Tails With Histories
PlaneSim's used market lists registrations, not catalogue entries: finite lessor fleets, open records on every airframe, and estate sales that turn one airline's end into another's bargain.
Most sims sell aircraft out of a catalogue. Pick a type, click, receive an interchangeable unit. PlaneSim's market page lists tail numbers. Every aircraft in the game is a real, individual airframe with an age, an hours-and-cycles record, a cabin somebody configured, and a spot of tarmac where it currently parks. The plane you lease today has a history. The plane you return will fly again for someone else.
Open records
Every listing shows the whole airframe: registration, type, age, total hours and cycles, cabin layout, location and owner, plus the aircraft's condition, its time since heavy check, and an appraisal. Nothing about a listed tail is hidden and none of it costs anything to see. Every buyer reads the same records the seller does, on sale listings, lease listings, and estate lots alike.
That openness is deliberate, and it sits inside a game that fogs almost everything else. Demand is fogged; aircraft records are not. The consequence is that reading listings is the skill, not finding them. Condition and the heavy-check clock tell you what the tail will cost you after you sign; the appraisal tells you whether the ask is fair. A cheap airframe with a heavy check falling due next month is not a bargain, however good the price looks.
The shelf is finite
Most worlds spawn a handful of leasing companies at creation, each holding a finite fleet of real airframes of varying age and condition. Lessors are infrastructure: they never go bankrupt, they refurbish returned tails before re-listing them, and they slowly add young airframes while selling off old ones. The used market breathes, but it never vanishes, and it never mints aircraft on demand. When a specific tail comes off the shelf, it is gone until an operator sends it back.
Bankruptcy feeds the market
A liquidated airline's owned airframes do not vanish with it. In worlds with estate auctions enabled, each becomes a sealed-bid lot, open for a bidding window of 3 days by default, with a distressed reserve price well below appraisal. Any active airline can bid: one live bid per lot, rebidding replaces it, at or above the reserve, sealed until the hammer, and then the results go public. Cash is re-checked at the close, and a bidder winning several lots must be able to pay for all of them. Unsold lots fall back to a leasing company at the reserve price.
Other worlds skip the ceremony. A leasing company buys each estate tail at a seeded distress discount, 15% to 35% below appraisal by default, and immediately relists it cheap; on the market page those fire-sale bargains carry a warning badge.
Either way the aircraft survive and re-enter circulation, and bankruptcies are where the sharpest deals in the used market come from. The records stay open here too: every lot shows condition, hours since the last heavy check, and an appraisal, at no cost to any bidder. A lot going cheap is a judgement about what it will cost you after the hammer, not a gamble on what it is. Read the heavy-check clock first, then budget for crew and cabin work, because those are yours now too.
Nothing resets
Every hour you fly stays on the airframe forever. Sell a tail to a lessor at appraisal minus a dealer margin, or list it yourself for other airlines, and its record travels with it. Your beaten-up ex-fleet can come back as a rival's bargain. On the buying side, unsold asks drift down over time and the card flags anything priced below appraisal, so patience is a strategy on both ends of the counter.
This is what a used market looks like when every entry is a machine rather than a product: finite and legible, shaped by what every operator before you did with the metal. The listing rules are documented at wiki.theplanesim.com, and the estate mechanics at wiki.theplanesim.com.