When you enter a world for the first time, you land on the airline picker. If you already own an airline there, you go straight to its dashboard; otherwise this screen is where your career begins.

What you can see before you commit#

You are not handed a dossier on the competition. Prospective founders get an aggregate world briefing (the world day, how many airlines and aircraft exist, how many airports there are), plus a founding shortlist of airports with strong demand and few incumbents. For each shortlisted airport you see its country, how many airlines are based there and its weekly departures. Exact passenger numbers are deliberately hidden: demand in this game is judged by character, never read off a chart. A "Found here" button prefills the form with that airport.

The founding form#

  • Airline code: 2–3 characters, IATA/ICAO style, starting with a letter. This becomes your identity everywhere: flight boards, the ledger, the map.
  • Name: your trading name. Leave it blank and the code is used.
  • Home airport: the single most important choice you will make.
  • Starting capital: displayed, not chosen. It is a world rule, identical for every player: by default $30,000,000 (your world may differ). It arrives in your account as founding share capital.

Why the home airport is everything#

Your home airport's country becomes your airline's nationality, and nationality drives traffic rights for the life of the company. Domestic routes are only yours inside your home country; flying between two foreign countries is generally forbidden unless treaties allow it. Pick a home with real demand, spare slot capacity and, ideally, no night curfew. See Slots & curfews and Stations for what those constraints mean day to day.

There is nothing to get wrong here: nationality is derived from the home airport you pick, not chosen separately.

Day one#

You start with cash, an empty fleet and no routes. The dashboard shows a short "Getting off the ground" checklist that walks you through the opening moves:

  1. Get an aircraft: lease or buy on the market (see Leasing, buying & ordering).
  2. Create your first flight number, starting from Route Evaluation.
  3. Put it on a tail and fly.

The checklist disappears the moment every step is done. From there, Your first route takes you through the details.