Start here

Run your own airline

Not fly the aeroplane. Run the airline: decide which routes are worth opening, find the aircraft to fly them, price four cabins against rivals who are pricing against you, and answer for the result in a ledger. PlaneSim is a free browser game where you do exactly that, in a world that keeps running whether or not you are watching.

What you actually do

• Found a carrier. Pick a home base, take your starting capital, and register an airline. The map is real: thousands of genuine airports, real distances, real demand between them.
• Get aircraft. Lease, buy new with a delivery wait, or buy used from a market where every airframe has a history and an age that follows it.
• Build a schedule. Not a route list: a schedule, with turnaround times, night curfews, airport slots held in a ledger, and aircraft that have to be somewhere before they can be somewhere else.
• Fill the seats. Passengers choose between every option on the market, weighing fare, journey time, connections, timing, comfort and your airline's reputation, separately for each cabin class.
• Answer to the ledger. Every cent is an entry. Fuel, leases, wages, landing fees, interest. Airlines here go bankrupt properly, and their aircraft go back on the market.

Do I need to download anything?

No. It runs in a browser, on a laptop or a phone. There is nothing to install and no launcher.

Is it free?

Yes, free during beta. Paid game time is planned eventually, and the rule that will hold when it arrives is that nothing purchasable will ever confer competitive advantage. No ads, and no way to buy your way past someone who out-planned you.

What happens while I am offline?

The world keeps running. Your aircraft fly the schedule you gave them, your rivals keep opening routes and cutting fares, and the market moves. This is the whole point of a persistent world, and it is also the commitment: a schedule you left broken stays broken until you fix it.

Am I playing against real people?

Both. Human players share every world with AI carriers running five different business models, from regional operators to legacy network carriers. The AI plays by your rules exactly: same commands, same loans, same leases, same bankruptcy process. It cannot see anything you cannot see. That means a world is never empty, and never unfair.

What happens when a world ends?

Worlds run posted seasons, printed on the world tile from the first day. When one closes it is sealed and published permanently at the archive: final standings, every airline, every carrier's record. Your season outlives the server it ran on.

How hard is it?

Honestly: this is the deep end of the genre. It is a simulation, not an idle game, and the first hour asks you to think about aircraft range and turnaround time. What we can offer instead of a gentle curve is a real explanation of every system, in the wiki, written from the engine's own code. If you want something lighter, our guide to the genre says plainly which games are lighter and better suited.

Start

Worlds are open now at play.theplanesim.com. Reading the first few wiki articles before you found an airline will save you a fortnight of learning the expensive way.