You have founded an airline and the money is in the bank. Here is the shortest honest path to revenue.
Step 1: get an aircraft#
Open the fleet's acquire screen. Depending on your world you will lease or buy: in worlds with leasing companies, every listing is a specific airframe with an exact tail number, age and history, offered for sale or lease (often both). Leases take a deposit up front and bill rent weekly, which is why most startups lease. Details live in Leasing, buying & ordering.
Step 2: evaluate the pair#
Before you schedule anything, run the pair through Route Evaluation. It answers "should I even fly this?" in one screen:
- Airport facts for both ends: runway length, size class, how full the slots are, and any night curfew.
- The traffic-rights verdict as an explicit pass or fail, with the freedom it relies on. If this is red, no schedule will ever save; pick another pair.
- The market's character: its type, season and lean. You will not see passenger counts; judging the size of a market is your job (see Market analysis under fog).
Step 3: build the round trip#
The "Create flight number" button drops you into the schedule wizard with the pair prefilled. There are no modes to choose between: the wizard opens as a single one-way leg, and the ⇄ Add return button appends the mirrored return under its own number (auto-suggested as outbound + 1). Add the return and the pair is created together and validated as one rotation. Pick your operating days, set departure times (entered in UTC, with local times previewed under each leg) and leave fares blank to track the engine's auto price if you prefer.
As you type, a live checklist validates your plan and shows exactly what fails and why. How much it can check depends on whether you have attached an aircraft: with a tail assigned all seven gates run, while a number saved to the pool is only checked for traffic rights and the departure curfew; range, runway, slots, rotation and the maintenance window run later, when you assign it. The full list is in Scheduling gates; how pairs behave afterwards is in Flight numbers & pairs.
A few first-timer traps:
- The rotation must pass through the airport where your aircraft is parked: start the loop from wherever the tail actually sits.
- Leave real ground time in the week. Every tail needs qualifying maintenance stops: by default 12 hours per week in stops of at least 2 hours (your world may differ).
- Watch the curfew chips. A perfectly-timed departure can still arrive inside someone's night closure.
Step 4: fly and watch#
Save, and the flights materialize immediately; the wizard tells you how many weekly departures you just committed. If you created the numbers unassigned ("pool"), assign the pair to a tail from the Flight Numbers page; both directions board the aircraft together.
Then go to the dashboard: today's flight board shows each departure, its load and status. Bookings build over the days before departure (see How booking works), so an empty first flight is normal, not a verdict.