Heavy Checks and Honest Downtime

Maintenance in PlaneSim is one policy slider, a condition number per tail, and a heavy-check clock that runs on flight hours. None of it pretends the hangar time away.

PlaneSim does not make you book shop visits. Maintenance is policy: you set one airline-wide spend level, and the engine handles wear, recovery, and hangar visits for every tail. Your job is to watch condition, budget for the bills, and schedule around the downtime. That last part is the one the game refuses to soften.

Condition, and what erodes it

Every aircraft carries a condition rating from 0 to 100. Flying wears it down, a little per flight hour plus a fixed amount per takeoff-and-landing cycle, and daily upkeep recovers some of it back at a rate set by your spend level.

Age adds a ceiling. An older airframe can never be restored to factory-fresh, and the ceiling drops a little each year, though it never falls below a floor. Old metal can still be reliable. It just cannot be perfect.

Condition bites in three places. Below the reliability threshold, 60 by default, every departure risks a technical cancellation, and the risk grows as condition keeps falling; a cancellation costs passenger compensation and hurts your image. Condition also feeds how passengers rate your product. And it sets what the airframe is worth on the day you sell it, which makes deferred maintenance partly a loan against your own balance sheet.

One slider

The Maintenance page has a single lever: spend level, 0.5× to 1.5× by default. Higher spend costs more per flight hour and recovers condition faster; lower spend saves cash while the fleet slowly deteriorates. Routine upkeep is billed daily, per aircraft, on the hours it actually flew. There is no per-tail micromanagement to do here, and that is the point. The decisions that matter are the level you set and the schedule you build around what follows.

The heavy check

Heavy checks fall due on flight hours, not the calendar: every 7,000 flight hours by default. The engine projects each tail's utilization, books a hangar window about two weeks ahead, and takes the aircraft out of service for five days by default. The visit restores a large chunk of condition, up to the age ceiling, and resets the flight-hour clock. The bill scales with the type's list price.

Then the honest part. Flights that overlap the hangar window are cancelled, with compensation, unless a reserve aircraft steps in and flies the rotation instead. Five days out of service is five days of flying you either covered or lost. There is no toggle that makes the downtime cosmetic.

Scheduling around the clock

The Maintenance page shows upcoming hangar windows and a flight-hour clock per tail, so checks announce themselves well before they bite. Roughly two weeks of notice is enough to thin a rotation, position a spare, or accept the cancellations with open eyes. How a reserve carries a rotation through a check, and what happens to passengers when the replacement is smaller, is covered in the wiki's reserves article at wiki.theplanesim.com.

The costs that arrive quietly

Fleet commonality is the big one. Your first three maintenance families are free by default; every family beyond that adds a 15% surcharge to all of your maintenance costs, not just the new type's. A varied fleet reads as flexibility on the network map and as overhead on the maintenance ledger.

Line maintenance is enforced, not advisory. Every aircraft's weekly rotation must include enough qualifying ground time, stops of at least 2 hours adding up to 12 hours per week by default, at any airport, and the scheduler holds you to it. A rotation packed too tight simply will not clear the gate.

Leased tails add one more line: a non-refundable maintenance reserve, billed per flight hour to the lessor on top of the rent.

Third-party maintenance contractors are not in the game yet. Everything above runs in-house, which means every one of these bills is yours and every hangar window lands on your own board. The board is at play.theplanesim.com.