Maintenance in this game is policy-driven. You do not book individual shop visits; you set one airline-wide spend level, and the engine handles wear, recovery, and hangar visits for every tail. Your job is to watch condition, budget for the bills, and schedule around the downtime.

Condition and wear#

Every aircraft has a condition rating from 0 to 100. Flying wears it down (a little per flight hour plus a fixed amount per takeoff-and-landing cycle), and daily upkeep recovers some of it back. How fast it recovers depends on your spend level.

Age puts a ceiling on condition: older airframes can never be restored to factory-fresh, and the ceiling drops a little each year (though it never falls below a floor). An old aircraft can still be reliable; it just can't be perfect.

Condition matters three ways. Below a reliability threshold (60 by default; your world may differ), every departure risks a technical cancellation, and the risk grows as condition falls; cancellations cost passenger compensation and hurt your image. Condition also feeds into how passengers rate your product, and it directly affects what the aircraft is worth if you sell it.

The spend slider#

The Maintenance page has one lever: a spend-level slider (0.5× to 1.5× by default). Higher spend costs more per flight hour but recovers condition faster; lower spend saves cash and lets the fleet slowly deteriorate. Routine upkeep is billed daily per aircraft based on hours actually flown.

Heavy checks#

Heavy checks fall due on flight hours, not the calendar: every 7,000 flight hours by default (your world may differ). The engine projects each tail's utilization, books a hangar window about two weeks ahead, and takes the aircraft out of service for five days by default. The visit restores a large chunk of condition (up to the age ceiling) and resets the flight-hour clock.

The bill is a percentage of the type's list price. Flights that overlap the hangar window are cancelled with compensation, unless a reserve aircraft steps in and flies the rotation instead; see Reserves & substitution.

The Maintenance page shows upcoming hangar windows and a flight-hour clock per tail, so you can see checks coming well before they bite.

Costs that sneak up on you#

  • Fleet commonality: your first few maintenance families are free (3 by default), then every extra family adds a surcharge (15% by default) to all maintenance costs. A zoo of types is expensive to keep airworthy.
  • Line maintenance: every aircraft's weekly rotation must include enough qualifying ground time (stops of at least 2 hours, adding up to 12 hours per week by default, at any airport), and the scheduler enforces it, so plan for it; see Scheduling gates.
  • Maintenance reserves on leases: aircraft leased from the market accrue a non-refundable per-flight-hour payment to the lessor on top of the rent; see Lease obligations.

Third-party maintenance contractors are not in the game yet; all of the above runs in-house.