Your first airport and routes

What you actually control

You own no aircraft and set no fares. What you do is build airports, open a market between two of them, and request a schedule in whole weekly round trips. Airlines fly what is worth flying; the public account collects a flat charge per completed air journey.

So your levers are exactly four: airport grade, which markets exist, how much service you request, and whether you pay to keep unprofitable service running.

Airports: three grades, and a movement budget

Airports are the most expensive single objects you will buy early on — a feeder alone costs more than a hundred kilometres of national route. Upgrading later costs 80% of the difference between the grades, so building small first is not a wasted purchase.

Movements are the constraint that catches people out. One daily round trip consumes two movements at each end — a departure and an arrival. Every market touching an airport draws on the same daily budget.

Opening your first market

A market is one bidirectional relationship between two airports — not a route you own, and not one per direction. Into it you place a schedule request in whole weekly round trips.

Two rules shape what you get:

• The aircraft size follows the smaller of the two airports. A hub connected to a feeder flies feeder-sized aircraft. Upgrading one end of a thin market changes nothing until the other end follows.
• Requested is not executable. The panel shows what you asked for beside what will actually fly. A gap means something trimmed it — the quarterly review, your fund, or the movement budget.

Reading a running market

Load factor is the signal, and it is measured separately in each direction. The healthy band is roughly 62% to 88%. Below it you are flying empty seats; above it, willing passengers are being left behind. A market can easily run full one way and half-empty the other, and the average will hide it — look at both.

The thing that changes behind your back

Every market carries its own three-month review clock. When it comes due:

Breaking even or better

Your request is kept unchanged.

Losing money

Your request is cut — by a quarter, or one weekly round trip, whichever is larger.

Doing well

Nothing. It is never raised automatically. Growth is always your decision.

Two details matter. The review touches only the commercial passenger service. And a cut rewrites your stored request — the number you typed is gone, not merely overridden for a month. A market you leave unprofitable will shrink toward nothing while you are looking elsewhere.

When you want service the market will not give

Each market has subsidised buckets alongside the commercial ones. The public pays exactly the shortfall — the amount by which that service loses money — up to a cap you authorise when you set the schedule. A bucket that turns profitable costs you nothing, without you changing anything.

Use it for a thin connection a province genuinely needs. Do not use it to force more flights through a full airport: the fund trim runs before the movement allocation, so money cannot buy past a capacity problem. Only an upgrade can.

Next

Part 5 is water — ports, terminals and sailings, where the facility you build decides which routes are even possible.

For hubs and transfer journeys, all six schedule buckets and suspension, see Aviation: airports, markets and subsidies.