Cabin Geometry Is the Business

Capacity in PlaneSim is not a spec-sheet number. Every tail carries its own layout inside a fixed floor-space budget, and where you spend that floor decides what the airframe earns.

Ask what an aircraft type "holds" and most sims answer with a spec-sheet number. PlaneSim answers with whatever you fitted. Every aircraft in your fleet carries its own cabin layout, a seat count per class plus optional cargo space, and that layout decides how many tickets each flight can sell. Two tails of the same type parked nose to nose can be entirely different businesses.

The floor is the budget

Each aircraft type has a fixed floor-space budget, and everything you sell has to fit inside it. The four classes price that floor differently.

Weights and multipliers are world settings, so check yours, but the shape of the trade is constant. A First seat consumes four Economy seats' worth of floor at the defaults, and it needs to earn accordingly. Note the fallback column, too: if you never publish an explicit fare for a premium class, it still sells, at that multiple of your Economy fare. An unpriced Business cabin quietly defaults to 2.8 times Economy whether or not the route can bear it.

Where layouts come from

Factory-fresh aircraft arrive in a dense all-Economy fit, one seat per unit of floor space. On a premium-minded network, the first job a new delivery gets is a visit to the Cabins page. Second-hand metal is the opposite case. A tail you lease or buy keeps whatever layout it already wears, and larger lessor airframes often show up with a business cabin already installed. Check before you plan a refit; sometimes the previous operator did the work for you.

The Cabins page lets you edit a tail directly, or save named layouts per aircraft type and install them in one click. Saved layouts are copies, so editing or deleting one never touches aircraft already wearing it. Standardizing a subfleet is a template away.

What a refit actually costs

On most worlds, reconfiguring is instant and free and the aircraft stays in service. The new layout applies to flights that enter the booking window from that point on; flights already on sale keep the inventory they were selling, so a mid-week refit strands nobody.

Worlds with refit windows enabled turn the same click into a real project. Seats are billed as hardware, the tail is grounded for the work, and flights overlapping the window are cancelled with compensation. The Cabins page warns you before you commit, so you will know which kind of world you are in before the invoice arrives.

Range eats seats

Capacity is not always the full layout. Past a type's full-payload range, the game trims the sellable seats on that leg, proportionally across all classes, falling toward zero at the type's absolute maximum range. A cabin that works on short hops can sell noticeably fewer seats on the type's longest missions, and the leftover payload is what carries belly cargo. Plan the layout against the sectors you actually intend to fly, not against the brochure.

Comfort is bought by the hour

Passengers are not interchangeable, and comfort is valued per hour aboard. A Business seat is worth far more on a ten-hour sector than on a one-hour hop. Some traveler types will not consider certain classes at all, and premium passengers expect a higher service standard once they are in the seat. Premium space, in other words, is a bet on stage length and on who is flying, not a default you inherit.

The Cabins page includes a comfort-by-distance view for exactly this judgement: where on the network premium floor pays its rent, and where it is four Economy seats flying empty. The full mechanics, including how passengers choose between competing products, are in the wiki at wiki.theplanesim.com. The floor-space budget itself is waiting at play.theplanesim.com.