Your First Thirty Days

Every founder gets the same capital and the same empty fleet. A field guide to the founding form, the first lease, the first rotation, and the mistakes that separate airlines a month in.

PlaneSim hands every founder the same deal: the world's posted starting capital, by default $30,000,000, an empty fleet, and no routes. Capital is displayed on the founding form rather than chosen, identical for every player in the world, arriving as founding share capital. What separates airlines a month later is not the endowment. It is the first three or four decisions, most of which are made before the first flight ever boards.

The decision that outlives every other

The founding form asks for little: an airline code of 2 to 3 characters starting with a letter, an optional trading name, and a home airport. The last field deserves most of your attention, because your home airport's country becomes your airline's nationality, and nationality drives traffic rights for the life of the company. Domestic routes are only yours inside your home country. Flying between two foreign countries is generally forbidden unless treaties allow it. There is no separate nationality picker and nothing to get wrong mechanically; strategically, there is plenty.

You are not handed a dossier on the competition. Prospective founders get an aggregate world briefing plus a founding shortlist of airports with strong demand and few incumbents, showing each airport's country, how many airlines are based there, and its weekly departures. Exact passenger numbers are deliberately hidden. Demand in this game is judged by character, never read off a chart, and that discipline starts before you even own an airline. Favor a home with real demand, spare slot capacity, and ideally no night curfew.

Week one: metal and a market

The dashboard's opening checklist is three items: get an aircraft, create a flight number, fly. Most startups lease, because a lease takes a deposit up front and bills rent weekly instead of consuming capital in one purchase. In worlds with leasing companies every listing is a specific airframe, an exact tail with its own age, hours and history, so read what you are signing for.

Before scheduling anything, run the pair through Route Evaluation. It shows airport facts for both ends, runway length, size class, slot fullness and curfews, and gives a traffic-rights verdict as an explicit pass or fail. If the verdict is red, no schedule will ever save; pick another pair. What it will not show is passenger counts. The market's type, season and lean are described, and sizing it is your job.

Building the rotation

The schedule wizard opens as a single one-way leg; the Add return button appends the mirrored return under its own number, auto-suggested as outbound plus one, and the pair is validated together as one rotation. Times are entered in UTC with local times previewed under each leg. Leave fares blank and the flight tracks the engine's auto price, a reasonable opening position while you learn the market.

Three traps take out more first schedules than everything else combined:

• The rotation must pass through the airport where your aircraft is parked. Start the loop from where the tail actually sits, not from your home base by reflex.
• Leave real ground time. Every tail needs qualifying maintenance stops, by default 12 hours per week in stops of at least 2 hours (your world may differ).
• Watch the curfew chips. A perfectly timed departure can still arrive inside someone's night closure.

A live checklist validates the plan as you type. With a tail assigned, all seven scheduling gates run; a number saved to the pool is checked only for traffic rights and the departure curfew, with range, runway, slots, rotation and the maintenance window deferred until assignment. Do not mistake a pool save for a validated plan.

The verdict takes weeks, not days

Save, and the flights materialize immediately; the wizard tells you how many weekly departures you just committed to. Then comes the part that punishes impatience. Bookings build over the days before each departure, so an empty first flight is normal, not a verdict. New players cancel viable routes on day two because the cabin was empty on day one.

The dashboard is where the real verdict arrives. Today's flight board lists every departure with its load and status. Once two closed weeks are behind you, the two trend charts appear: cash at each weekly closing, and network load factor by week. Those are the vital signs, solvency and how full the planes are, and thirty days in they are the only scoreboard that matters. Alongside them, the Upcoming Events panel previews the next 14 days of scheduled debits, lease rent and loan payments included, so no outflow ambushes an airline that reads its own dashboard.

The full walkthroughs live on the wiki, starting with Founding an airline, and the worlds themselves are at play.theplanesim.com. The capital is the same for everyone. The first thirty days are not.