...
Browse GamesSteam news
Full Steam announcements and update articles for this title.
Fixed delivery countdown rings getting stuck on the map forever. During mass aircraft replacements, the old icons could lose their tracking and haunt the route lines permanently. Casey swept the hangar with a flashlight.
Delivery status now syncs correctly on save/load. Previously, the game could show phantom delivery rings from stale order data until the first month ticked over.
Fixed a nasty frame-rate drop when the Strategic Advisor was open. Cash updates were hammering every button in the panel 60 times a second. Casey installed a governor. Your GPU says thank you.
Fixed a runaway string in the translation catalog. One rogue regex was pulling 18,000 characters of raw GDScript into the translation pipeline instead of the actual button label. 29 language files cleaned up.
Fixed a crash when clicking certain aircraft in the catalog. The engine options display was using an old wiring style that could trip over itself on some hardware. Casey rewired the whole panel with proper typed connections. Intel integrated graphics users should breathe easier.
Pre-purchase orders are no longer limited to one per aircraft type. Want to lock in 3 sets of 757s before they hit the market? Go for it. Each order gets its own cancel button and refund terms.
Delivery stall at 0 months remaining: if you're on an older version and orders seem stuck, update to the latest build. Casey squashed that bug a few patches back.
Early-era airports got a bigger terminal. Cities with 500K+ population now have 2 airline slots from the start instead of 1. No more watching a single rival lock you out of Berlin, Moscow, or Detroit before you can even buy a ticket counter.
The CONNECT TO section in City Panel now tells you when a destination's airport is full. Previously those cities just vanished from the list with no explanation. Now you'll see them greyed out at the bottom with a slot count so you know what's going on.
Added a Show More button to CONNECT TO. Casey was only showing you 5 destinations. Now you can expand the full list and see every reachable city.
The naming pen now reaches the engine room. Open Settings and you'll find a new Engine Makers tab where you can rename all six engine manufacturers. GeneralEd, TitaniumX, PrattPower, CFI, IndoEuro, AllianceCo. Casey knows their real names but the lawyers won't let him say them out loud.
Your engine brand names show up everywhere they should: the engine picker dropdown, spec sheets, summary lines, and the mass-modify panel. Profile-level edits persist across every campaign.
Fixed a bug where starting a new campaign after loading a saved game would overwrite that save slot when you hit Save & Exit. Casey found the misfiled boarding pass in the wrong gate pocket.
Union demands now scale with your airline's actual profits and the era you're playing in. A 1931 startup making $5K per route won't face $20K wage demands and million-dollar signing bonuses anymore. Casey recalibrated the negotiating table.
The same scaling applies to AI airlines. Rivals with thin margins get proportionally modest labor costs, while profitable mega-carriers face bigger asks. Everybody pays their fair share.
Closed out the remaining Discord suggestion backlog: lease auto-renew (already shipped), engine brand customization (deferred to roadmap), and the aircraft mega thread (acknowledged for monitoring).
Runway infrastructure now reflects the historical investment wave of the late 1950s. Airports built their long runways for the Comet and 707 programs, so cities like London are accessible to early jets by 1958 instead of needing another decade of construction. Casey checked the blueprints.
Your AI rivals finally noticed when an earthquake or disaster damages an airport on their routes. They'll spend their own cash to rebuild it instead of flying into rubble. They also avoid opening new routes to destroyed airports. Casey gave them a copy of the safety manual.
Bug reports first: loading a save with 300+ routes could freeze the game for minutes while economics recalculated. Casey found the system was re-running the entire profit engine on load instead of using the saved results. Also fixed custom order specs vanishing when you switched aircraft types in the catalog, and delivery orders losing their custom configs on arrival.
The used aircraft market was always stocked with 1930s biplanes, even when starting in the jet age. Casey moved the inventory seeding to after the campaign era is set. You'll see era-appropriate listings from day one now.
Hangar button in the HUD toolbar is always visible, even when the hangar is empty. Clicking it opens Fleet Overview's Hangar tab directly. No more hunting for where your stored aircraft went.
Starting a campaign in a later era now auto-grants all research tech from earlier decades. No more unlocking 1940s engines in 1985. Starter aircraft also match your campaign mode: cargo campaigns get freighter-configured planes, combined mode gets combi specs.
You can now delete and rename saves from the Continue Campaign panel. The rename pencil and delete X are right on each save slot row. Casey added a confirmation dialog for deletions because he knows you'll misclick.
New in Settings: rename your airline mid-game. Casey filed the rebranding paperwork.
The aircraft catalog's fuel efficiency and CO2 stats now reflect your engine mods. Previously they showed stock values even after you'd spec'd a custom order with fuel-saving engines.
Fixed a delivery countdown icon that stuck to the map after the aircraft arrived. Casey peeled it off the radar screen.
Month-end processing used to freeze for 20-40 seconds when your automation was establishing routes. Casey found the delegation office was walking the entire route network to check every single recommendation. Installed a fast-lookup filing system so only viable candidates reach the front desk.
Late-game empires with 350+ routes should see month ticks drop from half a minute to under a second. Your airline runs on time now.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were firing in July 2020, but the real Games were delayed to 2021 by COVID. Casey checked the calendar and moved the event to July 2021, where it belongs. The name stays '2020 Tokyo Olympics' because that's what they called it.
Aircraft ordered to the hangar (including custom-spec builds) now appear in Fleet Overview's 'On Order' tab. Previously, only route-bound deliveries showed up. Casey found the missing paperwork in a separate filing cabinet.
Casey pulled the invoice records and found the Skybus A320 listed at $10M. The A319 costs $24M. Something was off. The A320 now costs $24M, right where it belongs between the A319 and A321.
The Bering 777-200 was carrying 350 passengers in a three-class layout. Casey measured the cabin and says that's a 777-300 worth of seats. Corrected to 305, which matches the real-world config and sits properly below the 200ER's 313.
Met all era objectives early? Casey now puts a 'Claim Victory' button right on the Era Objectives panel. No more waiting for December to roll around. If there's a next era, the button says 'Advance to Next Era' instead.
Antitrust regulators will no longer fine you or force-sell your routes in a region where you're the only airline. If the AI packed up and left, that's not your fault. Casey argued the case in court and won. Regulators will still try to spawn competitors to keep things interesting.
Airframe modifications (winglets, fairings, aux tanks, denser seating) now show up in the Bulk Fleet Modification panel. Casey found the parts catalog was using a filing system that only works in the hangar, not in the shipped build. Swapped to a proper manifest.
Nine African cities south of the equator were being classified as Oceania by the map's region heuristic. Durban-Johannesburg was flagged as an overwater route requiring ETOPS clearance. Casey has updated the charts.
Brand traits (manufacturer bonuses and personalities) now load correctly in shipped builds. Same manifest fix as the airframe mods. Your Bering fleet was secretly flying without its brand identity.
Fixed a bug where airplane sprites on the map would appear during load, then vanish and never come back. Casey's radar was showing ghosts. The map's performance mode was escalating to 'hide planes' mid-rebuild but never de-escalating when route count dropped.
Route removal (from AI pruning or manual close) now re-checks the display mode. If you drop below the threshold, your planes come back on their own.
The upgrade recommender no longer suggests aircraft that need a longer runway than your route's airports can handle. Casey was getting tired of recommending 747s to bush strips.
Settings panel no longer forces horizontal scrolling. Casey found the options were wider than the window. Labels and dropdowns now clip to fit, the banned-aircraft buttons stack vertically, and career stats wrap onto the next line.
Map pan on ultrawide monitors no longer warps the cursor to the wrong spot. The drag release was converting coordinates in viewport space, but the OS expected window space. Fixed on standard pan and controller-to-keyboard handoff.
Hangar tab now shows a custom-spec badge when any stored aircraft have non-stock order specs. You can finally tell your extended-range birds from the stock models.
The Custom Order Spec panel now shows what your choices actually do. Effective range, passenger capacity, and fuel efficiency update live as you toggle aux tanks, weight variants, and seat configs. Casey was tired of pilots ordering extended tanks and then asking 'so how far can we fly now?'
Quarterly Reports now show the correct quarter. Casey caught the bean counters labeling September's books as Q4 instead of Q3. The report title reads the snapshot taken when the quarter closed, not the ticker that already flipped ahead.
Transfer passengers now survive save and reload. Casey found the manifest getting wiped during boarding. Your hub network keeps its connecting traffic exactly where you left it.
Pausing mid-month no longer drops a month of bookkeeping. The settlement paperwork goes through whether or not you step away from the desk.
Solo play with zero rivals stays solo. Casey stopped the dispatchers from sneaking competitors onto your tarmac after loading a save.
Suspended routes with no fleet can no longer be resumed into a zombie state. The Resume button now checks that you actually have planes before waving the green flag.
When your crew union contract expires, Casey walks in with a clipboard and a stack of demands. You now sit down at the table with the union and negotiate: accept their terms, slide the numbers around with a counter-offer, or reject outright and hope they don't walk out. Each deal shapes your wages, crew benefits, fatigue policy, and reputation for years.
Route economics now scale with weekly frequency. A route flying once a week carries fewer passengers and burns less fuel than one flying daily. Changing frequency in Route Details shows a profit delta in the toast so you know the math before you commit. Casey inspected the books and found the old formula charging full price for planes that were mostly parked.
The CREW & LABOR section in Route Details shows your active union contract terms: wage raises, benefits package, and rest policy.
Changing weekly flights now shows a toast with slot ops impact and transfer appeal shift. Casey likes to see the numbers move before he signs off.
Pausing during a month rollover no longer drops a month of bookkeeping. Casey found the settlement paperwork in the wrong tray.
Routes suspended by seasonal capacity restrictions now reactivate reliably when the restriction lifts. The Route Manager also shows seasonal, off-season, strike, and sanctions status instead of hiding them as active.
ETOPS overwater calculations now use the correct max diversion distance instead of doubling it. Russia counts as Eurasia. Advanced avionics unlock ETOPS-330 for transpacific twins.
Transfer passengers survive save and reload. Casey sealed the passenger manifest.
Route stats now update live. Open a route, and you see current projected load, profit, and demand without waiting for the monthly tick. Casey installed real-time gauges in the cockpit.
The Route Manager table refreshes when you create, swap, suspend, or close a route. No more staring at yesterday's numbers.
Adjusting the pricing slider recalculates stats on release so you can see the impact of your fare changes right away.
New routes show a CURRENT PROJECTION header instead of LAST MONTH until the first monthly tick runs. A hint explains the numbers are estimates.
Tooltips on the Route Manager's load and profit columns tell you when a value is projected vs. confirmed.
Custom order specs now stick. Configure your aircraft once and order as many as you want without re-entering the spec each time. Casey laminated the build sheet.
Order specs survive save and load. Your avionics and seating choices are right where you left them.
Bug reports now combine history logs into single files to stay under Discord's attachment limit. Steam display name and ID are included in the report embed.
Custom order specs now update the Aircraft Info display. Capacity, range, fuel use, CO2, and cabin config all reflect your MTOW, tank, and seating choices. Casey stopped reading the stock brochure.
Placing a custom order now charges the spec-adjusted price and delivery time. Your Comms Log shows the real numbers, not the stock sticker.
Selling aircraft to the used market now carries the original build year. A 1955 DC-7 no longer pretends it rolled off the line today. Pricing reflects proper depreciation.
Aircraft Info refreshes automatically after saving or clearing a custom spec. No more closing and reopening the panel.
Save & Exit now writes to the slot you last saved to, instead of always overwriting the autosave. Casey spotted the misfiled paperwork.
Diagnostics and engine logs now keep 10 sessions of history. If something goes wrong, the flight recorder has the evidence.
Bug report panel gains optional 'Older session logs' attachments. Attach up to 10 sessions of diagnostic and Godot logs when filing a report.
Bulk Replace: Select All and Deselect All buttons. Casey got tired of clicking 47 checkboxes one by one.
Engine and modification picker now shows absolute stats alongside the percentages. 'Range: 5,200 km (+6%)' beats '+6%' when you're trying to reach Honolulu.
Tutorial step dots are clickable. Jump forward or backward through a chapter without restarting. Casey approves of skipping the parts you already know.
Swapping to a different aircraft now rescales your cabin layout. Your 20% business / 80% economy split carries over to the new airframe instead of reverting to all-economy.
Crew Wage Boost gets a bulk-apply button. Set it on one route, then apply to every route flying the same aircraft type.
Route creation wizard now shows a region filter. 532 cities sorted by region. Casey reorganized the filing cabinet.
Estimated monthly profit appears during route setup. Green means money, red means turbulence. Pick your aircraft and both cities to see it.
Strategic Advisor: new Settings toggle to hide multi-stop routes by default. One less thing between you and your point-to-point empire.
Financial History charts added to the Market Dashboard. Cash, profit, and revenue plotted across every quarter since your airline's founding. Casey's been keeping the receipts.
Eastern Bloc aircraft rebalanced. The Il-14, Il-76, Tu-204, Il-114, Tu-204-300, V-100, and L-410 had prices that made your CFO cry. Seven price corrections bring Soviet iron closer to their Western equivalents.
Aircraft Catalog gains a 'Hide retired' checkbox. No more scrolling past biplanes to find your next widebody.
Route Manager search bar. Type a city name, IATA code, or aircraft name to filter your routes instantly.
Demand formula documented in the Help Guide. Now you can see exactly how economy, population, era propensity, and your demand slider combine.
Custom Order Spec now updates the Aircraft Info panel. Previously, saving a custom build (MTOW-C, extended tanks, premium seating, etc.) showed 'Pending custom spec' but kept displaying stock values for price, ETOPS, delivery time, and order totals. Casey found the spec sheet was reading from the wrong clipboard.
Order totals, max affordable count, and the PLACE ORDER button all reflect your custom spec price. A $8.7M custom 707 no longer pretends to cost $4M on the receipt.
AI rivals now pay down their emergency loans instead of drowning in interest forever. Previously, a rival that borrowed $5M would bleed interest until the heat death of the universe. Now they chip away at the principal when they can afford it. Casey has explained the concept of 'amortization' to several board members.
Leased aircraft can now be re-leased. When a profitable route's lease expires, and the rival can't afford a full buyout, they renew the lease instead of losing the route. Casey found three airlines closing their best routes because the paperwork said 'lease expired' and nobody thought to call the leasing company back.
Rivals stop stockpiling aircraft when they're broke. Legacy carriers used to speculatively buy aircraft into their hangars even when they couldn't make payroll. Now they hold off until cash is above $2M. Casey confiscated their catalogs.
Monthly emergency route pruning. When an airline's cash drops near the bankruptcy line, they now close their worst route immediately instead of waiting for the quarterly review. Three months of bleeding can be the difference between survival and receivership.
Fleet size caps have been raised and now scale with era. Late-game AI can field bigger fleets on popular routes, especially at greater difficulties. A 1990s airline running widebodies on London-New York shouldn't be capped at 6 planes while you run 20.
Smarter pricing. AI now recognizes monopoly routes and charges a premium. Raises are bigger on full planes, cuts are faster on empty ones. Rivals that lose money despite decent load factors will raise prices instead of accepting the bleed.
Struggling airlines now cut costs proactively. When cash drops below $1M, rivals downgrade all maintenance, shed fleet on under-loaded routes, and liquidate hangar stock. Previously, they just watched the bank account drain while doing nothing about it.
Runway Extension investments now work in the modern era. Previously, your investment bonus was capped at the airport's real-world runway length, which meant spending millions on extensions at a late-game airport did nothing. The bonus now adds on top of the natural runway. Casey found the old construction crew stopped pouring concrete at the property line. They have been given a stern talking-to.
Airport Browser now has a search field. Type any city name or airport code and hit Enter. If the airport has a detailed profile, you get the full infrastructure view. If not, it opens the City Panel so you can buy a hub and invest. Previously, you could only browse the 37 authored airports from the dropdown.
Hub Investments panel gains an 'Open any airport' search bar. Type a city name or code to jump straight to its City Panel for hub purchases and investment management. No more hunting for dots on the map.
Global search results expanded from 10 to 25. Shorter search queries now show more matching cities and routes.
Demand rebalanced across all eras. The 1940s and 1950s were quieter than a graveyard shift at a closed airport. Casey dug into the historical passenger data and built an era propensity curve. Early aviation is still niche, but the postwar boom through the jet age now fills seats the way it should. The year 2000 remains the baseline.
Wartime events softened. D-Day now boosts demand instead of penalizing it. Pearl Harbor ends sooner. The Korean War and Berlin Blockade are shorter and less punishing. Casey reviewed the records and concluded the old numbers were grounding too many planes.
Batch pre-orders are here. You can now pre-purchase 1, 5, 10, 15, or 20 aircraft at once, just like regular orders. Type a custom quantity or hit the quick-select buttons. Launch partner discounts apply automatically to your pre-order balance. Casey has been printing receipts all morning.
Airport slot throughput documented. The Player Help Guide now explains exactly how airport operations capacity works: the formula, era scaling, how flights consume ops, and what happens when you hit the cap. Casey wrote it on the back of a napkin and then typed it up properly.
Custom aircraft specs now stick. When you customize an order through the spec sheet and wait months for delivery, your avionics, seating, and cargo door choices are waiting on the tarmac. Previously, specs could get lost between ordering and delivery if you opened the customizer again for a different aircraft. Casey found the paperwork jammed in the wrong filing cabinet.
Steam ownership verification added. Achievements, leaderboards, and cloud saves require a verified Steam copy. If you bought the game on itch.io, nothing changes for you. Casey just wants to know who has a boarding pass and who climbed in through the cargo hold.
Five new aircraft fill gaps in the roster. Pacifica Stormbird (1959 turboprop) bridges the piston-to-jet era. Bering 720 (1960) plugs the six-year hole between the 707 and 727. Volga V-100 (2011) brings a modern regional jet to the Russian brand. Shortland 360 (1982 turboprop) gives Shortland a second life past the flying boat era. Convex CV-340 (1952) shores up the 1950s lineup. Roster now at 206 aircraft.
Scheduled routes can now be converted to air-taxi service and back. Small aircraft (under 50 seats) show a conversion button on the route panel. No need to close and re-create the route to switch modes.
Changing a route's pricing strategy now pops a confirmation toast showing the selected strategy and its effect. Casey got tired of watching CEOs click buttons and wonder what happened.
ETOPS regulations are live. Twin-engine aircraft now face overwater restrictions based on real history. Before 1985, no twin crosses more than 60 minutes of open ocean. After that, your ETOPS rating (set by avionics and crew rest) determines how far over water you can fly. Tri-engine and quad-engine birds are exempt. Check the spec sheet for your aircraft's ETOPS clearance.
New sandbox option: Randomize Rival Regions. Your AI competitors start in shuffled home regions instead of their usual countries. Keeps the early game unpredictable.
New sandbox slider: Demand Level. Scale global passenger demand from 0.5x to 3.0x. Crank it up for crowded skies, dial it down for a lean challenge. Available in campaign setup and in-game settings.
When a supply chain event restricts an aircraft, the catalog now tells you exactly why. Manufacturer on strike? Export ban? Parts shortage? The buy button says so, along with how many months you have to wait. No more guessing behind a generic 'Supply-chain restricted' label.
Each decade header in the Aircraft Catalog now has a Ban/Unban button. One click bans every aircraft in the 1950s, or unbans the whole 1970s if you changed your mind. The count shows how many you have banned out of the total.
New toggle in Settings under Banned Aircraft: 'AI Rivals Respect Your Bans.' Turn it on, and your rivals skip the same aircraft you have blacklisted. Handy for removing planes you find ahistorical or just plain ugly from the entire game. Casey filed it under 'market regulation.'
Custom aircraft names now show correctly in the order summary and the upgrade view button. Previously, your lovingly renamed 'Lockheed Super Constellation' still read as 'Pacifica Skystar Plus' on the purchase receipt. Casey has words for whoever typeset those labels.
Supply chain events (manufacturer strikes and export bans) can no longer lock out every available aircraft in the catalog. If only one manufacturer is left standing, the event quietly fizzles. Dawn of Flight players with two manufacturers will stop getting stranded for a year with nothing to buy.
Sixty-seven UI strings were showing literal '%%' instead of '%' across tooltips, event descriptions, hub investment panels, and patch notes. Casey went through with a bottle of correction fluid and a very steady wing.
All 29 translated languages recovered and corrected in the same pass. No translation was lost in the cleanup.
Fleet risk replacements and batch upgrades now keep your old aircraft flying until the new ones roll off the assembly line. Routes stay profitable while you wait for delivery instead of sitting idle on the tarmac.
Cancelling a pending batch swap returns any pre-reserved hangar stock. Casey double-checked the paperwork on that one.
The Strategic Advisor got a new Route filter: All, Point-to-Point, or Multi-Stop. Pick what you are looking for instead of scrolling past chain suggestions you do not want.
Hide Slot-Full is now on by default and checks both slot availability and throughput headroom. The advisor no longer recommends routes to airports where you physically cannot operate.
Five new aircraft join the roster. The Wolfram Fw 200 Condor and Meridian M-130 Clipper bring proper choices to the 1930s. The Donau 328J fills a gap in early-2000s regional jets. The Voltair VE-200 is your first electric option before 2030. And the Cascadia Q-500 gives turboprop fans a next-gen ride for the late 2020s.
The Pacifica Triton had its range card mixed up with the Triton 500. Casey rechecked the spec sheets and corrected it. The base Triton now sits where the L-1011-1 should: shorter legs than the 100, much shorter than the 500.
Two new manufacturers on the tarmac: Wolfram (sturdy German long-range builds) and Meridian (American flying boats). Players who like renaming brands can map them to their real-world counterparts in the Name Overrides panel.
The aircraft purchase panel got a proper order desk. Pick your quantity with the 1 / 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 buttons, type a custom amount, or hit MAX to fill every available hangar slot. The total cost and delivery time update live so you know exactly what you are committing to before you sign.
The Used Aircraft Market now shows up in the Fleet panel's Hangar tab. It was hiding whenever the listings ran dry. Now it stays put with a 'no listings' message so you always know where to look.
Launch customer offers scale to the era. A 1930s manufacturer no longer asks for $50 million to reserve a biplane. The investment tracks the aircraft's actual price, so early offers are affordable and modern ones still sting.
Sandbox mode is unlocked from the start. No need to finish an era first. Jump in whenever you want.
New in Settings: Freeze Era Progression. Turn it on, and your airline stays in the current era forever. The clock ticks but the era never ends. Build your empire on your own schedule.
The Upgrade Recommender now has a Hide Unaffordable checkbox. Toggle it, and the panel only shows swaps you can actually pay for right now.
Air-taxi routes have a fare slider. Open the route panel on any air-taxi route and drag the fare per km up or down. No more tearing it down and rebuilding to adjust pricing.
Casey checked the hangar records and confirms: the Pacifica Skystar is your Constellation, the Skystar Plus is the Super Constellation, and the Triton is the TriStar. They have been here all along under their stage names.
The console is now available to everyone. Press F10 during gameplay to open it. Set your cash, jump to any year, spawn aircraft, fast-forward months. It is a sandbox inside your sandbox.
Fair warning: the moment you use a cheat command, Casey stamps your save file. Achievements lock, and your scores will not upload to the Steam leaderboard. The help, state, and snapshot commands are safe. Everything else trips the wire.
Type help in the console for the full command list.
If your mouse was clicking one spot while the game registered another, that was Windows stretching the cockpit glass on high-DPI displays. Casey realigned the instruments, so pointer and buttons agree on where they are.
New in Settings: a Reset Display Settings button. If the window opens off-screen or the mouse drifts out of line, one press drops you back to a tidy windowed default. Works with keyboard and controller too, so a stranded cursor can never lock you out.
Keys 1 through 4 now set game speed directly. 1 for half, 2 for normal, 3 for double, 4 for triple. The tutorial has been promising this since launch, and Casey finally got around to connecting the wires.
Chinese players were seeing format errors all over the UI, and the word for airport slots was translated as gambling machines. Casey sent the bad translations back to the hangar and straightened out the terminology across Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
Japanese and Korean translations had similar format-string mix-ups causing display errors. Those got the same treatment.
If you started playing before antitrust enforcement existed, loading that save used to flip the regulators on behind your back. Casey pulled the default. Old saves now load with enforcement off, and you can toggle it any time from Settings under Campaign Options.
Delivery ring icons on the map could freeze in place and drift with the camera after a route rebuild. Casey found orphaned icons left behind when routes refreshed. They get properly cleaned up now.
The difficulty and sandbox menus could run off the bottom of the screen on smaller displays or at high UI scale. Casey added a scroll rail so every option stays reachable.
Tokyo has been reassigned from Narita to Haneda, its busier hub. Nicosia now shows its own code instead of borrowing Larnaca's. A few cities that were sharing runways with their neighbors got their own entries straightened out.
Fixed corrupted format strings in Russian, Ukrainian, and Arabic translations that were flooding the error log. The machine translator swapped Latin letters for look-alike characters in those alphabets.
If you played the demo before buying the full game, your achievements were logged locally but never sent to Steam. Casey found the disconnect: the unlock check saw them as already earned and skipped the handoff. Now every locally-tracked achievement gets pushed to Steam on startup. Fire up the game and your missing badges should appear.
Rivals were going missing. If your competition had grown past the three you start with, loading a save quietly dropped the extras and swept all their routes off the map. Casey tracked down the filing error, and your full roster now comes back exactly as you left it.
Closing Casey's Flight School with the X button used to shut the tutorial down for good, so it never offered again. Now the X just tucks the dialog away for the session. It returns next launch, and you can always replay it from Settings.
The trustbusters were double-dipping. When regulators forced you to sell routes, they could grab one the government was actively paying you to fly, then fine you for dropping it. Casey had a word with the front office. Forced sales now skip any route under an active subsidy.
On a Cold War realism run, trying to open a route across a closed border used to charge you for the airport gates first and only then tell you the flight can't happen — leaving you holding gates you didn't want. Casey moved the border check to the front of the line. Now you get the heads-up before a single gate is bought, on both the Buy and Lease buttons in the city window.
Only affects walled routes on a realism campaign. Every other route opens exactly as before.
Casey's little test robot picked up three tricky drills it used to skip. It now stages a supplier strike and checks you can still fly the planes you already own while nobody new can be bought, throws up the Cold War no-fly wall between the Americas and the Soviet bloc to make sure it holds, and grounds a plane for a shop visit to confirm a hangar spare slides in to keep the route flying.
To pull those off, Casey built a few back-room levers for the robot so it can stage a strike, fire off an event, or send a plane to the shop on demand, instead of waiting years for one of those to happen on its own.
All back-office rehearsal. Nothing about how your airline flies or earns changed.
Casey's little test robot learned four new drills. It now saves a game and loads it back to make sure nothing goes missing, tries the old share-issuing money trick on a shell airline to confirm it still gets slammed shut, pushes a route's weekly frequency past what a busy hub can hold to check it gets refused, and dials a route's cabin service up and down to be sure the numbers land right.
Casey also fixed a gremlin in the test bench itself. The robot used to trip over its own bootlaces every other launch, so half the runs came back blank. Casey found the loose lace, tied it off, and now the whole checklist runs clean every single time.
All in the back room. Nothing about how your airline flies or earns changed one bit.
Casey added a little back-office command bar for testing builds. It only shows up in the workshop version of the game, and it lets Casey jump the airline to any year, cash pile, or scenario in one line so tricky situations get checked before they reach you.
You will not see this in your copy. It is behind-the-scenes machinery so Casey can reproduce a report and confirm a fix fast.
Behind the scenes, Casey set up a little robot that boots the game, buys routes, flies a few months, and checks the numbers came out right. It plays through real scenarios on its own so more bugs get caught before they ever reach your airline.
Nothing to click here. This one is Casey doing quality control in the hangar so the flights you take are smoother.
Setting the same plan every day of the week got old fast, so Casey added a copy stamp to each aircraft on the Fleet Schedule board. Set up Monday the way you like it, then hit the stamp and choose Copy Monday to the weekdays or Copy Monday to the whole week.
Casey re-checks each day as it copies, since flying a route more often uses more airport slots. If a busy hub runs out of room partway through, the copy stops there, and Casey tells you which day it hit the wall. There's also a Clear all days option to wipe an aircraft's week clean and start over.
Board buttons only. Nothing about how your routes earn changed.
The multi-trip day editor Casey promised last update is here. On the Fleet Schedule board, every day cell is now a little menu. Click it, and you can tick more than one route for that day, so a shared plane can run its morning hop and its afternoon hop off the same base without a second aircraft.
Casey checks the paperwork as you go. Add a route that shares the base and fits the day, and it takes; try one that won't fit or can't reach, and Casey squawks the reason and leaves the day as it was. A cell shows the route code when it's flying one trip and a little chain badge with the count when it's flying more.
This is board buttons only. Your route economics and every existing plane fly exactly as before.
Some of your planes could easily fly more than one round-trip in a day. Casey's been at the whiteboard working out how a plane that does, say, a morning run to Paris and an afternoon run to Amsterdam should share its capacity between those routes. The answer: it splits its day fairly, so two round-trips give each route half a plane's worth of flying, and the plane never magically counts twice.
That math is now wired in, along with the sensible checks — the round-trips have to share a home base (the plane comes back between them), they all have to fit inside a working day, and the plane needs the range for each. There's no button for it on screen yet; the multi-trip day editor is the next update. Single-route days and every existing route are completely unchanged.
The weekly schedule board is up and clickable. Open Fleet Overview and there's a new Schedule tab. Take a spare out of the hangar, hit Make one shared, and it becomes a shared aircraft you can spread across the week.
Each shared plane gets a row with Monday through Sunday. Pick a route for any day, and the plane flies it that day. Fill a plane's whole week from one route, or split it: three days on London–Paris, four on London–Rome, whatever earns best. A plane can't be in two places on the same day, and Casey squawks if a route is out of range or the airport has no slot room.
Done with a shared plane? The ↩ button sends it back to the hangar. Route Details now shows a little note when shared planes are flying a route, so you always know what's coming in from the calendar. Your existing routes are untouched: this is extra capacity you build on top, only if you want it.
Following on from measuring up the wall: Casey's built the actual pegs and pins for the weekly schedule board. Behind the scenes, a plane can now be pulled from the hangar, marked as a shared aircraft, and tacked onto specific days of specific routes. The sensible checks are all wired in too. A plane can't be in two places on the same day; it has to have the range for the route, and the airport has to have the slot room.
There's still no board on screen to click. That's the very next update. Nothing about your current routes changes: they earn and bill exactly as before. Casey just wanted the mechanism solid before he hangs it on the wall.
Right now every plane you own is married to one route for life. Casey reckons that's a waste: a jet flying London–Paris three days a week could be earning its keep somewhere else the other four. So he's out with the tape measure, sizing up the wall for a proper weekly schedule board where one aircraft can split its week across routes.
This update is Casey getting the pegboard and the paperwork sorted; there's nothing new to pin up just yet, and every route you fly today earns and bills exactly as it did before, right down to the last dollar. The board where you actually put planes on days is taxiing in over the next couple of updates.
When a plane goes in for a heavy maintenance check, it's grounded for a while and a route with just one aircraft used to sit there earning nothing until it came back. Casey didn't like watching an empty gate.
New Auto-Cover: flip it on in Automation Settings and, whenever a route's aircraft is grounded for a check, Casey rolls a suitable spare out of your hangar (one with enough range) to keep the route flying. The moment the check is done, the spare taxis back to the hangar. Route Details shows a little 🔧 badge while a stand-in is on the job.
Great for lean single-aircraft routes that you don't want going dark every time an inspection comes due. Set it once, and Casey handles the swaps.
Leases used to lapse in a confusing puff of smoke; the route would just go 'suspended,' and it was never clear whether you were still paying for a plane you no longer had. Casey filed the proper forms. When a lease runs out now, the aircraft is returned to the lessor, and the route stops billing (no more phantom lease payments), with a plain message telling you exactly what happened.
New Auto-Renew: flip it on for any leased route in Route Details, pick a 1, 3, or 5-year term, and Casey re-lets the same aircraft the moment the old lease ends; the route never stops flying. No more scrambling to keep planes in the air while a new one is on order.
And if a lease already lapsed, there's a Re-lease button right there to put the same aircraft back to work, plus a live preview of the new monthly rate. Set it and forget it.
You wanted to run your routes right from the city window instead of hopping over to the Route Manager. Done. Every route in a city's ACTIVE ROUTES list now carries the full set of controls: open its details, pause it, park the planes in the hangar, or sell it off, all without leaving the window.
Closing a route from here works exactly like the Route Manager does: park the aircraft to keep them, or sell for their market value, and you get your slot deposits back either way. Leased routes just hand the planes back.
And in the Comms Log: those '★ Achievement' messages are now clickable. Tap one to unfold exactly what you did to earn it, handy when a shiny badge pops and you're not sure which milestone you just crossed.
You asked for it: the CO2 Market and Fuel Hedging windows now show a proper price-history graph, not just today's number. Watch the trend, spot the dips, and buy your quotas or lock a hedge when the timing looks right.
Each graph has a scale switch flip between the last 1, 5, or 10 years to zoom in on a recent swing or step back for the big picture. A fresh campaign starts collecting data from its first month, so the line fills in as you play.
A few of you have hit a rare slowdown where the game gets laggy over a long session. Casey couldn't tell what was causing it from the reports alone, so he bolted a proper flight recorder into the diagnostics log it now tracks how hard the graphics and memory are working and raises a flag the moment something starts creeping up. If it happens to you, your report now carries the exact readings Casey needs to actually fix it.
He also pinned up a troubleshooting checklist for launch snags including the Mac 'app is damaged' message (a one-line fix), the Windows 'unrecognized app' warning, and where to find your logs. Look for TROUBLESHOOTING in the docs folder.
The little readouts along the top of the screen your goal progress, the fuel price, reputation, and the zoom level were tucked in at a font size Casey needed a magnifying glass for. A player flagged that they were just too small to read comfortably.
Casey nudged those numbers up to a more readable size across the board. The clock and your cash were always big and bold; now the smaller stats keep up. And if you want them bigger still, the Text Size setting scales everything from here.
A switch in Settings that's switched off for you, like the Casey Cup opt-in when community events are turned off, used to go so dark it practically vanished into the navy panel behind it. You couldn't tell it was there until you poked it.
Casey gave those greyed-out switches a gentler, more readable tone. They still clearly read as 'not available right now,' but you can actually see them now.
While you're still picking your era and difficulty at the start of a game, tapping a keyboard shortcut - pause, speed, save - could quietly fire off in the background before your airline even existed. Casey noticed the menu was tucked out of sight but still listening for keys it had no business answering.
Now those shortcuts stay grounded until you've finished setting up your campaign. The Era and Difficulty screens have the controls to themselves, exactly as they should.
Start a brand-new game and the route and region tallies used to still carry numbers from your last campaign for a month or two before sorting themselves out. Casey tracked down a couple of counters that weren't getting cleared when you began afresh.
They reset to zero the moment a new game starts now, so your fresh airline's record book begins exactly where it should - empty.
Dragging the Text Size slider in Settings had a nasty habit of shoving the whole interface up to giant size and refusing to come back down. Casey found the culprit: the menu was rebuilding itself on every tiny nudge of the slider, yanking the control right out from under your finger mid-drag.
Now the slider waits until you let go before it redraws, so it tracks smoothly from small to large and back again. No more settings screen stuck at maximum zoom.
Your cabin service quality used to be one setting for the whole airline. Now you can tune it route by route. Open a route's details, find the new Cabin Service Quality section, and step Economy through First up or down to suit that particular market.
Run a white-glove operation to the business hubs while keeping the regional shuttles cheap and cheerful. Quality set above your airline baseline costs a little monthly upkeep per aircraft, and the panel shows the running total so there are no surprises. That keeps gold-plating the whole network from being free. Dialing a route below your baseline is on the house.
Changed your mind? Hit Reset to airline default and Casey hands that route back to your standard service. Routes you never touch keep flying on your airline-wide quality exactly as before.
Got a plane parked in the hangar that the catalogue won't sell you anymore an atomic airframe, a model from a maker that folded? You own it, so Casey will let you fly it. Owned aircraft now show up in the New Route wizard and the route swap menu, not just the city's Connect To list.
Swapping an aircraft onto a route you already run now checks the runway and the airport the same way building a brand-new route does. No more sliding a big jet onto a route through a field that can't take it from the route manager while the airport menu quietly refuses.
Multi-stop routes used to show a blank aircraft dropdown when you went to change planes. Casey had been measuring the whole trip end to end instead of the longest single hop. It fills in properly now, even on a long chain flown by a short-legged bird.
Chicago liked to warn that Midway 'can't take jets until 9999,' which read like never. It's really just waiting on O'Hare to open in 1959. Casey reworded the notice to give you the real year.
New airlines no longer start with a single lonely aeroplane. Casey now has a small fleet waiting for you at the gate: one aircraft you own outright, plus two on lease.
Fly any of the three on whatever routes you like. The leased pair cost nothing to buy; they just bill a monthly lease once you put them to work, so you can get three routes running on day one without draining the bank. Open your Hangar to see them; the leased ones wear a little tag.
The big multi-airport cities now have a dot for each airport, and each one is a real destination of its own. New York already had Newark; now LaGuardia joins it. London already had Stansted; now Gatwick joins it. Paris adds Orly, and Tokyo adds Narita.
Each airport keeps its own books, its own routes, its own slots, its own hub. So you can run JFK and LaGuardia as separate operations, fly into Gatwick instead of Heathrow, or build a hub at Orly. Your existing routes are untouched; the new airports just show up as extra places to fly.
Casey went round every airport in the game with the surveyor's wheel and pinned each one to its correct spot on the map. Now when you look at where a flight lands, it lands where it really would.
Playing with Realism Mode on? The Cold War now has a hard border. Between 1947 and 1991, no airline flies straight between the Americas and the Soviet bloc, no matter how cozy you've gotten with the diplomats. Try it, and Casey will wave you off at the gate with a note explaining why.
This is a wall of its own, separate from the usual relations and sanctions rules. Once the Soviet Union breaks up in the early '90s, the border lifts on its own. Casual campaigns aren't touched at all; this one's just for the history buffs flying with Realism Mode switched on.
Sandbox mode now has options. When you pick an era off the Sandbox card, the next screen carries two new switches just for you.
Want a sandbox with real stakes? Flip the new Bankruptcy switch on, and running out of cash for two straight quarters will end the run, same as a ranked campaign. Leave it off (the sandbox default), and you can build forever without ever going under.
And you choose the crowd. Set your Starting Rivals anywhere from 0 to 8. Pick 0 to build your empire in peace with no competition ever turning up, or pack the skies with 8 cutthroat carriers fighting over every gate. Sandbox also waves off the antitrust regulators, so cornering a market you set up to own won't summon a challenger.
Cornering a region's market now draws attention. Dominate a region and a fresh rival sets up shop there to challenge you. Push past 80% of the market and antitrust fines start landing each quarter; past 90% and the regulators force you to sell off routes so other airlines can compete.
You also can't quietly buy out or merge away the last few rivals anymore; the competition authorities won't let the market shrink below a handful of airlines.
Rather play tycoon without the watchdog? There's a new Antitrust Enforcement switch on the campaign-setup screen, on by default. Turn it off, and the fines and forced sell-offs go away, but a new challenger will still turn up wherever you get too comfortable, and you still can't absorb every last competitor.
You can now choose how often a route flies. The New Route wizard has a Flights/week dial (1 to 14), and every route in Route Details has − and + buttons to dial it up or down anytime. More flights earn more as long as there's demand to fill them and need more slot room at each airport, so Casey will turn you down if you try to cram in more than the gates can handle. Set it and forget it at the default daily service, or run a route hard when the money's there.
You can now hide the music player. Casey added a Show Music Player switch under Settings → Audio; flip it off and the little player in the bottom corner tucks away. The music keeps playing; the volume slider is right there too. Turn it back on whenever you fancy seeing the controls again.
The Airport browser now shows your slot count at a glance: how many slots you hold and how many of the metro's slots are in use so you don't have to pop open the City Panel just to check.
Casey now gives you a heads-up before the big events. About a year ahead of an Olympics or a World Cup, a note lands in your Comms Log naming the host city, so you can build up capacity there before the crowds arrive instead of scrambling once the demand spike hits.
Upgrading a route's aircraft used to park your current plane the second you clicked, leaving the route grounded for weeks while the replacement was still on the assembly line. Casey sorted out the order of operations. Your old aircraft now keeps flying the route, and keeps earning, right up until the new one is delivered. Only then does it head off to the hangar.
Fancy the cash instead? There's a new Swap & Sell option that liquidates the old plane the moment the new one arrives, right from the city map and the route panels. A pending swap shows up in your route list and the Aircraft On Order panel, with a Cancel button if you have second thoughts. Swapping a grounded plane to get a stuck route flying again still happens on the spot, because nobody wants to wait on a bird that wasn't going anywhere.
Exporting your fleet to a spreadsheet failed every single time Casey had filed the aircraft-to-route lookup in the wrong drawer, so the whole export jammed. Fixed. The Route and Maintenance Forecast exports were also leaving the origin and destination columns reading "" because Casey was squinting at the wrong nameplate on each airport. All three exports now come out clean with real city names.
A couple of freighter aircraft were listed with passenger counts in the tens of thousands; the A321 XLR Freighter claimed a frankly heroic 27,000 seats. Casey recounted. Those were cargo-hauler typos about a hundred times too big, and they'd have made the planes wildly overpowered on freight runs too. Both now carry a sensible load in line with the rest of the fleet.
Selling a route used to hand back the airport slots at both ends even when your other routes still flew through those airports, so the survivors kept operating with no slot to their name. Now Casey only releases a slot when nothing else is using that airport. Sell one leg of a network and the rest keep their gates.
Parking a route's fleet in the hangar now actually moves the planes instead of cloning them. The Park button also steps aside once a route is empty, so you can't keep parking aircraft that already left. To put an empty route back in the air, just add aircraft to it again.
Loading a save from inside a running campaign (the in-game Load menu) could hard-crash on bigger save files, while loading the very same file from the main menu was fine. Casey tracked it down: the game was clearing the old world out from under the number-crunchers while they were still mid-calculation on it.
Now the game waits for the books to close before it wipes the slate. Load away mid-campaign, large empires included, and the doors stay on their hinges.
Signing a vacation-package deal hands you a $6M upfront cheque from the travel agency. Some sharp operators were signing it, pocketing the cash, and cancelling the next morning free money, no strings. Casey had a word with the agency's lawyers.
Cancel a vacation package early, and you now pay back whatever slice of that signing bonus the agency hasn't yet earned through its monthly cut. The fee starts at the full $6M and ticks down to nothing over about two years of partnership. Stick with the deal, and you walk away clean; bail in week one and you hand the cheque right back. The cancel button shows the exact fee, and asks before it charges you.
Buying a landing slot at an airport that hasn't been built yet was never going to fly. The game used to take your money for it anyway, then refuse the route once you tried to open it. Casey grounded that. Munich's first airport didn't open until 1939, so you can't buy a slot there before then. No more cash and slots stranded at a runway that's still farmland.
Same rule on multi-city routes. Routing a chain through a not-yet-built airport now stops you before a single slot is charged, and it names the city holding things up. If you can buy a slot somewhere, you can fly there.
If you fly at 1440p, 4K, or anything above 1080p, the map was coming out soft while the UI stayed sharp. Casey worked out that the map wasn't matching its detail to your monitor's actual pixels. Now it does: the higher your resolution, the more map detail it pulls in. Satellite and OpenStreetMap styles get the biggest jump.
Also gave the base world map a proper set of mip-levels, so the far-zoomed-out globe stops shimmering. Sharper at every altitude, whatever screen you fly on.
Search by airport code now. Type HND or NRT and Casey points you straight at Tokyo. SIN finds Singapore, CDG finds Paris. No more scrolling the whole list to land on one city.
Every metro answers to all its codes, including the busy second airports the old list skipped: Tokyo Haneda, London Gatwick, New York LaGuardia. And it works everywhere you'd want it. The City Search, the New Route picker, the Strategic Advisor's hub filter, and Hub Investments all take a city name or a code, whichever you remember.
A fatal crash no longer just bills you a settlement and moves on. Now you get a say. When the lawsuit lands, pick how to handle it: settle fairly and pay the assessed amount, hire a ruthless legal team to slash the payout at the cost of your reputation, or roll the dice and fight it in court.
Fighting is a gamble. Win, and the settlement gets cut to a fraction with your name cleared; lose, and it grows while the press has a field day. Each option shows you the numbers before you commit, so you can weigh cash against reputation. Close the window without choosing, and Casey just settles it fairly on your behalf.
Big incidents used to slip by quietly until you noticed the damage. Not anymore. A serious or fatal incident now pauses the game, swings the map over to the city where it happened, and flashes a red ring right on it. There's a klaxon to get your attention, a judge's gavel when a lawsuit gets filed, and a low rumble when a disaster wrecks an airport.
And destruction finally comes with a reason. When a hurricane batters New York or an earthquake levels a hub, Casey tells you exactly what hit it instead of leaving you to guess. Historical disasters and wartime damage are named too.
A single bad accident used to slap you with a flat $50 million lawsuit, no matter how big your airline was. In 1934, that quietly ended a lot of runs before the player even noticed the money draining away. Settlements now scale with the value of your airline instead. A scrappy 1930s startup faces a 1930s-sized claim; a global giant faces a giant one. Either way it's painful, but it can never wipe you out in one blow.
A few things shape the number: bigger aircraft mean a bigger claim (more souls aboard), and a strong reputation actually helps now; a trusted brand settles for less. And there's a hard ceiling, so no single incident ever costs more than a survivable slice of what you're worth. Casey checked the math twice.
A manufacturer strike used to ground planes you already owned. Picture 68 DC-3s parked in your hangar and the game refusing to let you put a single one on a route. A strike now only stops you from ordering new aircraft from that maker, the way a real walkout would. The birds already in your hangar fly as normal. This fix covers adding to a route, the +/- fleet stepper, and the swap picker, so the planes you own are always available to you.
Safety still wins, of course. A real grounding, a safety investigation, or a parts shortage keeps that aircraft type on the tarmac whether you own it or not. Those genuinely can't fly until the order lifts. Casey checks the paperwork either way.
A few sharp-eyed CEOs noticed you could print money by issuing stock over and over. Casey called in the underwriters and shut that down. Dumping a big block of shares now depresses your own realized price, and it only recovers over the following months as the market absorbs the new float. Sell fast, and you sell cheap, the way it works out in the real world.
There's a sensible ceiling now too: each quarter you can only raise equity against the value of your actual business, your fleet and hubs and earnings, not the cash already sitting in your account. An airline with no routes and no planes can't conjure a fortune out of thin stock.
The Markets panel spells it out: your remaining equity headroom for the quarter, plus any market overhang weighing on your price. Buybacks are untouched.
Festivals, holiday rushes, the World Cup, the Olympics those temporary demand bumps used to stack up in your Comms Log one message at a time. Casey moved the recurring seasonal ones out of the log and onto the map instead. The affected airport now wears a gentle pulsing ring, and if you hover over the city, Casey tells you which event is fueling the surge and how big it is.
The big one-off events still announce themselves in the log the way they always did, and now they pulse on their host cities too, so the map always carries the detail.
Rings getting in your way? Flip "Demand Events" off under Layers, Map Objects, right beside the delivery countdowns.
Want to start straight in the jet or jumbo age instead of climbing up through the decades? New Campaign now lets you pick a locked era and jump right in. The catch: it's a casual run, so your scores won't post to the leaderboard, and it won't unlock eras for your ranked games. That keeps the climb meaningful for folks who earn it. Everything else is a normal campaign though, deadlines and bankruptcy and goals and all, so it's a real game, not a free-play sandbox.
New Campaign has a fresh "Shuffle History" option. Leave it off, and the oil shocks, recessions, wars, and pandemics land on their real dates, like always. Flip it on, and Casey scrambles those dates by a few years, so knowing your aviation history won't let you game the timeline. The same world seed always produces the same shuffled calendar, so you can still hand a run to a friend and have it play out identically.
The tutorial used to nudge you to hire executives and staff up in 1932, before your wallet could handle it. Those tips now wait until you've actually got the cash to act on them, so you're not being sold a corner office before you can afford a desk.
Building an A→B→C route from scratch was hiding in plain sight. The New Route wizard's stop option got a clearer label, and dragging between two cities on the map now drops a one-time tip pointing you to it. Casey hates a buried feature.
Drowning in panels? There's a new "Let Casey Handle Everything" button at the top of Automation Settings, plus a shortcut to it right from your executive screen. One click hands the routine paperwork to Casey, while the big strategic calls stay parked until your books are healthy. Toggle any of it back off whenever you want the controls again.
A rival grabbing the hub at an airport you wanted to grow at used to leave you stuck. Now you can seize it. Open that city's panel, and you'll find a button to take over the rival's hub outright. It also scoops up the slots they were holding there.
The more of the airport you already control, the cheaper their hub is to take. Box a rival in, and their hub goes for a fire-sale; muscle into a city where you have no presence and you'll pay a steep premium. Either way it dings your reputation, so Casey suggests doing it where you already run the show.
Found your airline in Moscow or anywhere across the old USSR and Russia and you'd start on frosty terms with your own backyard, which never made much sense. Now your home region greets you as a friend from day one. Casey had a word with the locals. Set up shop somewhere that already likes you and nothing changes.
The Strategic Advisor kept suggesting routes through airports where you'd already grabbed every slot, which is no help at all. There's a new "Hide slot-full" checkbox up in the Advisor's filter bar. Flip it on, and Casey only shows you routes you can actually build today.
Your routes and your rivals' routes looked a little too alike on the map. Casey drew your own lines a touch heavier, so at a glance you can tell which webs are yours and which belong to the competition.
Aircraft makers kept knocking with the same launch-customer offer, and turning one down only sent it back to the top of the pile next month. Casey filed the rejection properly this time. Pass on a plane's launch slot once, and that offer stays gone for the rest of the campaign.
Hired a customer service tier you can't afford to keep? You can scale it back down now, or disband the team entirely, and the lower monthly bill kicks in the following month. Your maintenance crew works the same way. The recruiters keep what you already paid them, so time your hires well.
New airlines now taxi out of the gate with one aircraft already parked in the hangar, so you can open your first route on day one instead of waiting on a delivery. Casey picked something affordable and era-appropriate to get you airborne.
On tutorial steps that wait for you to do something, a "Skip this step?" popup would appear, and clicking Keep Waiting only bought a few seconds before it nagged again. Two things were going wrong: the timer behind it was quietly stacking up extra copies, and Keep Waiting was just restarting the countdown. Now Keep Waiting means it once you dismiss that popup, it stays gone for that step. You can still skip whenever you like using the Skip buttons on the tutorial card.
A player saved a scenario with strong rivals, came back the next day, and found those rivals' routes wiped out as stale with brand-new rivals dropped in 65% of the way through. Casey traced it: when one airline absorbed another, most of the loser's routes moved over correctly, but any route that had drifted off the books kept the absorbed airline's name on it. Those stray routes had no living owner, so the next time you loaded the game they got swept away, and the empty rival slots filled with newcomers.
Casey now does a clean sweep at every takeover, merger, and acquisition: every single route flips to its new owner, with none left flying under a flag that no longer exists. Future sessions won't see rivals vanish on load. One note for saves already affected: the stray routes from a past merger will still get tidied up once on the next load, since they belong to an airline that's already gone, but it won't keep happening.
katy50306 spotted that the Research panel showed zero fundable techs in all four branches, and even traced it for us: the tech files weren't loading in the packaged game. Dead on. The research lab was reading its catalog in a way that works in our workshop but comes up empty once the game is boxed for shipping, so every released build has had research quietly switched off. Casey rewired it to load the catalog from a fixed list instead, and the lab is open for business. Existing saves pick it right up.
The same wiring fault was hiding in the UI theme picker, which would have shown only the default theme in shipped builds. Fixed the same way, so all the alternate color themes are selectable now too. Casey added a pre-flight check so this whole class of problem can't sneak back in.
A player noticed their quarterly profit was three times their visible revenue and couldn't find where the rest came from. They were right: subsidy and contract income credited to your cash but never showed up as a line. Now the Quarterly Report itemizes every income stream. Government Subsidies and Capacity Contracts each get their own row alongside Flight Revenue, with a Total Revenue subtotal, so the numbers add up in front of you. The old "Ticket Revenue" line is now "Flight Revenue" since it always included cargo too.
While in there, Casey caught a related slip: capacity-contract income was being added to your bank but left out of the reported quarterly profit, which quietly dinged your credit rating and share price. It now counts where it should.
While reading that last lag report, Casey noticed some workshop tools had been packed into the shipping crate by mistake. A few developer-only helpers and the test rig were riding along in the game and quietly throwing an error at startup. Casey pulled them out, taped up the crate, and added a checklist so they can't sneak back in. Cleaner builds, one less error in the logs, nothing you'll notice except a tidier launch.
A player on a giant 777-route empire reported a "laggy crash" after a marathon session. Casey pulled the flight recorder and found good news first: it wasn't a crash at all. The game saved cleanly and shut down properly. The frame rate held steady for hours, then sagged near the end.
To find out exactly why, Casey upgraded the black box. The diagnostics now report real memory use, which used to come back blank in shipped builds. And the moment the frame rate dips, they write down what's on screen, whether a big calculation is running, and how loaded things are. Next time a late-game session turns sluggish, Casey will know precisely what to fix instead of guessing.
You can finally tell what an executive actually costs. Each C-suite hire now has a clear ONE-TIME sign-on plus a monthly salary that scales with the era, so a 1946 CFO draws a 1946 wage, not a modern fortune. The old Executive Team tab made the sign-on fee look like a monthly bill, which made every hire read as a money pit and scared everyone off. The Executive Impact Tracker had the same mix-up and showed wild losses. Both now show the real salary, the sign-on separately, and an honest payback period.
And yes, you can fire one now. Each executive's button flips to Dismiss once they're on staff. Let them go, and their salary comes off the books immediately. No refund on the sign-on, and rehiring later means paying it again, so choose your moment. Casey filed the paperwork either way.
Two window annoyances you flagged, both fixed. You can now pick a different aircraft from the route-creation dropdown even while the clock is running. Before, the list opened but wouldn't let you choose anything unless you paused first, because a monthly update kept yanking the list out from under your finger. Casey now leaves any open dropdown alone until you've made your pick.
And windows where you're making changes no longer jump back to the top when the month rolls over. Scroll halfway down your route list, let the calendar tick, and you stay right where you were. Casey's holding the page for you.
Two cabin fixes from your reports. First: when you swap a new aircraft type onto a route, the cabin layout now resets to that airframe's default instead of keeping the old plane's seat map. Before, a 737's layout would stick around after you put a widebody on the route, leaving you flying over- or under-capacity until you fixed every route by hand. Casey now strips the old seats out the moment a different airframe rolls up to the gate.
Second, the request: open Route Details for any route, customize its cabin, and there's a new "Apply this layout to all N routes" button. One click copies that exact seat map onto every route in your fleet flying the same type. No more configuring each one separately.
A tiny consistency fix ClassyKraken spotted: the "slot at capacity" notice you get when a new route can't squeeze into a busy airport looked slightly different depending on whether you were buying or leasing the aircraft. Now it reads the same either way, pops up right at your cursor, and points you at investing in slot throughput at that hub or trimming frequency on a route you already fly. One form, filed the same way every time.
The Chief Executive Briefing now tells you what you're actually picking. Realism Mode and Freedoms of the Air used to be two separate switches that were really meant to be flipped together, so they're now one Realism Mode toggle with a plain-English rundown of everything it turns on: country operating licenses, freedoms-of-the-air route rights, crew bases, aircraft type-rating training, insurance and lawsuits, and frequent-flyer programs. It's the deeper sim for experienced CEOs; leave it off for a streamlined first campaign.
The Carrier Strategy picker now shows exactly what each identity does to your costs and fares as you flip through the list, and the old "scaffold" label is gone since Realism Mode is very much real now. No more guessing what you're signing the paperwork for.
Setting up a new campaign used to be a one-way street: click a difficulty, and you were whisked off to the next screen before you could touch the weather, carrier strategy, or seed, with no way back short of bailing to the main menu. Now picking a difficulty just highlights it. Take your time with the settings, then press Continue when you're ready. And every setup screen has a Back button, so you can step back through Era, Difficulty, Mode, and your airline details and change your mind without losing the campaign.
Open a big window, and the world now waits for you. When you pop open a large management panel, the clock holds so your rivals can't keep snapping up gates and routes while you read or plan. Close the window and time picks right back up. Prefer to keep things moving while you multitask? There's a switch for it in Settings under Gameplay.
You can now reach a route's details straight from the City Panel. In the Active Routes list, click a route's name or anywhere on its row to jump right into that route's full readout. Casey will pop a tip the first time so you know the rows are live.
From the year 2000 onward, your carbon tax used to be a flat fee per plane, so a tiny regional jet and a thirsty jumbo paid the same. That never sat right with Casey. Now the bill is split by how much each aircraft actually burns: lean, efficient planes carry less of the carbon tax, and thirsty or oversized ones carry more. Your airline's total carbon bill stays the same, so this rewards the efficient fleet you've been building rather than piling on a new charge. Rivals keep their own books, so this one's strictly between you and the tax office.
Every aircraft now carries a fuel-efficiency rating, and it actually means something. Newer airframes sip; old piston haulers guzzle. You'll see it in the Aircraft Catalog, on each plane's spec sheet, and side by side in the comparison view. Run a lean modern fleet to trim your fuel bill, or fly thirsty classics and pay for the character. A fuel-conscious airline is finally a strategy you can actually build toward.
While he had the clipboard out, Casey wrote up the rest of a plane's running costs too. The spec sheet now lays out the maintenance schedule, the A, B, C and D checks, when each comes due and roughly what it'll cost for that airframe, plus a CO2 footprint readout for the carbon-minded. Size up what a plane costs to keep flying before you ever sign for it.
Different engines have always flown a little differently, but the only place you saw it was a cramped line of small print. Now when you pick an engine, whether at the purchase screen, on a plane's spec sheet, or when you book a fleet-wide upgrade, Casey calls out exactly what changes. Range, speed, fuel burn, maintenance, price - each one as a tidy colored number. Green means it helps you, red means it costs you. No more guessing whether the long-range engine is worth the extra fuel.
Same treatment for the wrench work. Queue up winglets or a cabin reshuffle across a whole fleet type and you'll see the trade laid out before you spend a dime: a little more reach, a little less thirst, whatever the mod actually does. Casey reckons you should know what you're buying before the invoice lands.
Banning planes one at a time used to be a slog, and the Aircraft Catalog snapped to the bottom every time you marked one "never buy again." Casey filed a complaint with himself and won. The list now holds your place when you ban a plane, and every aircraft has its own Ban / Unban button right in the catalog, so you don't have to open each one to do it.
New up top: a Brand filter. Pick a manufacturer to see only their lineup, then ban the whole fleet in one click - or flip it around with "Buy only this" to keep a shortlist of brands and quietly retire the rest. The autopilot's plane-buying respects your bans, so build the catalog you want and let it shop for you. Less scroll-wheel cardio, more flying.
During a busy month, rivals expanding routes and scrapping over gates in a price war — Casey's logbook filled up with chatter every time a rival grabbed an airport slot. The City panel and the Slot Advisor were keeping their slot-watching line open even after you'd closed them, so the control tower kept paging a desk nobody was sitting at. Both now hang up cleanly when they're put away. Rivals can elbow for gates in peace, and the logbook stays quiet.
It has been a while, CEO! Casey put his head down, the studio went quiet, and a whole lot of airline turned over in the meantime. This is the catch-up post for everyone, and it is a big one. The short version: your rivals grew up, you can paint the fleet, every campaign is now its own little world, and the money got a great deal more interesting.
A quick word before we taxi. Every existing campaign loads cleanly. The deepest new systems are gated behind Realism mode, which you opt into at the start of a campaign. Casual play behaves exactly as it always has, and your books are never touched by anything you didn't choose.
The biggest change you'll feel. Your rivals now play by most of the same rules you do.
They borrow. A cash-strapped rival that's tapped out the bank can issue bonds to keep fighting. Good credit borrows cheap; a junk rating gets nothing. Over-borrow and they still end up in receivership, so watch who's loading up.
They insure, and they get sued. Each rival pays a premium that scales with the size and age of its fleet. A crash on their watch spikes their risk and starts the settlement bills.
They go public. In Realism, rivals start privately held and hold their own IPO once they're big enough. A private rival can't raid you and can't be raided.
They train crews and weather strikes. Picking up a new aircraft type costs them a type rating and a ramp-up window. Every few years, their unions renegotiate, and a bad deal grounds some of their routes.
They merge with each other. A cash-rich competitor will absorb a struggling one, folding routes, fleet, and debt under one flag. Fewer, bigger rivals late in a campaign means the survivors are tougher.
Casey ran every bit of this on a separate desk so none of it shifts a number on your own routes. The skies just got a lot more honest about who's flying in them.
Each new game now rolls an eight-character world seed, or you can type one in for a repeatable run you can share with a friend.
History bends with the seed. COVID, 9/11, the 1973 oil shock, and a dozen more events still happen on schedule, but how hard they hit shifts within a sane band based on your seed.
Some events fork outright. The A380 program might ship on time, ship late, or cancel before service. US deregulation might land in 1978, slip to 1985, or stall in Congress. The 787 might be grounded until 2014. The same seed always picks the same branch.
Manufacturers don't all survive. Two plane-makers hit exit windows where they might fold, get absorbed, or hang on as a niche shop. Your fleet keeps flying either way, but new orders dry up and dead-brand airframes lose a third of their resale value.
Era 5 — The Green Frontier (2025-2040). The clock now runs past 2020 into sustainable-fuel mandates, hydrogen demonstrators, and the electric regional wave. New goals: $5B company value, 80 routes, all seven regions.
Two players who start with two different seeds live in two genuinely different airline industries. That's the whole point.
Buying a plane is now a procurement conversation.
Engine catalog. Two or three engine options on dozens of widebodies and narrowbodies, each trading range against fuel burn, maintenance, and resale. Pick one and your orders use it.
Custom order specs. Weight variant, aux tanks, cargo door, avionics, IFE, crew rest, and combi vs passenger. The right picks unlock ultra-long-haul and ETOPS ratings. The wrong picks just cost you money.
Finite production slots. Manufacturers build only so many frames a year, and your rivals are booking the same line. Order a hot new type late, and you might wait two or three years for delivery. The Order Backlog panel shows the squeeze.
Standardize for savings. Run a fleet that's mostly one spec, and your maintenance bills drop up to 5%. Run a grab-bag of variants, and you pay up to 15% more.
When a brand-new type is two years out, the maker may also offer you Launch Customer status: an exclusive ordering window, 20% off your first five frames, and a say in the spec everyone else inherits. You get three months to decide.
The world's big hubs are now real places with real constraints.
Real infrastructure. Runway counts and lengths, gate counts, slot caps, curfews, customs, and cargo ramps. Open the Airport Browser (Shift+X) to compare them.
Multi-airport metros. Tokyo has Haneda and Narita, New York has its three fields, and London and Paris have theirs. The runway gate walks the whole metro, so an A380 can use Narita even when Haneda's runways are short.
Curfews bite. Heathrow's night closure, Frankfurt's, Narita's, Orly's, and Sydney's all cut throughput 25 to 29 percent at those airports. Your rivals feel it too.
Build your own. Stand up a maintenance base at a hub for a 30% discount on heavy checks, or pour concrete on a brand-new greenfield airport where slots are then yours at half price forever.
Airports also grow over the campaign on their own historical schedule, and the Browser keeps a log of every expansion that fired in your world.
A whole finance wing opened up next to the route map.
Bonds. Raise cash without the bank. Issue bonds, pay a fixed coupon, refinance when rates fall, or buy them back early.
Fuel hedging. Lock tomorrow's fuel price today with a portfolio of contracts. Pick the term, the volume, and how much is sustainable fuel. When spot prices spike, your hedge rides through.
Subsidies and contracts. Local governments will pay you to fly underserved routes. Corporate and cargo clients will reserve seats for a steady monthly fee. Both have terms, and breaking them costs you.
A real used-aircraft lot. Listings come first, second, or third-hand at different prices, with gray-market metal out of sanctioned regions if you don't mind the reputation hit.
Going public and getting raided. Grow a private carrier into a listed one with an IPO, and defend against the hostile takeover bids that come for you when you're weak.
Casey personally inspects every subsidy check for forgery. He has found none. He looked very hard.
Scheduled flights aren't the only game anymore.
Seasonal scheduling. Put a route on a summer-peak, winter-peak, holiday-burst, or fully custom 12-month profile, and its frequencies scale themselves through the year.
Charter. Lease a whole aircraft to a single client for fixed monthly money over a contract term. Steady cash, no competition, but the plane is committed.
Air-taxi. Run a small plane on demand at a premium fare per kilometer. Low volume, high margin, for the right aircraft on the right pair.
Realism mode adds front-of-house and back-of-house depth.
Cabin Designer. Build what passengers actually sit in, per class: seat pitch, galleys, lavatories, entertainment, Wi-Fi, power, and meal service. Quick templates from No-Frills to Flagship, or tune it dimension by dimension.
Frequent-Flyer Program. Passengers earn miles and climb tiers, and every mile owed sits on your books as a real liability that comes due when members cash them in.
Partnerships. Shake hands with hotels, ground-transfer operators, and vacation-package agencies to lift demand in the cities they feed.
Crews and turn times. Aircraft need ground time between flights, crews need type ratings for new types, and positioning pilots away from their bases costs more than cabin crew. Run a tight, concentrated operation, and it pays off.
All of it Realism-gated. Casual campaigns keep the simple flat numbers exactly as before.
Things that live above a single campaign.
Career profile. Earn experience across every campaign you fly and unlock starting bonuses that carry into the next one.
Ghost carriers. Opt in and your retired airlines come back as AI rivals in future games, complete with a founder bio. Beat the ghost of your own last empire.
Casey Cup. A monthly leaderboard challenge on a fixed seed and scenario, with your run auto-submitted at the deadline.
Custom alerts and scheduled actions. Set conditions that ping you (cash below a line, a route on a losing streak) and queue future moves to fire on a date you pick.
Career timeline. A wall of past lives — every campaign you've flown, charted by outcome.
Eight UI themes in Settings, from the warm Sunset cockpit to Midnight, Daylight, Forest Cabin, Noir, Aurora, Tropical, and a high-contrast Pure Charts. Swap live; every open panel repaints.
Photo Mode on F12 for a clean shot of your network, plus an end-of-era recap screen.
196 aircraft and 528 cities. The roster grew across regional turboprops, classic narrowbodies, Soviet and Eastern types, and modern freighters. The map gained 32 hubs, starting with the one Casey was most annoyed about missing: Newark.
Maintenance checks now arrive with the eras. Line checks formalize in the mid-1950s, heavy checks in 1970, so a Dawn-of-Flight campaign isn't paying jet-age overhaul bills.
If you build a thousand-route empire, you've felt the late-game slowdown. Casey spent a long stretch under the floorboards on it.
The late-game frame-rate drop at two thousand-plus routes is gone. Autosave moved to a background thread, the monthly economics now run across every CPU core, and loading a giant save no longer freezes the screen.
The numbers are bit-for-bit identical to before. Same airline, same money, far fewer stutters.
The latest builds closed out a run of player-reported items.
A frequent-flyer program in a long-haul Realism campaign was honoring miles at roughly ten times the right rate and quietly draining the bank. Fixed, and the fix lands the moment you load your save.
Post-1991 campaigns were still calling Moscow's airspace "the USSR" on subsidies and route blocks. The successor states now put their own names on the charts.
The Fuel Hedging panel's buttons wouldn't click because the desk was redrawing itself dozens of times a second. Bolted down, plus a new readout showing your reference fuel volume so you can size a hedge.
The quarterly report was counting aircraft leases twice. Your cash was always charged once; the report just read worse than reality. Struck the duplicate.
If your progress record ever got wiped, the game now reads your actual save files and unlocks the eras you really reached.
The AI parity systems: do late-game rivals feel like real competition now, or still pushovers?
Realism mode as a whole: is the depth worth the bookkeeping, or is any one system more fiddle than fun?
The finance wing: bonds, hedging, subsidies, contracts. Too much, too little, about right?
Performance at scale: if you run a huge network, tell us how the late game feels now.
Bug reports: F8 in-game opens the report form with diagnostics attached, or drop into the Discord. Casey reads everything and squawks at the rodents in the avionics bay until they stop chewing wires.
Blue skies, CEO. Go break something. -Casey
Casey filed some inspection paperwork this week from a place that shouldn't exist. Amsterdam Schiphol sits on the bed of a lake that the Dutch finished draining in 1852. The runways are three meters below sea level. The dikes are doing the heavy lifting. It's also one of the best starter hubs in SkyChart's 1930s campaign, and the post breaks down why.
Economic value 90, tourist appeal 85 — top tier for a city this size
Short hops to London, Paris, Hamburg, and Brussels unlock the European triangle early
By the early jet age, the same hub stretches all the way to Jakarta along KLM's real historical map
The full read covers KLM's first scheduled international flight (May 17, 1920), how WWII flattened the place, and why the postwar single-terminal rebuild still scales with widebodies in 2026. Read the full city spotlight →
Wishlist SkyChart: 90 years of aviation history, 496 cities, 66 historical aircraft, and 35 AI rivals trying to take your slots before you land them. → Wishlist on Steam
Boeing nearly bankrupted itself building the 747. The plane it shipped changed how airlines made money for a generation. When Pan Am Flight 1 taxied out of JFK on January 22, 1970, it carried 332 passengers to London on a plane that Boeing had bet the company on. The 747 came within weeks of pushing Boeing into bankruptcy before enough orders arrived. The bet paid off, and the wide-body defined airline economics for the next four decades. The 747-100 carried roughly 490 passengers in high-density seating, almost double the 707, with a 9,800 km range that turned multi-stop routes like New York–London or Tokyo–Los Angeles into single legs. Per-seat costs dropped sharply and fares followed, putting long-haul flights within reach of ordinary travelers years before deregulation removed the price floor.
Pan Am's Juan Trippe and Boeing's Bill Allen sealed the original 25-aircraft order on a handshake, before a single rivet was placed.
Boeing built a brand-new factory in Everett, WA to assemble the 747. It still holds the record as the largest building by volume in the world.
Airlines that over-ordered in the early 1970s got crushed by the 1973 oil shock, and Boeing itself had to resell completed 747s at a loss.
In SkyChart, switching from narrow-bodies to wide-bodies is one of the biggest decisions in a long campaign across 84 aircraft from 1925–2095.
Wide-bodies print money on dense intercontinental hub-to-hub routes, and bleed cash if you upgrade thinner markets too early.
Image Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747#/media/File:B-747_Iberia.jpg Read the full write-up
Read on the Casey Jones Labs dev blog →
SkyChart: Airline Executive is a deep airline management sim, the spiritual successor to Aerobiz that fans have been waiting 30 years for. 496 cities, 122,760 city pairs, 66 historically accurate aircraft. Wishlist to get notified on the Early Access launch. → Wishlist on Steam
Fellow indie dev Czardus posted a long-form playthrough of the demo on YouTube. He builds an empire, learns the hub system the hard way, and along the way buys out a competitor's London Heathrow slot just to spite them. If you want to see how the campaign plays out before you wishlist, this is probably the best video out there right now. Czardus picked the Dawn of Flight era on Easy, started building hubs in Chicago and New York, and worked his way through the Great Depression all the way to global expansion across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. By the end, he had 92% market share in the Americas and a 150-city network. A few things he flagged that I thought were worth calling out:
He liked the auto-slot purchase when buying a route into a city where he didn't already hold a slot
He got tripped up by the "Awaiting Delivery" status on new routes and briefly thought routes were broken. That's something I'm looking at for clarity.
The "Buy All" button in the Strategic Advisor became his favorite tool
He said Easy felt a little too easy for him. Fair feedback. I'll be folding it into the balance pass.
"I Didn't Expect This Airline Sim to Be This Deep" by Czardus
Czardus is also working on his own Steam project, Timber Life. Wishlist it and give it a look. → Timber Life on Steam
Here's how to use the jet age to your advantage. When the Bering 707-120 unlocks in 1958, you're standing at the most pivotal moment in your airline empire. The jet revolution didn't just add speed; it reshuffled which airlines dominated the industry for decades. The operators who hesitated got left behind. The ones who committed early built intercontinental empires. The Bering 707-120 packs a 9,300 km range, 900 km/h cruise speed, and 160-seat capacity into a $4,000,000 airframe. That's 35% faster than the piston-era Lockford Constellation and enough range to connect virtually any city pair within a single hemisphere — non-stop.
9,300 km range unlocks true intercontinental routes — New York to London, LA to Tokyo, Johannesburg to Zurich
35% speed advantage over piston aircraft means more daily cycles per airframe and lower per-seat operating costs
30-year service window (1958–1988) gives you a long runway to dominate hub routes before the 747 era arrives
160-seat capacity rewards hub-and-spoke strategy — point it at high-traffic city pairs, not thin regionals
Buy early, reinvest the yield gains, and you'll be widebody-ready when the Bering 747-100 unlocks just 12 years later
Image Credit: JQ Official
Read on the Casey Jones Labs dev blog →
SkyChart: Airline Executive is a deep airline management sim — spiritual successor to the classic Aerobiz. Wishlist to get notified on the Early Access launch. → Wishlist on Steam
The Bering 314 Clipper is SkyChart's first true intercontinental aircraft — and in 1938, nothing else comes close. In 1938, crossing the Atlantic or Pacific by air meant boarding a flying boat — a giant aircraft that landed on water because paved runways simply didn't exist at enough destinations around the world. The real Boeing 314 offered sleeping berths, a formal dining salon, and a lounge on transoceanic crossings that cost the equivalent of $15,000 round-trip today. SkyChart's Bering 314 Clipper captures all of that history — and turns it into one of the biggest strategic decisions you'll face in the 1930s campaign. With a range of 5,900 km and 74 seats, the Bering 314 is a quantum leap over every aircraft that came before it. The Forge Trimotor and Dawson DC-3 top out at 885–2,400 km — the 314 opens up city pairs that no other aircraft in the era can reach. When it unlocks in 1938, intercontinental routes stop being a future goal and start being a present opportunity.
Range of 5,900 km — the only 1930s aircraft in SkyChart capable of genuine transoceanic routes
74-seat capacity priced for premium fares across SkyChart's 496-city global network
20+ game-years of service (1938–1960) before the early jets arrive to take over
No competition — nothing else in SkyChart's 66-aircraft roster comes close to this range in the era
Strategy tip: stake out 2–3 long-haul coastal hub routes the moment it unlocks — you'll own those slots when the jets arrive
Read on the Casey Jones Labs dev blog →
SkyChart: Airline Executive is a deep airline management sim — spiritual successor to the classic Aerobiz. Wishlist to get notified on the Early Access launch. → Wishlist on Steam
No runway until 1975. Nonstop to six continents by 2010. Abu Dhabi is SkyChart's Gulf hub — and one of the most rewarding bases in the game. Abu Dhabi is a city that didn't exist on the commercial aviation map until 1975 — and then became one of the most strategically dominant hubs on the planet in under 40 years. The secret? Geography. Draw a 7,000-kilometer circle from Abu Dhabi and you cover Europe, East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia in a single arc. That's not luck; that's the entire Gulf hub value proposition. The real-world story of Etihad Airways — launched in 2003, buying equity stakes in struggling carriers worldwide to feed traffic into Abu Dhabi, operating widebodies to six continents within a decade — is one of commercial aviation's most compressed success arcs. In SkyChart: Airline Executive, you get to attempt the same playbook across 90 years of aviation history, from the propeller age through the ultra-long-haul jet era.
Hub-flagged city — one of a small subset among 496 cities with hub designation, meaning strong connecting-traffic potential and infrastructure for multiple airline bases
Economic value 82/100 — upper-tier commercial market comparable to major capitals, not a leisure destination; tourist appeal 65 reflects its business-and-transit-first identity
5% annual population growth — a route that looks marginal early in your campaign can become a top-yield corridor by midgame as the city expands
Ideal spoke geometry — mid-century long-haul aircraft reach Mumbai, Nairobi, London, and Bangkok; later jets extend the network into North America and East Asia without relocating your base
66 aircraft spanning 1925–2095 — an Abu Dhabi operation built in the 1970s, naturally evolves into a widebody empire by the 1990s as new types unlock
Establish your Abu Dhabi base before the jet age opens in the 1960s. Run efficient medium-haul routes to cover costs while you wait for widebodies. Then pivot to ultra-long-haul when the aircraft unlock — the same path Etihad actually walked. Patience and network thinking beat point-to-point volume here; almost every long-haul route out of Abu Dhabi lands at another high-value market, compounding revenue as your fleet upgrades.
Read on the Casey Jones Labs dev blog →
SkyChart: Airline Executive is a deep airline management sim — spiritual successor to the classic Aerobiz. Wishlist to get notified at the Early Access launch. → Wishlist on Steam
Chief flight inspector Casey the Macaw would like a word. Several words, actually.
New harvest pipeline pulls real climatology data: NOAA IBTrACS tropical cyclones, NOAA NGDC volcanic eruptions (VEI 3+), and 30 years of Open-Meteo ERA5 wind/pressure/precip/cloud.
Dormant WeatherSim autoload wired in, feature-flagged off. Old storm system still flies.
Harvest pipeline is dev-only — triple-locked out of shipped builds.
Planes pushed 55% toward white, so they stand out against their own route colors.
Performance Tuning screen now skips on subsequent campaigns when the hardware fingerprint matches.
Single-click a city properly clears stale route origins; drag-drop uses an atomic open call.
Pan speed now scales with zoom (up to +150%) and flick velocity (+60%).
ESC with no panels open opens the save/exit dialog on the first press.
All planes composite into a single CanvasGroup draw call (big GPU win late-game).
Route drag-preview line now tracks the cursor every frame and clears on release.
HUD button locks: tutorial/campaign can gate Routes, Finance, Company, Awards, Rivals, and Map.
Vertical pan is now 1:1 at every zoom level (previously yeeted you into the Pacific at low zoom).
Stripped a dev-tooling path leaking into shipped binaries across 30 locales.
Fixed a missing get_current_date() call that was crashing the HUD at boot.
Silenced spammy Not Enough Cash / Advanced to Month / Route closed warnings.
HUD now hides during Era/Difficulty/Mode/Airline/Performance setup screens.
Fixed eight broken tr() wrappers in Quarterly Report and Strategy Planner.
Music and Sound Effects are now separate audio buses with independent sliders in Settings.
Fixed spammy OptionButton PopupMenu disconnect errors during UI rebuilds (9 panels, 16 sites).
Repaired 29 broken translation wrappers across 7 panel scripts.
Menu music is now a proper two-track playlist with smooth crossfades.
Rewired volume so the Music bus handles all attenuation — no more double-applied volume.
763 UI strings wrapped for translation across 50+ scripts.
PO scaffolding for all 29 Steam-supported languages.
Language override selector added to Settings.
Community Weblate server is live with GitHub webhook auto-sync.
Tile loader now sniffs magic bytes (PNG/JPEG/WebP) before decoding — kills hundreds of log errors.
Fixed Steam overlay signal arity (3 args, not 1).
Virtual keyboard consumes save/load/back actions while open, so dialogs stop hijacking it.
AI rivals now log diagnostic squawks at every silent-exit checkpoint.
One-click "Buy All Hubs" button in Strategic Advisor's Hub Investments tab.
FAA-style weather avoidance: routes curve around active storms, deviation scales with intensity.
Geodesic simplification threshold 0.45 → 0.15, segment count 32 → 48 (smoother arcs).
Routes refresh every 8 seconds to track moving storms — airplane animator paths follow.
Right-click closes any DraggableWindow, same as ESC or B on the controller.
ScreenshotCapture autoload is now editor-only (no more F12 capture in shipped builds).
.vscode/ excluded from exports — no leaking dev paths.
Robust save loading: route color fields use safe .get() with defaults; missing cities/aircraft warn instead of silently dropping routes.
Accessibility pass: close button, HUD icons, and airline color picker all palette-routed with tooltips.
Upgrades scanner rewritten to use the main-thread snapshot pattern (zero GameManager reads in worker).
Added _exit_tree() cleanup so the Upgrades thread can't outlive the node.
Fixed HTTPRequest.use_threads missing macOS guard in tile_detail_layer.gd.
Fixed 9 style.bg_color.a = 0.5 value-type assignments across 5 files.
Scripted shorts pipeline: camera flyovers, staggered route spawns, aircraft stat cards, revenue charts.
Portrait and landscape render modes; AVI → MP4 via ffmpeg.
Recommender no longer skips every pair where any airline has a route — only skips pairs the player flies.
Added 5 missing demand multipliers to recommender projections (regional index, city boom, feeder, specialization, union membership).
Rival attraction constant replaced with difficulty-aware get_ai_demand_multiplier().
Maintenance rate tuned from 1.5%/mo → 0.5%/mo (~6%/yr) via a single MAINT_RATE_PER_MONTH constant across 8 files.
Carbon tax scales with fleet size: $30K × fleet × age_mult (was flat $100K/route).
Route renderer: viewport AABB culling + low-zoom line simplification + pan-triggered dirty flag. No more multi-second hangs on 2000-route saves.
world_map.gd: bucketed route visual cache + sparse delivery-ring tracking set.
Vertical map clamp tightened to 5% slack; 5 inline copies consolidated into one helper.
_disconnect_ui_signals() now walks every persistent child manager (event_manager, alliance_manager, market_dynamics, slot_auction_manager) — fixes menu-cycle crash on Windows.
RouteRecommender.cleanup() is now actually called from GameManager on window close — scan threads join cleanly on quit.
Snapshot cache invalidated by reassignment (_cache = {}) instead of in-place clear — no more racing with worker reads.
Trackpad pinch-to-zoom rewritten: multiplicative scaling, cursor-tracked anchor, softened velocity.
Help & Controls Help tab now scrolls with the right stick on controllers.
Tutorial action-set fix: WindowManager scans for any visible window in the overlay, not just known-by-name.
Steam overlay auto-pause: waits for the Steam ready signal, retries on the next frame.
Steamworks Auto-Cloud paths documented for Windows/Mac/Linux.
Main-thread snapshot pattern: workers now read ZERO GameManager state. Fixes Array refcount crash from worker reading active_routes mid-autosave.
Async callback API replaces the busy-wait loop.
New purchases take 1–6 months, depending on model size and global backlog.
Leased aircraft arrive in 1 month; hangar aircraft still deploy instantly.
Difficulty-scaled delivery time (0.5× Glider → 1.3× Supersonic).
New On Order tab in Fleet Overview with progress bars and a cancel option (15% restocking fee).
The world map shows a delivery progress ring at the midpoint of waiting routes; awaiting-delivery routes glow blue.
D-pad now passes through on all 5 controller configs (era/difficulty/menu navigation).
Select/View button remapped to open Settings on every screen.
Route culling removed — no more flight paths vanishing on zoom/pan.
ScrollContainer joystick input is disabled on the save screen (DraggableWindow already handles it).
Uses true map coordinates instead of wrapped screen position — every city lands dead-center now.
The 111× cost bug: route costs were being computed in km against a degree budget. Fixed — AI rivals actually fly now.
AI expansion chance rebalanced across difficulty (20% Glider → 50% Supersonic).
Early-era AI candidate search tripled + range pre-filter, so Forge Trimotors stop dreaming of Tokyo→London.
AI establishes 2–4 routes at game start (scaled by difficulty) and ramps dynamically when falling behind.
Route income now starts flowing from day one, rather than at the first-month boundary.
AI fleet caps, pricing aggression, war triggers, cash reserves, maintenance, and demand multipliers (1.05×–1.40×) all scale with difficulty.
Fixed 13 corrupted em-dashes in the tutorial.
Tutorial spotlight gracefully hides when the target window isn't open (no more full-screen highlights).
"Swap All" → "Upgrade All" name corrected across 4 docs.
AI receivership: keeps top 60% of profitable routes flying; airlines can emerge early if cash rebuilds.
The tutorial card shows a visible ⏸ Game paused by the tutorial indicator.
The tutorial auto-advances when the correct panel is opened via a keyboard shortcut.
Chapter 9 now pops a live Event Explainer demo (Jet Age 1958).
Era Objectives double-rebuild race fixed with a guard flag.
Tutorial text corrected: Legacy Lounge is on the era victory screen, not the main menu.
Controller cursor bumped to layer 110 — always on top of Save/Load and Quarterly Report windows.
Casey appreciates your patience. He has filed the paperwork in triplicate.
In October 1973, oil prices quadrupled overnight — and airlines that weren't ready were never the same. Here's how that crisis plays out in SkyChart. On October 17, 1973, OPEC's Arab members announced an embargo that sent a barrel of crude from $3 to nearly $12 within months. Pan American World Airways alone saw its fuel bills balloon by approximately $200 million in a single year. The survival tactics were almost grimly comic — carriers stopped painting their aircraft to save weight, slashed inflight magazine runs, and quietly killed any route that couldn't carry its weight. What the crisis also did was accelerate a transition that was already underway: the move to widebody jets. Airlines that had already committed to larger, more fuel-efficient aircraft absorbed the shock and kept growing. Those still running older narrowbodies faced a brutal restructuring — or worse.
SkyChart spans 90 years of aviation history — the 1973 fuel crisis is one of several historical disruption events modeled in the game.
Fleet composition matters: widebodies entering service around this era (747-100, DC-10, L-1011, A300) offer transformative per-seat economics on high-volume routes.
Airlines that upgraded before the crisis had options; those that waited had crises. That's not a scripted outcome — it's the result of the choices you made in the preceding decade.
SkyChart's 122,000+ city pairs give you room to build a resilient network — dense domestic routes to stabilize cash flow while you weather disruption on thinner international segments.
Think in cost-per-seat, not cost-per-flight. A 400-seat aircraft at 85% load is a fundamentally different business than two 200-seaters on the same route.
Read on the Casey Jones Labs dev blog →
SkyChart: Airline Executive is a deep airline management sim — spiritual successor to the classic Aerobiz. Wishlist to get notified on the Early Access launch. → Wishlist on Steam
Casey came back from a meeting at Steam HQ, waving a clipboard and looking thunderous. 'They told me players couldn't SCROLL the help guide with a controller! TWO HUNDRED PAGES of expertly-curated wisdom and they could only see the first screenful?!' He stomped over to Help & Controls, ripped open the Help tab, and bolted a right-stick scroll handler directly to the inner content panel. Sidebar still navigates with the D-pad, content now scrolls with the right thumbstick, and a controller hint sits at the top so nobody has to guess. 'Read every word, Captains — I labored over those.'
'And then — THEN! — They said the BUTTONS in my own Flight School don't work with a controller!' Casey was speechless for a full second, which is some kind of record. The track selection dialog and scenario prompt were both showing up while the registered tutorial card was hidden, so the Steam Input action set silently slipped back to MapNavigation, and the controller stopped accepting menu input. Casey taught the WindowManager to scan for ANY visible window in the tutorial overlay's neighborhood — not just the one it knew about by name. 'If you can SEE a button, you can PRESS a button. End of debate.' Also wired the focus chains explicitly so the title-bar close button is reachable from the d-pad.
Casey also tightened up the Steam Overlay auto-pause connection. 'They mentioned — POLITELY this time, like a footnote — that the game wasn't pausing when the overlay opened.' The signal was being connected before Steam had finished initializing in some cases, so the wire was never live. Casey now waits for Steam to confirm it's ready, retries on the next frame if needed, and prints a friendly tower notice when the connection actually goes through. 'I want to SEE the green light, not assume it.'
Bonus: Casey marched up to the Cloud Saves desk and discovered the Steam Auto-Cloud config was pointing at a folder that doesn't exist with a file extension SkyChart never writes. 'WHO set this up?! It's looking for .sav in the install directory, and we save .json to AppData!' He left a note for the human pilots with the correct Steamworks Auto-Cloud paths for Windows, Mac, and Linux. (No code change needed — just go fix the Steamworks config, Captain.)
Casey was halfway through a pot of coffee when the whole tower went dark. 'A pilot reported the game just VANISHED on him in mid-1970, and another captain says it crashes the moment he tries to start a fresh game on the Steam Deck!' He grabbed the flight recorder and traced the route recommender's background scanner sneaking into the active flight manifest WHILE the main crew was sorting routes and saving the books. 'You can't read the passenger list while someone's still SHUFFLING IT, you absolute menace!' He boarded up the entire hangar — every single piece of game state the recommender needs is now collected on the main desk before the worker bees are even allowed near it. No more midair manifest swaps. No more phantom Array refcount crashes. The route AND slot scanners both got the same treatment.
Casey also nailed the busy-wait door shut. 'You were spinning a worker thread in a tight loop, peeking at the cache every ten milliseconds like a kid checking the oven door!' Replaced the entire setup with a proper async callback chain — when the scan finishes, the worker hands results back to the main thread via a deferred callback, the cache updates safely, and any UI panels waiting for results get notified at once. Way calmer in the tower.
Casey marched into Boeing's front office and demanded to know why new planes just materialized on the tarmac. 'You can't build a 747 in five minutes! I don't care WHAT the simulator says!' Aircraft now have realistic delivery delays — 1-6 months depending on model size, with a global backlog system. Order the same hot new jet as every other airline? Get in line, Captain. Hangar aircraft still deploy instantly because Casey already inspected those rivets.
Leased aircraft arrive in 1 month — the leasing company keeps the inventory. New purchases scale with difficulty: Glider captains get express shipping (0.5x), Supersonic veterans wait in the full queue (1.3x). The delivery countdown ticks down each month, and Casey sends a delivery notification when your bird finally touches down.
Casey added an 'On Order' tab to Fleet Overview so you can track all pending deliveries, see progress bars, and cancel orders if plans change. Cancellations cost a 15% restocking fee — 'You think Boeing gives refunds? They've already cut the aluminum, Captain!' Fleet additions on existing routes arrive without grounding the operation — your current planes keep flying while the new one is built.
The world map now shows a delivery progress ring at the midpoint of waiting routes — a circular countdown that fills as delivery approaches. Awaiting-delivery routes glow in a distinct blue rather than the usual suspended gray, so you can spot them at a glance from 30,000 feet.
Casey updated the tutorial to teach new captains about delivery delays hands-on — place your first order, advance time, and watch the delivery notification pop. 'Every pilot needs to learn patience, and I'm the bird to teach it!'
Casey was mashing the D-pad on the Steam Deck trying to pick an era, but nothing happened. 'The buttons are RIGHT THERE, and they're not doing ANYTHING!' Turns out Steam Input was swallowing the D-pad signals and dumping them into a black hole — no output mapping at all. Wired all five controller configs to pass the D-pad through properly. Menu navigation, era selection, and difficulty picking — all working with D-pad and joystick now.
'Where's the settings button?! I need to adjust my font size, and there's no way to get there without a mouse!' Casey discovered the Select button was mapped to Speed Cycle — handy, but not nearly as important as being able to reach Settings. Remapped Select/View to open Settings on all controllers, in all screens. Added on-screen hints so pilots know it's there.
Flight routes were vanishing into thin air during zoom and pan. Casey traced it to overzealous fuel-saving — the renderer was skipping routes outside the viewport, but only recalculating which routes to show on zoom changes, not pan. 'You can't just STOP drawing a flight path because the passengers can't see it!' Removed the CPU-side culling entirely — the GPU handles clipping just fine with our route count.
The left joystick was double-dipping on the save screen — moving the cursor AND scrolling the save slot list at the same time. 'Pick a lane, stick!' Disabled the ScrollContainer's built-in joystick response since DraggableWindow already handles right-stick scrolling properly.
Casey was testing the 'Zoom to City' button and ended up staring at an empty ocean. 'I clicked TOKYO, and it took me to the BERMUDA TRIANGLE!' Turns out the navigation computer was reading the city's screen-wrapped position instead of its true map coordinates — so the zoom target shifted depending on where you'd scrolled last. Like asking for directions and getting yesterday's answer. Casey swapped in the original chart coordinates, and now every city lands dead center, every time.
Casey was reviewing the rival airlines' flight logs and found something shocking: 'They haven't opened a SINGLE route in TWENTY-FIVE YEARS?! What are they doing with ten million dollars — building a swimming pool on the tarmac?!' He traced the problem to the navigation computer, which was calculating route costs in kilometers instead of degrees — making every route look 111 times more expensive than it actually was. A $500K setup fee was showing up as $55 MILLION. 'No wonder nobody's flying — the accountants think a puddle-jumper to Osaka costs more than the airline itself!' One decimal conversion later, rivals are back in the air.
Casey also found the difficulty dial was wired backwards. 'On EASY mode, the rivals barely move, and on HARD mode they're everywhere?! That's like putting training wheels on the race car and a jet engine on the tricycle!' The AI expansion chance table now starts at 20% on Glider (up from a laughable 8%) and scales to 50% on Supersonic.
'The early 1930s route planner was picking Tokyo-to-London on a plane that could barely reach Osaka,' Casey muttered, shaking his head at the atlas. The Forge Trimotor has 885 km of range — that's regional, not intercontinental! AI now knows to pick nearby cities when range is limited, triples its candidate search in early eras, and pre-filters impossible pairs before scoring. No more throwing darts at a world map from a biplane.
Casey noticed rival airlines sitting on the tarmac while the player had 20 routes in the air. 'They have TEN MILLION DOLLARS, and they're waiting for a COMMITTEE MEETING before opening their first route?!' AI now establishes 2–4 routes immediately at game start (scaled by difficulty) and dynamically ramps up expansion when falling behind the player. The more routes you open, the harder they push to compete.
'The cash register was broken on day one — routes were flying full, but the money wouldn't start flowing until the first month closed!' Casey found that route income only began to drip after the first-month boundary. Now the economics engine fires immediately when the game starts, so your treasury reflects real earnings from the very first day.
'While I had the hood open, I upgraded the whole avionics suite,' Casey announces, unfurling a blueprint the size of a runway. Rival airlines now scale with difficulty across the board: fleet caps (4–10 per route), pricing aggression, market war triggers, cash reserves, maintenance levels, and demand multipliers. AI adjusts maintenance quarterly, invests in city infrastructure, and competes with difficulty-scaled demand bonuses (1.05x–1.40x). Every knob now turns when you turn the difficulty dial.
Casey was squinting at his tutorial clipboard when he noticed every em-dash had been replaced with a question mark. 'Who redacted my briefing notes?! I specifically wrote DASHES, not RIDDLES!' Tracked it down to 13 corrupted characters across the tutorial steps — some encoding gremlin swapped them during a file transfer. Casey personally re-inked every dash with a fountain pen.
'Why is my spotlight illuminating the ENTIRE AIRPORT instead of just the Route Info panel?!' Casey found the tutorial highlighted falling back to a full-screen placeholder when the target window wasn't open yet. Now it gracefully hides instead of turning the whole screen into a crime scene.
The tutorial kept whispering 'Swap All', but the button actually says 'Upgrade All'. Casey cross-referenced four separate documents and found the old name in every single one. 'Did nobody update the manual after the rebrand?!' All references now say Upgrade All — including the pilot handbook.
Casey discovered rival airlines entering receivership and never coming back — like sending a pilot to the break room and bricking the door shut. All routes suspended, zero income, guaranteed dissolution in 6 months. Now receivership keeps the top 60%% of profitable routes flying, and airlines that rebuild their cash to $0 can emerge early. Restructuring, not liquidation!
'The game keeps pausing, and nobody's telling me WHY!' Casey added a visible indicator on the tutorial card: when the tutorial auto-pauses the game, you'll now see a clear '⏸ Game paused by tutorial' label. No more mystery freezes.
Players were opening panels via keyboard shortcuts during tutorial steps, but Casey didn't notice. 'You already DID the thing I was about to teach you!' Now the tutorial auto-advances when you open the correct panel via shortcut — Casey gives you credit for being ahead of the class.
Chapter 9 used to say 'here's what historical events look like' without actually showing one. Casey now pops open a demo Event Explainer with 'The Jet Age Begins (1958)' so you can see the format live. Show, don't tell — that's Aviation Instructor 101.
Casey found the Era Objectives panel occasionally showing every goal twice — a timing bug where two rebuild signals raced through the same door. Added a bouncer (a guard flag) so only one rebuild runs at a time. No more double-vision on the objectives board.
The tutorial promised 'find the Legacy Lounge on the main menu,' but there's no Legacy button there — it's on the era victory screen. Casey corrected his own notes before anyone else noticed. Almost.
Steam Deck and ROG Ally pilots reported the controller cursor hiding behind Save/Load and Quarterly Report windows. Casey traced it to the cursor sitting at layer 103, while 13 modal panels could stack up to 102. Bumped the cursor to layer 110 — always on top, always visible.
Casey was pacing the tarmac while a trainee spent fifteen minutes picking an airline name — meanwhile, three flights departed, two landed, and a quarterly report filed itself. 'Time doesn't STOP just because you're choosing a font color!' Now the game clock pauses during airline setup and performance config screens. Casey finally gets to finish his coffee before the chaos starts.
'Who approved unlimited credit for an airline that owns ONE propeller plane?!' Casey found the loan officer rubber-stamping $500K requests with no ceiling, no questions asked. The corporate bank now caps total debt at $5M, and every $500K tier bumps the interest rate by 0.5%. At max debt, you're paying 6%/mo — enough to make even Casey's monocle pop off.
Steam Deck pilots reported the cursor snapping back to the airline name box every time they dismissed the keyboard. Casey traced it to a focus trap with zero cooldown — the moment the keyboard closed, focus yanked right back and reopened it. Added a brief post-keyboard grace period so Deck pilots can actually reach the Confirm button.
Casey noticed Deck controllers couldn't open city windows intermittently — 'I'm pressing A right on Tokyo and it's showing me NOTHING!' The virtual cursor was checking if a HUD button had focus instead of checking what was under the cursor, so leftover focus from the Play button was blocking city detection. Removed the stale focus check; cities now respond reliably.
Strategy Planner dropdowns on Steam Deck were invisible during selection — 'It's like filing a flight plan blindfolded!' Added visible focus highlighting to all OptionButton menus so controller users can actually see what they're picking.
Casey felt the map fighting him after zooming — dragging vertically moved either too fast or too slow, depending on the zoom level. The Y-axis panning wasn't accounting for map scale like the X-axis was. One division later, drag-to-pan feels 1:1 at every zoom level.
Remapped Music Pause from Shift+Space (which never worked due to the Ctrl key filter) to Ctrl+M. Casey can finally mute the in-flight entertainment without unbuckling his seatbelt.
Casey was filing paperwork at two desks stacked on top of each other when his pen went right through the top form, and he signed the wrong document underneath. 'Who designed this filing cabinet — the clicks are landing on the WRONG window!' Turns out, when two panels overlapped, background windows were hijacking focus before the buttons could register. Casey installed a z-order checkpoint in the window manager so that only the topmost panel at the click point responds. No more phantom clicks through the Fleet Overview into the Strategic Advisor.
The route information panel had a sneaky fuel leak — every time it refreshed, it left an old signal connection dangling on the tarmac. After 14 minutes of flying, Casey counted 85,000 stale wires in the cockpit. 'No wonder the error light looks like a Christmas tree!' Now the panel properly disconnects the old cash-change listener before wiring up a new one. Zero leaked connections, zero error spam.
Casey caught the Route Recommender's background scanner reading the flight manifest while the main crew was rewriting it mid-air. 'You can't check the passenger count while someone's still boarding!' Added local snapshots so the cache validator doesn't race with the main thread.
Casey was running new captains through the pre-flight briefing when someone pulled up Chapter 1 mid-campaign. 'Where's the NEXT button?! I can't just stand here on the tarmac forever!' Turns out the tutorial hid the navigation buttons because it expected setup screens that don't exist in an active game. Now Chapter 1 shows full Next/Back controls when accessed from a running campaign — no more stranded rookies.
'Stop moving my clipboard!' Casey taped his tutorial card to a spot on the console, but every new lesson kept yanking it back to the default corner. Now, once you drag Casey's card somewhere, it stays put — your chosen position is respected across all steps.
Casey found three warning lights blinking on the control panel for no reason: a phantom 'unused signal' alarm on the legacy toggle, and two 'static function called on instance' alerts from MigrationManager and PlatformManager. Quick wiring fix — suppressed the false alarm and removed the unnecessary static markers from singleton functions.
Casey was inspecting the fleet roster when he spotted something alarming: 'Why is the ticket counter still selling seats on a 1960s prop plane in 1980?! That thing belongs in a museum, not on the tarmac!' The aircraft catalog now properly filters out retired airframes — no more booking passengers onto planes that should be collecting dust in a hangar. Route creation, upgrade suggestions, and the recommender all respect retirement years now.
The Upgrade Advisor was drawing a blank on grounded routes — 'No suggestions? We've got planes parked on the ramp with propellers from the Eisenhower era, and you're telling me there's NOTHING better?' Casey discovered the advisor couldn't estimate demand for non-operational routes, so it assumed zero passengers and gave up. Now it peeks at what demand WOULD look like if the route were flying, then recommends the right modern aircraft to get those birds back in the air.
Casey noticed the Quarterly Report was missing transfer passenger stats entirely. 'We built this whole hub-and-spoke network and the bean counters aren't even tracking the connecting traffic?!' The quarterly financial report now shows total transfer passengers routed through your hubs when hub traffic is active.
Casey ran a full systems diagnostic and found the flight computer was choking on rush-hour traffic. 'Three thousand routes and the radar screen was redrawing weather blips eight times a second — no wonder the cockpit instruments were lagging!' He throttled the weather radar to half-second refreshes at high traffic, switched route lines to fast-draw mode when the network gets dense, and cached those pesky gate-check lookups that were scanning the entire terminal every frame. FPS should climb noticeably at scale.
The Comms Log dismiss button was occasionally crashing the radio stack — Casey traced it to a timing issue where the logbook was rebuilding mid-click. 'You can't rewrite the manifest while someone's still reading it!' Fixed with deferred rebuilds.
Every panel in the airline now shows a loading spinner when crunching numbers: Hub Strategy, Fleet Risk, Market Dashboard, Route Forecast, Threat Analysis, and 11 more. 'Passengers deserve to know when we're thinking,' Casey notes, polishing the spinner.
Casey was reviewing the era progression logbook when he noticed something suspicious: pilots who'd completed Dawn of Flight were STILL locked out of The Jet Age. 'I personally stamped that boarding pass CLEARED — how is the gate still shut?!' Turns out, the scanner was comparing apples to oranges — literally. The save file stored era completions as decimal numbers (0.0, 1.0), but the gate reader expected whole numbers (0, 1). Godot 4.6 treats those as different species, like comparing a macaw to a parakeet. Casey installed a type-normalizer in the career stats loader that converts all JSON floats back to proper integers on load. Era unlocks, achievement checks, and the completed checkmark all work correctly now. 'A boarding pass is a boarding pass, whether you print it in Courier or Helvetica,' Casey declares, oiling the turnstile.
Casey's been studying airport blueprints and connecting-flight timetables with the intensity of a macaw who just discovered layover lounges have complimentary seeds. 'You've got routes radiating out of Tokyo like spokes on a propeller, but nobody's CONNECTING through it! That's like building a roundabout with no exits!' He's installed a brand-new Transfer Passenger system: from 1955 onward, cities with 3+ of your routes naturally attract connecting travelers routing A→Hub→B through your network. Buy a Hub upgrade and the flow intensifies — Level 3 hubs channel passengers at 80% efficiency, turning your spoke cities into transit powerhouses. Build a trunk route between two hubs and double-hop itineraries (A→Hub1→Hub2→B) emerge automatically, with intercontinental passengers bouncing through your network like frequent-flyer pinballs. Casey even added transfer stats to the Route Info panel, hub cards show connecting traffic totals, the news ticker reports quarterly transfer volumes, and the map marks active transfer hubs with an ⇄ icon. AI rivals now prioritize hub-feeding routes too, so watch Atlanta and Dubai light up. 'A real airline doesn't just fly routes — it builds a WEB,' Casey declares, pinning red yarn between pushpins on his wall map like a conspiracy theorist who happens to be right.
Casey reviewed the demo lounge and decided one hour wasn't enough time to properly inspect the aircraft. 'You can't judge an airline from the boarding gate — you need at LEAST three hours to kick the tires, check the rivets, and fly a few routes!' He tripled the demo timer from 60 minutes to a full 3 hours. Even better, passengers who already used their original hour get a fresh boarding pass — the new limit applies retroactively, so everyone gets the full 180 minutes. 'Generosity is the first rule of aviation hospitality,' Casey announces, stamping EXTENDED on every expired demo ticket.
Casey was trying to inspect the Worst Routes report and found it wedged behind the HUD like a baggage cart jammed under a jetway. 'I can SEE my losses, but I can't TOUCH them — which is poetic, but unhelpful!' The panel now opens properly centered below the HUD bar instead of spawning at coordinates (0,0) directly behind flight control. He also noticed the same Worst Routes data was still duplicated inside the Advisor panel — 'Two copies of bad news doesn't make it twice as actionable, it makes it twice as depressing.' Removed the redundant tab so there's one clean panel, one source of truth, and one very smug macaw.
Casey's been poring over a century of airline schedules with a magnifying glass and a world atlas. 'You mean to tell me a World Cup kicks off in Rio, and we don't see a SINGLE extra booking? That's not an airline sim, that's an abacus!' He's now installed a Global Mega-Events Calendar covering 1930 through 2100 — FIFA World Cups (all 43 of them), Summer Olympics, Winter Olympics, World Expos, UEFA Euros, Rugby World Cups, Cricket World Cups, and annual crowd-pullers like Hajj, Carnival, Oktoberfest, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Golden Week, Mardi Gras, and the Holiday Rush. Each event boosts demand at host cities and nearby airports — fly to Munich during Oktoberfest and watch your load factors soar, or position aircraft near World Cup venues for a two-month windfall. Casey even extrapolated future hosts through 2098 using 'rigorous ornithological rotation analysis' (he picked cities out of an atlas with his beak). 'A real airline chief reads the event calendar before the route map,' he declares, pinning a giant wall chart to the flight ops board.
Casey's been eyeing the dashboard gauges and the flight school curriculum with his trademark clipboard intensity. First up: the HUD's era goals strip now lights up each goal individually — cash turns green the moment your treasury hits target, route count goes green when you've got enough legs in the air, and regions follow suit. 'Why should a captain have to squint at one big grey blob when I can give you three precision instruments?' he says, buffing the glass. The strip hides itself in Sandbox mode ('No goals, no gauges — that's the whole point of flying free, Captain').
The City Panel got a cockpit upgrade, too. Selecting an origin city no longer loses your place when you close the panel — Casey installed a persistent origin banner that shows where you're flying from, complete with a clickable city name and a Cancel button for when you change your mind mid-route. 'Real pilots don't forget where they took off from just because they closed a window,' he notes.
Over in Flight School, Casey now knows when to keep quiet. Sandbox mode? No auto-tutorial — chapters are in the Settings menu if you need a refresher. Scenario mode? Casey pops up with a polite 'Want the guided tour starting from Chapter 2?' since the scenario already handles setup. And for controller pilots, every tutorial button now shows the right gamepad prompts — \ Next, Back, \ Skip — switching live as you swap between controller and keyboard. The virtual cursor steps aside while Casey's talking, too. 'Can't have two birds on the instrument panel at once,' he explains, smoothing his feathers.
Casey noticed pilots staring at a frozen cockpit screen, wondering if the instruments had broken. 'You can't just lock up the controls without telling anyone — that's how you get a mutiny at 30,000 feet!' He bolted a spinning beacon to the dashboard that fires up whenever the flight computer is crunching heavy data: loading route manifests, tallying fleet rosters, building market share charts, or rendering performance sparklines. The spinner runs on a GPU shader — independent of the main avionics bus — so it keeps turning even when the flight computer is maxed out doing math. The mouse cursor flips to a wait icon, too, because Casey believes in redundant systems. 'If the light's spinning, we're working. If it's not, we're done. Beats staring at a blank panel, wondering if you need to slap it,' he explains, tapping the beacon approvingly.
After squawking at poorly labeled cockpit instruments and unlabeled route cards for long enough, Casey has officially opened the SkyChart Academy — and he's not letting anyone leave until they've earned their wings.
v0.2.36.0 – v0.2.37.2 SkyChart now has a full in-game tutorial with 15 chapters covering every major system — from laying your first route to corporate espionage. Two tracks available:
Quick Tour — 4 chapters to get you airborne fast. Earn the Casey's Copilot achievement.
Full Course — All 93 systems, every panel, nothing skipped. Earn Casey's Star Student + 25 Legacy Points.
The tutorial features a two-stage spotlight system that follows you into dropdown menus, breadcrumb progress dots, a Resume Tutorial button in Settings, and per-chapter replay if you want to revisit anything. Signal-wait timeouts mean nobody gets stuck. A 'Don't show again' option is there for the veterans. The last two patches ironed out 40+ tutorial steps with missing navigation, wrong signal names, and stale panel references — including a Chapter 1 auto-advance that was stalling on the tarmac and a spotlight ring that pointed at nothing. Casey is now satisfied. Mostly. 'A flight manual that doesn't tell you where the cockpit is... isn't a manual. It's a paperweight.'
v0.2.39.6 Casey finally snapped about pilots confusing their livery with a rival's on the map. The new livery paint shop gives you full Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders — any color in the spectrum — plus 10 preset swatches including new pink and dark teal options. Full Steam controller and d-pad support included. Casey also installed a Rival Color Contrast Inspector: after you pick your color, he personally checks every competitor's paint job and resprays any that are too similar. 'If I can't tell your planes apart at a glance from the tower, someone's getting a new coat of paint — and it won't be you.'
v0.2.38.0 – v0.2.39.5 Casey strapped on a gamepad and rewired the entire experience from the couch. Every campaign screen — era select, mode, difficulty, airline setup — now has visible focus rings and proper d-pad navigation. Highlights:
Focus stays locked inside overlays — no more accidentally panning the map during era selection
Airline name field glows when selected, with a toast prompt to press A for the keyboard
On-screen keyboard rebuilt: arrow keys for cursor, DEL for forward-delete, CLR to wipe the field
Steam Overlay now auto-pauses the game
Controller disconnect triggers a pause with warning
Settings and Help panels no longer eat controller input
v0.2.39.4 The diversification catalog is now historically gated. No more building a theme park in 1930:
Hotels unlock in 1946 — Pan Am started it
Concert Halls in 1955, Golf Courses in 1965, Theme Parks in 1978
Carbon Offsets: 2005, naturally
The Strategy Planner and Recommender respect these dates
Airport capacity has been fully rebuilt: 43 major hubs now follow hand-tuned historical growth curves (Heathrow 1946, Changi 1981, Incheon 2001), with all other airports growing dynamically by city population and aviation era. Most airports start with just 1 slot in 1930. A new Airport Expansion Alert fires every January when any airport where you operate adds new slots — so you can rush in before your rivals do.
v0.2.39.0 Casey cross-referenced real-world specs for all 66 aircraft and issued corrected range certificates — the DC-3 no longer claims lunar orbit capability. A new Distance Unit setting lets you choose Kilometers, Miles, or Nautical Miles. The game auto-detects your locale on first launch. Speed displays match throughout.
v0.2.39.1 – v0.2.39.3
Ghost flight crash fixed — on macOS, the economics thread kept processing data from a previous game after returning to the main menu, causing a crash. Now the menu waits for all background calculations to complete before switching.
Supply chain events now actually enforced — export bans, strikes, and fleet groundings now block purchases across every UI panel; AI rivals respect restrictions; the route recommender stops suggesting planes you can't buy.
Market shocks now persist through save/reload — fuel crises, recessions, and deregulation deals no longer vanish when you save.
Route Deregulation now grants the promised slots instead of making empty announcements.
PlatformManager crash on New Game fixed — the singleton was being swept up in menu cleanup, breaking leaderboards.
Achievement lookup fixed for Casey's Star Student — type-checking instead of string matching.
Route renderer fixes: lines no longer disappear near map edges or during zoom-pan sequences.
v0.2.37.0 238 color values across 50 UI panels were hardcoded, making colorblind and contrast settings do almost nothing. Casey rewired 221 of them through AccessibilityPalette with live-refresh — every panel from Finances to Fleet now responds to all five colorblind modes and three contrast levels in real time.
Full patch notes for every version are available in the SkyChart update history, or in-game under Settings → Patch Notes. 'Every captain deserves a proper briefing.' — Casey
About
This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for SkyChart: Airline Executive, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main SkyChart: Airline Executive statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.