Debt Is a Tool Until It Is Not

The loan desk never says no; it just prices you. How leverage sets your rate, what the weekly annuity does to your cash, and what overextension actually looks like from the inside.

Debt is the fastest way to grow in PlaneSim and the fastest way to die, and the loan desk is built so that both outcomes are your call. It will lend to anyone with room under the ceiling. There is no rejection letter, no application review, no relationship banker to charm. Risk shows up in exactly one place: the price.

How the desk prices you

You choose an amount and a term, by default anywhere from 13 to 208 weeks (your world may differ). The rate is not negotiable. Every world sets a hard debt ceiling per airline, by default $80M, and your rate is a base rate plus a risk spread that scales with how much of that ceiling your debt would use after the drawdown you are asking for. The defaults are 7% base plus up to 8% of spread. Borrowing your first million is cheap; borrowing near the ceiling costs close to the full spread.

The quote you see before confirming is exactly what you will pay: annual rate, weekly payment, total interest over the term. Nothing changes between quote and signature.

One consequence deserves more attention than it gets. Because each loan is priced at your leverage after it, order matters. Many small loans taken as the airline grows will price better than one giant loan taken up front. Front-loading your borrowing means paying near-ceiling spread on money you will not deploy for months.

The annuity does not care how your week went

Repayment is a fixed weekly payment, drawn automatically. Each payment splits into interest, a real cost that lands on your income statement, and principal, which only reduces the balance-sheet liability. Early in the term the split leans hard toward interest; it shifts toward principal as the balance falls.

Two things the bank will never do: pause a payment, and block one. The annuity leaves your account even when it pushes your cash negative, and negative cash starts the insolvency clock. Missed-payment weeks are tracked on the loan. The one mercy is real, though: you may repay any loan early, in full, at its remaining balance, with no penalty, and the interest you have not yet incurred is simply never charged. Deleveraging is always available at face value.

Reading your own book

The Loans page shows every loan with its rate, balance, weekly payment, payments remaining and maturity, plus three headline numbers worth memorizing: total debt, weekly service, and leverage as a percentage of the ceiling. The Upcoming Events calendar projects every payment forward alongside your other bills, with a marker showing how far today's cash reaches. Your financial rating grades the same picture through debt-to-assets and interest-cover ratios, so what you see is what a lender sees.

What overextension actually looks like

It rarely looks like a bad loan. It looks like a good loan serviced by revenue that has not arrived yet.

Revenue in this game is recognized when flights complete, and a new route spends its first weeks filling a booking curve before the cabin earns what the spreadsheet promised. The annuity leaves every week regardless, including those weeks. An airline that borrows against projections is running two clocks against each other: the booking curve's slow build, and the weekly debit that never misses. If cash goes negative and stays there through the world's grace period, liquidation runs automatically; the whole sequence is laid out in the wiki's Bankruptcy & estates article, and by the time it applies, the interesting decisions are behind you.

The working rule is short. Weekly service is the number to respect, and you size it against routes that are already earning, not routes you hope will. Debt bought the fleets that made plenty of airlines in this genre. It also wound most of them up. The desk will fund either outcome, at the posted rate, and the quote will be honest both times.