and you invent it — the game cannot guess where an aircraft came from or who leases it to you.

The labelling lives on its own page — the “Groups” button in the filter bar of the Fleet tab. You will not be sorting them one by one: filter the fleet (say, every 737 at one airport), select the whole filtered set with a single tick in the table header and move it into a group at once. The finished labelling comes back to the Fleet tab as a row of chips and as subheadings in the list; for anyone who created no groups the tab looks exactly as before. Deleting a group does not touch the aircraft — they simply return to Ungrouped.

The company map

The Map tab on the company page shows the whole fleet at once: flights in the air as aircraft icons turned to their heading, everything else as counters on the airports where it is parked, with the home airport ringed in the accent colour. Every airborne aircraft trails a short tail, route endpoints are labelled with airport codes, and whichever aircraft you click shows its whole route: the distance already flown as a solid line from telemetry, the rest along the navigation points of its plan. The Routes chip draws the same for everyone currently airborne, only dimmed and dashed. Where no airway route exists — over the ocean and on pairs crossing the date line — the old great-circle arc remains. Click an aircraft to see who is flying it and how long is left; a counter, to see which aircraft are sitting there; an airport, to see how many flights leave and arrive there. Above the map sits the legend, which is also the filter: live pilots, your own AI fleet, other AI fleets and ferries, each with its aircraft count; clicking hides that group, and the choice is remembered. Your own aircraft are drawn warm, everyone else's in cool violet. The board on the right says the same in words: live flights, virtual-fleet legs and ferries, and the parking stands with how long each aircraft has been idle.

An aircraft reserved for live pilots

Any aircraft you own can be taken out of the AI fleet: open its card, find «Who flies this aircraft» and switch on «Live pilots only». From then on no AI crew is assigned to it, and crews already on it are released into the pool — they keep drawing salary until you move them to another airframe or dismiss them. A leg already in the air finishes normally. Live pilots book such an aircraft as usual, and it is always free — which is the whole point. The fleet list labels these aircraft, and the fleet advisor stays silent about them standing idle — so does the staff screen, which never counts them as waiting for crew: they are idle because you decided so.

Under the same flag, management can reserve the aircraft for one particular member of the airline — optional, but once reserved, only that person can take it. Everyone else, the owner and the executive included, is refused by that pilot's name: on a flight booking, on a ferry, on an exchange order and when handing out an assignment. The reservation can be lifted or moved at any time, in the same place. Bookings and assignments already made are not cancelled — they run to the end, and no new ones appear. If the person leaves the airline, the aircraft frees itself. In the fleet list such an aircraft is labelled «personal aircraft» with the pilot's name.

What kind of operation a flight is

• Passenger — tickets plus whatever cargo fits in the hold.
• Freight — its own cargo rate and costs by actual mass; a freighter has no seats and takes no passengers.
• VIP — the customer buys the whole aircraft, not a seat. It arrives as an order from the exchange; there are no standing VIP lines in the schedule any more.
• Charter — also a whole-aircraft hire: a one-off order, or your own aircraft out of the hangar. There are no standing charter lines in the schedule any more: a series of departures is covered by a charter programme — a contract with a term, a rate per departure and a penalty for a miss.
• Contract — military lift, air ambulance, patrol, flight school, sightseeing. Paid at cost plus a margin, and not every type is eligible for the work.

The contract exchange

One-off work is found by asking, not by scheduling: pick an aircraft and a pair of airports, and ask whether there is an order. You get a single answer — customer, fixed payment, deadline; there is no haggling. The exchange sits both in the airline office and in the hangar. Orders split by aircraft: a whole-aircraft charter is offered to anyone, while contract assignments go to military, general aviation, utility types, helicopters and freighters.

The exchange has three tabs. "Ready orders" is a board: requests with a customer, a route and the aircraft that will fly it; the card shows both the payment and what is left of it as profit on that particular aircraft. Orders appear where your aircraft are parked, hold for a few hours and are replaced by new ones; an order you do not take simply leaves — no penalty, no obligation. "Ask by route" is the original form, for when you have already picked the route yourself. An order's story is tied to a place: a shift rotation flies to an oil field, a coal pit or a mine, and the board shows such points even when no scheduled service goes there — nobody charters a shift into a major city hub. An order that ends at a helipad is offered to helicopters only: there is no runway there and an aeroplane has nowhere to land — the same rule applies to programmes. Runway length is judged the same way: an order for four hundred people is not offered where the runway is a kilometre and a half, and if you ask about such a route yourself, the exchange answers that the runway is too short for that aircraft. The third tab, "Programmes", is about work that lasts months rather than one flight.

Below the board sits "Demand you don't serve": orders waiting next to your parking stands that you have no suitable aircraft for. Nothing stops you from taking them, and the card counts honestly what flying six people on an airliner would cost: a charter is paid by the aircraft's weight, but fuel and fees grow with it too, so a large aircraft on a small order breaks even at best. Business aircraft add a cabin premium on top of the hourly rate, and it grows with the number of premium seats: a nineteen-seat jet charters for noticeably more than a nine-seat one, even when both hit the weight ceiling long ago. The card also says what size of aircraft would turn that trip into a profit. Airliners have their own work on the board: tour operator programmes, shift rotations, delegations, repatriation flights — everything that really does involve a lot of people.

Some orders carry a condition beyond «land at the point»: there is something to DO on the spot. The first such story is the hoist medevac — the aircraft arrives at a helipad and holds a hover over it while the casualty is lifted aboard. The condition is stated as numbers on the card BEFORE you sign — how many seconds in a row, inside what radius, at what maximum ground speed and at what height — and it is checked by those same numbers afterwards. What counts is the longest UNBROKEN stretch, not the total: the work is presence over the point, not the number of times you clipped the circle. The flight debrief then names both the requirement and what was counted. Only the tracker can confirm such work: it is visible in the flight recording, and a manual report contains no recording, so it cannot close an order with work on it. Fall short and the order is not completed and pays nothing — but it is not burnt either: it stays open until its deadline, and a «Fly it again» button appears on the card of the order you took. The flight you already made goes nowhere: it was accepted and paid as an ordinary flight — revenue, XP, the maintenance-fund contribution, a line in your logbook. A retry gives you ONE MORE flight for the same order; it does not cancel the previous one. Attempts are not unlimited: how many are left is written on that same card. Run out and you can only decline the order for half the penalty or let the deadline pass for the full one.

Charter programmes

The "Programmes" tab is a contract with a customer for a series of flights: "fly the shift out every Tuesday and Friday for eight weeks". Every flight in the contract is a ROUND TRIP: the aircraft takes the customer out and comes back under the same contract, the way a summer charter flies Moscow — Antalya — Moscow. The return leg is always paid: where there is someone to carry home, at the full rate; where there is nothing to carry back (supply runs, humanitarian cargo), the customer pays for the ferry home separately. Under a contract the aircraft never flies home empty on your money. Offers are computed around where your aircraft are parked, and the card names the customer, the weekdays, the departure time, the term, the aircraft that will fly and the date of the first flight. A contract starts working the next day: its weekdays are picked so that tomorrow falls inside the rhythm. There is never a flight on the day you sign — the aircraft may be in the air, and a contract that breaks the minute you sign it would be a trap. One exception: a weekdays-only contract signed on a Friday or Saturday starts on Monday. The date is on the card before you sign, not after. The big number is what you keep from one round trip: a programme rate is always below the one-off rate — you trade margin for predictability, not the other way round. A human signs the contract; after that the NPC fleet flies the legs, and between them the aircraft keeps flying your network. You do not set up a schedule for a contract — one is created automatically and stays out of the general lists. Nor can you fly a contract leg yourself: the contract line never reaches the flight board, and a flight made by hand is not credited to the contract. It only takes work it can return from in time: once there is less time left than a round trip needs, dispatch holds the aircraft where it stands — the staff list calls it "holding for its contracted departure", and that is not idle time.

Rotation contracts are a breed of their own. They are tied to a place: an oil or gas field, an open pit, a mine, a placer claim, a polar station, an offshore base. The board shows such places even when no scheduled service goes there — but never more than half the list, so ordinary destinations stay. Customers there often name the aircraft too: an unpaved strip calls for an An-24, An-26 or L-410, an offshore platform for a helicopter, a remote pad for a turboprop. Where the runway is paved the requirement is softer: any narrowbody or regional of the right size will do. The requirements are printed on the card: if your aircraft meets them, the contract is offered to you. For a domestic-built aircraft the customer pays a premium — it is named on the same card and already included in the rate. If the route you want is not on the board, ask for it: “Ask about a route” prices a contract for any pair your aircraft can reach. Freighters get rotation work of their own: pipe to the rig, explosives to the pit, haul-truck parts, fuel until the ice road opens. There is usually nothing to carry back, and the customer pays for the empty return at the cost of the leg plus a margin; where cargo moves both ways (concentrate, core samples, gold under escort) the return leg is paid at the full rate.

A signed contract shows up on the "Lines" tab and on the exchange itself as a ribbon: one segment per flight, flown ones filled, missed ones red. A miss costs a quarter of the rate, and the customer's patience is finite — what is left of it is written on the card. Run out and the contract is broken off with a termination penalty. If you can see you will not cope, terminate it yourself: the price is the same, it is named in advance, and the aircraft is released at once.

Who flies the order

When you sign an order you name the crew right away. It is a separate question: the airline takes the order, but any of three can fly it.

• I fly it — the booking is created for you immediately, there is nothing else to book. The flight shows up in My flights and on the flight board, and that is where the briefing and SimBrief come from.
• Company crew — no booking, the aircraft stays free, and a hired crew takes the order on its very next departure, ahead of any scheduled line. It needs a crew hired for that particular aircraft.
• Assign to a pilot — a normal assignment for another approved company pilot: they see it and either accept or decline.

You can change who flies until the flight starts — on the Lines tab, in the Orders in progress block. The deadline and the decline button live there too: declining is free within 15 minutes of signing, after that it costs half the penalty. Declining has its own rule: a flight that was flown but did not close the order (the work condition was not met) locks the performer change — whose flight it was is a settled question — yet still lets you decline. Otherwise such an order would be a dead end: neither done nor dropped, just hanging until the deadline. If you cancel your own booking and assign nobody, the order is left without a crew and burns down to a penalty — the block highlights such orders.

Wear and breakage

• Hours wear the components down, and scheduled checks come due on those same hours.
• Hard landings and random failures leave defects, and clearing each one costs money.
• A critical defect, or condition below 25%, grounds the aircraft until it is put right.
• A worn airframe costs more to insure. Its insured value really is lower, but the underwriter adds a condition surcharge, and together those come out at roughly the same premium an intact aircraft pays. A neglected airframe used to be noticeably cheaper — that was a discount for not maintaining it, and it is gone. The surcharge is shown on the policy under the Documents tab, and as its own line in the charge.

Where money comes from and goes

• Flight revenue is tickets and cargo minus fuel, airport charges and handling. What is left goes to the airline account, and a share of the profit is paid to the pilot as a bonus. The airport charge is per cycle, and it depends not only on the aircraft but on where you land: a point with no scheduled service, no long runway and no published frequencies — a helipad, a farm strip — has nothing to maintain, and charges a quarter of the rate. An aerodrome with a terminal and a tower charges in full. And if you fly a rotorcraft leg YOURSELF, the cycle charge is halved — that is a premium for flying it live, and a hired crew does not get it: the same helicopter under an airline crew pays the full rate. On a helipad both reductions stack, and the cycle ends up eight times cheaper than at an aerodrome. Landing quality can only ADD to the profit: a smooth touchdown adds up to 10% to the flight's net, shown as its own line with your vertical speed in the debrief. A rough landing earns no premium, but it takes nothing away from what you made either — you pay for it in airframe wear and repairs.
• Costs are debited automatically: salaries every 30 days, lease instalments, repairs and checks, hub upkeep, loan payments. How much that adds up to over a month is shown as a single figure under Finances → Forecast: leases, salaries, the loan and upkeep are all normalised to one 30-day window, with the calendar of exact charge dates right below it. The company's cash balance, meanwhile, is visible in the company header on every tab.
• When cash runs short, Finance has a bank: a loan with equal weekly instalments. The limit depends on the value of owned aircraft and recent profit, so an all-leased airline gets almost nothing out of it.

Aircraft size moves both halves of the ledger, and not in the same direction. A seat on a small aircraft sells for more: on a route nobody else serves the fare is higher in real life too, and the smaller the aircraft the bigger the premium — threefold over the mainline rate at nine seats, twofold at thirty, and gone altogether from forty seats up. Per-cycle costs work the other way: they follow the aircraft's class, and a nineteen-seater pays a nineteen-seater's cycle charge even when its weight puts it in the same class as an airliner. Both rules look at the whole aircraft, not at seats alone: a business jet with few seats only because those seats are wide does not count as small. It gets neither the thin-route premium nor the lighter cycle charge — its money is in charter rather than in a schedule. A freighter has no seats at all, and both halves are worked out from the aircraft itself: the premium keeps growing as the payload gets smaller instead of flattening out at eight tonnes, and the cycle charge follows its own size rather than an airliner's class — taking the seats out and putting freight in their place does not make an aircraft more expensive to handle.

Jet fuel subsidy

Fuel is the largest single cost of a flight, and legacy Soviet-built aircraft burn twice as much of it as modern airliners: the Tu-154, Tu-134, Il-62, Il-86 and Yak-40 were designed when kerosene was cheap. The state covers 45 % of the price for them — these aircraft fuel up at 38.50 ₽ per kilogram instead of 70. You can see it in the flight report: the Fuel line already shows the reduced amount, with the size of the discount stated next to it. Modern domestic types — the Superjet, Tu-204 and Il-114 — are not covered: they pay for themselves on par with imported aircraft without help.

What the aircraft has flown and earned

The "Where this aircraft has flown" tab on its card gathers everything it did into one timeline: flights with live pilots, virtual-crew legs, ferries and maintenance stops. The summary on top gives the number of flights, how many were flown by a pilot, and how this aircraft is usually landed. Airline management also sees the money there: the net result of every leg — the same figure the flight breakdown ends with — plus the net over the aircraft’s whole history. A ferry sits in that column as a minus: it earns nothing and its cost is charged. A rank-and-file pilot does not see the money column.

Why an aircraft is sitting idle

The aircraft card carries a block that answers two questions at once: why the airframe is not working — no crew, waiting for maintenance, parked in the wrong place, no line that suits it — and where to put it. The second half lists legs of your own network this aircraft could fly, with the profit worked out the same way the NPC dispatcher works it out. A collapsed version of the same adviser sits in the airline overview: how many aircraft are working, how many are idle, and which lines are losing money. The panel on the Fleet tab carries a separate line about crew: how many people to add across the whole fleet, and how many are already hired beyond the work there is. One reason stands apart — «Waiting for its hour»: a pair's passengers are spread unevenly across the day, and a leg that leaves full in the morning will not even cover its fees in the evening. There is nothing to fix here, dispatch will send the aircraft out as soon as its hour comes; but if you would rather not wait, create one more line out of that airport for its type, so the aircraft does not depend on the demand pattern of a single pair.

The personal hangar

The hangar is your own fleet, separate from the airline: aircraft are bought with your own money, and charter flights on them pay you directly. Handy when you have no airline yet, or simply want to fly something of your own. A charter's payload is set by the same demand of the direction as any other flight: your charter shares the passengers of the pair with everyone else flying it, and spends them too. On a thin route that shows immediately, and the pre-flight estimate names exactly the number the aircraft will fly with.