Airline management borrows a lot of vocabulary from the real industry, and PlaneSim borrows some of it back. This page defines both: the terms the game puts on screen, and the industry terms you will meet in forums and articles about real airlines. Where the game expresses an industry idea differently, that is said plainly rather than glossed over.
The aircraft#
Airframe: one specific, individual aircraft. Not a type: a physical machine with a registration, an age, an hours-and-cycles record and a history of previous operators. Every aircraft in the game is one of these. See Leasing, buying & ordering.
Tail: the same thing, named after the registration painted on it. "A tail" means one aircraft.
Type: the model, such as a narrowbody twin-jet. Types share a floor-space budget, range and payload profile, and maintenance behaviour.
Cycle: one takeoff and landing. Airframes age by cycles as well as by hours, and short-sector flying accumulates cycles faster than long-haul does.
Condition: an airframe's physical state, 0 to 100. Below a reliability threshold (60 by default) departures start risking technical cancellation. Condition also feeds what passengers think of the trip and what the aircraft is worth when sold. See Maintenance & heavy checks.
Heavy check: the big scheduled maintenance event that restores condition, takes the aircraft out of service for real time, and costs real money.
Floor space: the cabin budget of a type. Seats consume it at different rates by class, so a premium cabin costs you more than one economy seat. See Cabins.
Narrowbody / widebody: industry terms for single-aisle and twin-aisle aircraft. The game does not label types this way; what matters here is the floor-space budget, the range and the payload curve.
Getting aircraft#
Lessor: a leasing company. Most worlds spawn several at creation, each holding a finite fleet of real airframes. They do not go bankrupt and they refurbish what comes back.
Dry lease: the industry term for leasing an aircraft without crew. Every lease in the game is effectively this: you get the airframe and you staff and operate it.
Wet lease: the industry term for leasing an aircraft with crew, usually short term. Not modelled as a separate product here.
Maintenance reserve: a non-refundable amount billed per flight hour to the lessor on top of rent. It is a real cost of flying leased metal, not a deposit you get back.
Ferry flight: a positioning flight with no passengers, flown to get an aircraft where you need it. A leased or bought tail is handed over where it currently parks, not at your base, so the first ferry is usually on you.
Estate auction: a sealed-bid sale of a bankrupt airline's aircraft. See Bankruptcy & estates.
The network#
Station: an airport you have opened for your own operations, with the staff and cost that implies. See Stations.
Hub: a station you deliberately build connections through, rather than just fly to.
Rotation: the chain of flights one aircraft flies in sequence. A rotation has to close: the aircraft must physically be where its next flight departs from.
Turnaround: the ground time between an arrival and the next departure of the same aircraft. Too little and the schedule will not hold.
Block hour: the industry measure of flying time, from pushback to arrival at the gate. It is the unit most airline costs are quoted in.
Slot: a permission to use a congested airport at a given time. In this game slots are a ledger with named holders rather than a capacity number, so they can run out. See Slots & curfews.
Curfew: a night-hours restriction at an airport that blocks movements in a window.
Frequency: how often you fly a route in a period. Often worth more to passengers than a bigger aircraft flown less often.
Connection bank: a deliberate cluster of arrivals followed by a cluster of departures at a hub, arranged so passengers can connect. Also called a wave. See Hubs, banks & connecting time.
Minimum connecting time (MCT): the shortest gap that counts as a valid connection at an airport. Set per hub, split domestic and international.
Hub and spoke: the industry term for routing traffic through a hub instead of flying every city pair directly. The game does not force either model; it simply prices the trade-off.
Passengers and money#
Demand: how many people want to travel between two airports in a period, simulated per origin-and-destination market. It exists whether or not anyone flies it.
Origin and destination (O&D): where a passenger actually starts and ends, as opposed to the individual flight they are on. Someone flying A to C through your hub is O&D traffic for A to C.
Load factor: the share of available seats that were sold. The most-quoted number in the industry and the most misleading on its own: a full aircraft at a bad fare loses money. See Inventory & load monitoring.
Yield: industry term for revenue per passenger per unit of distance. It is the number load factor has to be read against, because the two trade off: cut fares and load factor rises while yield falls.
RASK and CASK: industry terms for revenue and cost per available seat-kilometre. The game does not print these labels, but the same idea is what the route profitability view is showing you: what a seat earns against what it costs to fly.
Spill: demand you could not carry because the seats were sold out, which then goes to another option. Sold-out flights spill to rivals.
No-travel: the option every passenger always has of simply not going, alongside travelling by ground. Bad options lose to these, not only to competitors, which is why a route can fail without a single rival on it.
Booking curve: the pattern of how a flight fills as its departure approaches. New routes spend their first weeks filling one, which is why revenue lags a route launch.
Image: your airline's reputation, formed slowly from completed flights and recovering with a lag. See Image & reputation.
Compensation: what you owe passengers when you cancel on them or deny them boarding. A real cost, not a formality.
The world#
Fog: the rule that you cannot see the market's full truth, only what you have earned the right to see. Aircraft records are never fogged; demand is. See Market analysis under fog.
AI carrier: a computer-controlled airline running one of five business models. It uses the same commands you do and can go bankrupt like you can. See AI carriers.
Season: the posted lifespan of a world, printed on its tile from the first day. When it ends the world is sealed and published permanently.
Interlining: an agreement letting passengers book a journey across two airlines on one ticket. See Interlining.
Codeshare: an agreement letting one airline sell seats on another's flight under its own flight number. See Codeshares.
World configuration: the live ruleset of the world you are in, printed in full under World → Configuration. When a wiki page cites a default and your world disagrees, that screen is the one telling the truth.