[EDIT 6/19/23] I am changing my recommendation to No as I believe route profitability is either fundamentally broken or needs to be fully explained. As I note below, it should be as simple as this formula: (passengers * ticket price) - (cost per hour + maintenance before next leg).
However this doesn't appear to be the case. I constantly am battling routes that begin to lose money despite being 95-100% capacity and previously making tons of cash. In particular it seems almost impossible to keep long routes with heavies making money. Eventually they will start losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per week for seemingly no reason while being at 95-100% capacity. Let's take a look at just one example that I have detailed:
SYD-SIN with a 777-200ML
Route distance: 5465KM
Aircraft max range: 17450KM
Aircraft cost at max range: 26487/hr
Service cost at turn-around: 10360
Aircraft speed: 945kmh
Time to fly route: 5.7 hours
COST TO FLY ROUTE: 26487 * 5.7 = 150976 + 10360 turn cost = ***160976***
^Cost assumes no discount for flying a shorter route
# Pax/Max Pax on this leg: 440/440 (100% capacity)
Ticket price for leg: 966
REVENUE FOR THIS LEG: 440 * 966 = ***425040***
Net income from route: 425040 - 160976 = ****264065****
So why does this aircraft lose 30,000 on every leg? It should be making 264,065.
This is but one example. I have plenty of other routes that are doing the same thing: profitable until one day they are not, despite carrying the same number of pax.
So either there is some dynamic variable that we don't know about and cannot seem to control, or the profitability calculation is broken.
Either way, I am rapidly losing patience with this and hope the dev fixes this or fully explains profitability soon.
Thanks to the dev for making this game. I have gotten quite a bit of enjoyment out of it. Sadly, I agree with some of the reviewers stating this game needs some work and probably should have been released as early access. That having been said, I got it for $11 on Steam and feel I have gotten more than my money's worth out of it. This genre is seriously lacking for games and we are fortunate to have this as an option. I am glad I picked it up. I can recommend this game to anyone looking for something more in-depth than Fly Corp, less in-depth than The Airline Project, or you are waiting for The Airline Project NG to come out. I have been playing airline sims since Aerobiz on SNES, and this is the most I have enjoyed an airline simulator in a very long time. I have a list of things below I feel need to be changed, and hope the developer will consider these in the spirit of improving a game that already has a solid foundation, and making it even better and more appealing to other users.
1. When you're trying to plan routes you would click on airport and see what the popular destinations are - you cannot see which airports you can actually fly to because of your level. You have to click the airport name and look at the level on the airport menu. This makes it very tedious to plan routes at large scale. It would be nice if the airport level were listed next to it or in a tooltip.
2. Needs an auto save - a banner pops up after 5 minutes saying you haven't saved your game in 'x' minutes and is super annoying.
3. The court needs a persistent legal defense you can pay into that will automatically act as defendant for you. The number of messages that scroll across the left side of the screen is absurd once you get to a large network. There is simply no way anyone can realistically react to each one without that being the only thing you would ever do. You lose hundreds of millions of dollars to lawsuits by the time you're a large level 4 international airline.
4. Flight details need more data - I need to know how much I am paying per flight hour on the flight since shorter distances are less money per hour than the aircraft info lists. There also needs to be a table view that shows me leg, # pax, ticket price, fuel cost, income, net proceeds on a per-day or per-week period. This needs way more data than what is shown, and currently once the next leg starts the info on the screen is gone forever. It is really difficult to understand what makes one airplane more profitable on a single leg than another. It seems to be way more complicated than (passengers * ticket price) - (cost per hour + maintenance before next leg).
5. Route profitability needs more attention. In addition to the flight details above, this is quickly becoming a "ticket price simulator" trying to find the perfect ticket price. Can you introduce advisors or marketing into the game so I can pay money to a team that will recommend me the optimum price for the route? I don't want to them to automatically adjust it, just tell me what the best price or best price range is to make the most money. I can burn 20 minutes on a single route playing with the ticket sliders.
6. Only level 4 aircraft can fly over water. This seems to be quite unrealistic. In reality some of the aircraft depicted in Levels 2, 3 are certified by EASA and FAA with ETOPS certification to fly over water. In particular I am having a lot of trouble finding an aircraft that can be profitable between Eastern US and Western Europe because the range is half of what the smallest range Level 4 aircraft can do, but the larger Level 3 A32x and 737 Max's aren't allowed to fly over water. I think some Level 3 aircraft like the "321leo" and "737 min 900" should be allowed to fly over water.
7. A game manual would be nice, or some way to see what the keybinds are in the game. After the initial keybind description in the tutorial, I can't find a way to see them.
8. What does it mean to "invest in infrastructure" when the 'airport full' card pops up on the left side? Improving the runway and upgrading departure don't seem to help. "Invest in an airport" is the only thing that does and the tool tip doesn't indicate that this should have anything to do with the transfer terminal workload. You also max out on this really easily. There needs to be some re-wording done to the button or tool tip on this. Call it "Invest in Airport Infrastructure".
9. There needs to be some kind of delay on the levels before you can fall back. Sometimes you are right on the edge and while you're planning routes or buying aircraft you'll fall back to the previous level.
10. Allow the game to run in the background. There's a lot of grinding in this early game and there are times where everything is just running smooth but you need to wait until you get a few more million dollars. Give me the ability to do something else while I wait, please. Right now the game pauses as soon as the window loses focus.
11. Option to disable the custom cursor and use Windows cursor. Or at least the option to disable how the cursor changes from the paper airplane to the hand. It's annoying on laptop screens, and on systems toward the lower end of the minimum requirements, there is a moment of lag when that cursor changes. It makes it difficult to click things.
12. There seems to be a bug with Bahrain airport in particular, where sometimes adding a route will summon the langoliers from Stephen King's famous novel, and will eat the aircraft you place on the route. The aircraft will just vanish and be gone forever. A red line will remain for the route (if that was the only aircraft on it). Any future aircraft assigned will meet the same fate. A save, exit, and load of the game will clear the red route and the issue maybe will not happen again. It has happened three times for me creating a route from Baghdad to Bahrain, Beirut to Bahrain, Jeddah to Bahrain.
13. Competition - this would add depth to the game if we had competitors and could view what they're charging on our routes, how saturated a given route is with competition etc.
14. Marketing - some way to promote a route, run ad campaigns for the airline, and frequent flyer programs to boost company reputation.
