Premium economy, the cabin this genre keeps skipping
Real airlines have spent two decades making premium economy their highest margin cabin. Airline sims still mostly stop at three classes. PlaneSim models W as a first class citizen: its own passengers, its own fares, its own share of the floor.
Premium economy is arguably the most commercially interesting thing to happen to airline cabins since deregulation. Introduced in its modern form in the early 1990s and now standard on most long haul fleets, it routinely earns the best revenue per square metre on the aircraft. Airlines keep adding rows of it, often at business class's expense.
Airline management games have mostly ignored it. The standard genre model is three classes: economy, business, first. The established incumbent in this space lets you allocate an aircraft's floor across those three and choose seat products within them, which is a genuinely good system, but the fourth cabin is simply not in its vocabulary. If you came to these games from the real industry, or from reading airline annual reports, the gap is hard to unsee.
PlaneSim books four classes: Y, W, C, F. Premium economy is not a seat variant or a fare bucket. It is a cabin.
What "a real cabin" means mechanically
Three things have to be true for a cabin class to matter in a simulation, and W meets all three here.
It occupies real floor. Cabin configuration in PlaneSim is geometric. Every seat consumes floor area; stretch the pitch and the frame holds fewer seats. A W cabin at 38 inch pitch takes space that could have been ten more economy seats or three more business seats, and the trade is computed from the geometry, not looked up from a preset. Comfort ratings then depend on distance flown, so the same W product reads differently on a two hour hop than on an eight hour sector.
It books its own passengers. Demand in PlaneSim is evaluated per cabin class by a cast of customer types with different weightings for fare, time, comfort, and service. The passengers considering your W fare are a distinct population from your Y passengers and your C passengers. W is not overflow from either neighbor. It competes upward and downward at the same time, which is exactly what makes it hard to price in reality.
It prices independently. Fares, service level, and airline image all apply per class, per market. You can run a generous W and an austere Y on the same airframe, and the market will respond to each on its own terms.
Why this changes network decisions
Once W is real, a set of real world dilemmas shows up in the game.
The cannibalization problem: a strong W product close to your C fare drains your own business cabin before it takes anything from a rival. Airlines manage this with fare fences; in PlaneSim you manage it with the gap you leave between the two products.
The density problem: on a leisure heavy route, W rows are often worth more as extra Y seats. On a long thin route with mixed traffic, a modest W section can carry the flight's margin. The same aircraft type ends up with different configurations on different missions, and the configuration screen is where that decision actually lives.
The fleet problem: reconfiguration is per airframe, so a mixed fleet accumulates mixed cabins over time. Whether to standardize is a genuine cost and scheduling question, not cosmetics.
None of these dilemmas can exist in a three class model. That is the argument for building the fourth cabin properly, and it is why we gave W top billing on the front page rather than listing it as a feature footnote.
The cabin system, seat geometry, and per class demand weighting are documented in the wiki, written from the engine's code: wiki.theplanesim.com. The live world runs at play.theplanesim.com if you would rather test the cannibalization problem yourself.