Frequently asked questions

No. Skyline is strictly single-player. Your rivals are AI-run airlines that expand, defend their hubs, react to your fares, and can even go bankrupt, but there is no online or co-op play.

The full game runs a multi-decade window - long enough to grow a startup into a mature network. Demo: the demo caps you at your founding year plus two more (see the Playtest / Demo / Full game section).

Yes. Airports, aircraft types, and macro conditions (fuel prices, exchange rates, world events) draw on real data. But historical shocks like recessions, oil spikes, and pandemics are scheduled probabilistically, not pinned to fixed dates - so a downturn might land in 2008 in one game and 2012 in another, and you can't win by memorizing history.

Once you're certified and staffed, open Network Planning from the map, pick a destination from your hub, and set the aircraft, weekly frequency, and fare. A live projection shows expected weekly profit, revenue vs. cost, and load factor before you commit. You also need the traffic rights for that country pair: domestic flying is unrestricted, but international routes depend on your jurisdiction's air-service agreements. Start with short routes near home.

Scheduling works in seasons. You create a season plan, add a commercial service (the route, fares, and cabins), and define when it operates and which pool of aircraft can fly it. The engine then auto-assigns specific aircraft ("tails") to each flight, inserting empty repositioning flights where needed to keep aircraft in position. Changes are queued and take effect at the season boundary (or the next future Monday for amendments), not instantly, with day-of tools for cancelling, retiming, or swapping individual flights.

Congested airports have limited capacity per time window. At the most restricted ("Level 3") airports each flight needs a slot and pays a coordination fee; less busy airports are advisory or uncontrolled. Slot handling is built into the seasonal planning flow.

All three. The used-aircraft exchange delivers quickly and cheaply for getting off the ground. New aircraft are ordered through a production-slot order book (option a slot, firm it up, pay pre-delivery payments, take delivery years later) and can be bought with cash, financed with a loan, or leased. Owned aircraft sit on your balance sheet and depreciate; leased aircraft carry no book value but cost a monthly rate and are handed back at lease end. A stronger relationship with a manufacturer earns better financing terms and access to earlier delivery slots.

Yes. Each manufacturer program has a real-world lifecycle: you can't order a type before it's announced or after it's retired, and delivery dates can slip when a program hits production problems. There are 70+ real aircraft types.

Yes. At order time you set the class split (first/business/premium/economy), seat pitch, and options like IFE, winglets, ETOPS, and extra fuel tanks, within what your brand archetype and the era allow. There are factory presets and you can save your own. You can also retrofit an owned aircraft later; it's grounded during the reconfiguration and costs the config difference plus a labor premium.

Aircraft accrue flight hours and periodically enter A-, C-, and D-checks: progressively longer and more expensive, paid as real cash events, and staggered so your whole fleet doesn't ground at once. AOG ("Aircraft On Ground") is an unscheduled grounding; older, more worn aircraft are far more likely to suffer one. A spare engine can absorb some AOG events. Aircraft reliability decays with age and they typically retire around 25 years.

Through a founding wizard with five steps - Founder → Charter → Capital → Positioning → File. You sign at the end and the game begins. You then earn your operating certificate in-game before you can fly.

Your starting background. Each archetype sets your starting capital, baseline strengths, and a couple of optional traits you can pick, plus an overall difficulty. Examples range from the well-funded (Wealthy Investor, Family-Money Heir - easier starts) to the scrappy (The Outsider, Charter Operator - harder starts), with industry insiders, a tech entrepreneur, and government-connected founders in between.

On the Charter step you name the airline (IATA/ICAO codes are suggested and editable), pick your home hub airport, and pick a jurisdiction - the country/regulator you operate under. Your jurisdiction sets your tax rate, home currency, union strength, and how long and complex your operating certificate (AOC) is to earn.

An AOC (Air Operator Certificate) is your license to carry paying passengers. It is granted in stages after founding while the clock runs, and it stalls whenever the regulator is waiting on a decision from you - so check in on it. You also need at least one aircraft and a rostered crew before you can actually sell seats.

Your strategy, set across three choices: a brand archetype (legacy, LCC, ULCC, premium, regional, hybrid - plus charter/cargo), a network shape (hub-and-spoke, point-to-point, focus-city, or hybrid), and a geographic focus (domestic, regional, long-haul, global). The wizard scores how coherent your three picks are - mismatched strategies (e.g. a ULCC running a complex hub-and-spoke) cost you more and grow slower.

Yes - an optional, story-driven guide led by Rhea Santos, your Chief of Staff. Instead of a wall of text, it's a nine-chapter arc that walks alongside you and only advances when you hit real milestones (get certified, buy your first aircraft, paint it, hire crew, open your first route, see first revenue, and so on). It's on by default; you can turn it off on the final founding step, replay the whole tour from the menu, or skip individual chapters. Opening a screen for the first time also pops a short "primer" card explaining that room.

Press Play to start the clock (nothing happens while paused). Then follow the chain: open the Executive/Authority area to begin certification and clear the regulator's pending decisions; buy your first aircraft (the used-aircraft exchange delivers fast; new factory orders take years); paint it in the Brand Studio; hire pilots and cabin crew (this takes a month or two, so start early); then open your first route from the map.

Play/pause starts and stops the clock, and there are three speeds - 1×, 8×, and 128×. Pausing never penalizes you. Heavy moments (month boundaries, deliveries, maintenance) may briefly show a "busy" state while the sim catches up.

A floating dock along the bottom of the world view holds your workstations - Operations, Acquisitions, Executive, and Identity - each opening screens like Dispatch, Crew, the Order Center, Finance, Authority, and Brand. A status strip across the top shows cash, date, load factor, costs, and alerts; when a number turns red, it wants your attention. The main view is a 3-D world map.

Every flight carries a full cost stack: fuel, crew, maintenance, airport and navigation fees, ground handling, catering, distribution, insurance, and the aircraft's lease or depreciation, plus a share of fixed corporate overhead. The usual culprit is low load factor: empty seats still fly the full cost. Other common causes are a fare-per-mile below your cost-per-seat-mile, heavy fuel on long thin routes, expensive airports, or premium cabins you can't fill.

Demand comes from a gravity model: bigger, wealthier, and closer city pairs generate more trips, with extra pull from tourism, shared language, hub-to-hub and capital-city connections. Demand also varies by season, day of week (business routes peak midweek, leisure at weekends), and daily random swings, all deterministic from the same seed. Countries growing richer over time fly more.

Yes. On any route with two or more carriers, the AI solves for the fare that best maximizes each of their profits given what everyone else, including you, is charging, and adjusts accordingly. You set your own fare (within a range); the game never auto-prices you. AI carriers also open and close routes, change frequencies, and order or retire aircraft based on their strategy and how much pressure you put on their hubs.

Passengers choose among the available options by price, travel time, frequency, brand, non-stop vs. connecting, and (for your own loyalty members) loyalty, weighed differently for business, leisure, visiting-friends, and connecting travelers. Frequency matters disproportionately: thanks to the "S-curve," the carrier with the most departures on a route captures a share larger than its seat share alone.

Each cabin is split into nested fare buckets: the same seats sold at different prices depending on timing and demand. The engine uses EMSRb (a real airline-industry method) to protect seats for later, higher-fare bookings, so you don't sell out cheap when high-value demand is still coming.

Two engine-driven reasons: fuel prices move with oil-market events and shocks, and exchange rates drift over time, re-valuing your foreign revenue and costs in your home currency. You can hedge both: lock in a share of your fuel at today's price for future months, and manage currency exposure, for an upfront premium.

You can raise capital in rounds (Friends & Family, Angel, Private Equity), issue bonds, or go public. An IPO has gates: a couple of years of history, recent profitability, and a healthy margin, and it prices shares at a discount to fair value. Your company's valuation is driven mainly by trailing profit, scaled by your jurisdiction and founder profile.

Once you take outside capital, a board forms and meets quarterly. It grades your performance and sets targets on profit, cash, valuation, and brand strength. They cannot remove you, but if confidence drops, the board can block big moves (large aircraft orders, IPOs, large buybacks) and impose a temporary mandate like a spending freeze until you recover their confidence.

During major economic shocks you can access relief: a low-interest emergency loan, a payment holiday that pauses debt payments until the shock passes, and the ability to defer or cancel aircraft deliveries at reduced penalty.

Frequent-flyer program (legacy/hybrid brands): launch once, then it enrolls passengers, tiers them, and makes your customers stickier at equal fares, a compounding share advantage over time. Ancillary revenue (LCC/ULCC/hybrid/regional): per-passenger fees for bags, seat selection, priority boarding, and onboard food & drink; ULCCs earn the most, while legacy/premium brands lean on fares instead. Lounges (legacy/premium): a brand and prestige investment at your key airports, built and run at real cost across basic/business/first tiers. Alliances: join a global alliance for a yearly fee and a multi-year commitment; it lifts revenue on your connecting/interline traffic, so it pays off most if you carry meaningful connecting flows.

macOS and Windows, as native desktop apps distributed on Steam. There is no Linux build shipped and no browser version: the shipping product is desktop-only.

Yes. The shipping build launches through Steam.

Yes. The game autosaves the moment you launch your airline, then every six in-game months, into a single rotating autosave slot. You also have a quick-save slot and unlimited named manual saves. On desktop, saves are files in the app's data folder and are synced by Steam Cloud.

It can. Saves record the engine version, and a major engine change will ask you to start a new game rather than load an incompatible save. This is most likely across big milestones. We can't promise saves carry across major updates or between the playtest, demo, and full game: treat a new milestone as a fresh start unless a release note says otherwise.

The game loop is tuned for smooth fast-forward: it throttles updates, caps how much time advances per step to avoid hitches on heavy months, and keeps time moving even when the window is minimized.

Six Steam achievements ship: First Flight, In the Black (first profit), Going Public (IPO), Ten Tails (10 aircraft), Network Effect (25 destinations), and Three Decades (survive 30 years). Discord Rich Presence shows your airline, hub, year, and fleet/route counts on the desktop build.

Playtest / Demo: these builds include opt-in telemetry, you're asked for consent on first launch, and nothing is collected unless you agree. Each save also has a "Share save with team" button so you can send a problem save to the developers. Telemetry is compiled out of the final release build.

They're the same game from one codebase. Playtest: the full game, given to invited testers, with opt-in feedback telemetry. Demo: the full game with a single limit, time. You get complete founding and every system, then a hard stop after two in-game years, ending on a recap of your airline so far and a link to the full game; nothing is feature-locked, only the calendar is capped. Full game: the complete multi-decade sim with no time wall.

No. Demo saves stay in the demo. Plan to start fresh in the full game.

The core simulation is deep and largely complete: demand, competitive pricing, scheduling, crews, maintenance, finance, currencies, and living AI competitors all run. It's a playtest on the road to a 1.0 release, so expect rough edges and some systems still being deepened. Development is guided by an ongoing honest internal audit and by playtester feedback, which is the whole point of the playtest and demo.

A few systems are in the game but still being deepened, for example cargo and charter operations, deeper alliance/partner products, and structured goals and win conditions (the game is currently an open sandbox with no lose-condition screen). We'd rather tell you honestly than overpromise; the roadmap is shaped by what testers tell us matters most.

Yes, that's why the playtest and demo exist.

Four things ground or delay your flights: an explicit cancellation, an AOG (grounded aircraft), a crew shortage (not enough rostered crew for the flight), or an aircraft out of position from an earlier delay. Delays cascade: a late inbound flight pushes back everything that aircraft flies next.

Yes. Crew are named individuals, hired separately by role (pilot / cabin), base, and, for pilots, aircraft type rating. If a flight doesn't have enough crew for its assigned aircraft, that flight is cancelled at execution. Hiring takes a month or two through a realistic labor-market funnel, so recruit ahead of growth.

Yes. Union contracts come up for renewal, and you negotiate them (accept, counter, or decline). Pushing too hard raises grievance and can trigger a strike of up to three months, during which strikers draw no pay.

Yes. Type-rating training converts a pilot to a new aircraft family for a fixed cost and a few months. Widebodies require captain rank. Crews also retire (mandatory ages) and leave voluntarily over time, so plan your pipeline.