Flight numbers, pairs, and a tail's week

What a flight number contains, why round trips are directional pairs validated as one rotation, and how Operations Control renders an aircraft's actual day.

What a flight number contains

A flight number is the commercial product. One holds: a number of 2 to 8 letters and digits, a routing of one or more legs, a days-of-week pattern, departure times entered in UTC (the game resolves red-eye legs to the next day), fares per cabin, an on-board service level, an optional validity window, and, eventually, an aircraft to fly it. Everything else in network planning hangs off this object.

Round trips are pairs

Following real-world convention, the outbound and the return fly under different numbers. The wizard has no modes to pick between: it opens as one leg, and Add return mirrors it back. The return number is suggested as outbound plus one (QF401 out, QF402 back), and a Suggest button finds a free consecutive pair.

The two numbers are created together and validated as one rotation, because a lone one-way number can never close a weekly tour. The pair lives or dies as a unit against the seven scheduling gates, and it stays linked afterwards: each half shows a chip pointing at its twin, assigning a pooled pair to an aircraft boards both directions together, and Cancel pair removes both with one confirmation. Duplicating one half seeds the wizard with both directions.

The same builder covers the other shapes. Add leg extends a single number over a chain (A to B to C) for a through-service or a closed loop; give those legs distinct numbers instead and you get a multi-city chain, each sector numbered in its own right. The wizard infers which shape you meant from the legs you built.

Fares ride along

Every fare row is optional. A blank cabin sells at the engine's auto price, computed per leg from its distance, and keeps tracking it; set a number to take control. Return fares mirror the outbound until you deliberately split them. Service level runs from None to Premium and costs per passenger-hour.

From paper to metal

Create the number with a tail selected and flights materialize immediately, with the wizard reporting the weekly departure count. Create it unassigned and it waits in the pool, where only traffic rights and departure curfews were checked; the equipment gates run at assignment, with a live verdict as you pick a tail. Reassigning to a different aircraft moves the whole number.

What a tail's day actually looks like

Operations Control is where the abstraction becomes a working day. The rotation board draws a timeline bar chart of the whole fleet, grouped by type: one row per tail, one bar per flight, a red line marking right now. The header keeps a running total of fleet block hours per week and average utilization, and you can step a day in either direction, snap back to now, widen the window to 24, 48 or 72 hours, or filter to one type.

The bars carry the texture of the day. Outlined means scheduled and not yet departed. Solid teal is en route right now. Grey has arrived. Red hatching is a cancellation, a dashed bar is a ferry flight with no passengers, and a wide hatched block is a heavy-check hangar window. An amber tail on a bar is a delay pushing past the scheduled arrival. Tail labels add badges worth acting on: RESERVE, STORED, IN CHECK, and an amber NO MAINT WINDOW warning when a rotation is missing its required weekly line-maintenance ground time. Fix that one in the schedule before it bites.

Click any bar and the flight's detail drawer opens: route, flight number, status, departure and scheduled arrival, any delay with the new expected time, the operating tail and type, and, for your own flights, seats sold against capacity per cabin class. A collapsible disruptions rail summarizes the last 24 hours of delays, cancellations and compensation, one row per event with the money it cost you. One honest caveat: a flight rescued by a reserve aircraft departs on time and never appears there; if the substitute was smaller, the denied-boarding compensation shows up on your ledger instead. An empty rail is the goal.

Changing your mind

Editing a number's times, days or routing offers two paths. Apply now withdraws the current future schedule, compensates booked passengers, and materializes the new plan immediately. Cutover in N days keeps flights before the cutover flying on the old times, bookings intact, with the new schedule starting after.

Cancelling a number removes all its future flights. Booked passengers are refunded plus a 20% compensation penalty, and your image takes a hit. Cancellation is a real cost, not an undo button, which is exactly how it should feel.

The flight-number mechanics and the operations board each have a full reference article on the wiki.