Load Factor 0.15.0

NEW

Route and flight reports. Pick any completed flight and see passengers and revenue by cabin, local versus connecting traffic, fuel, crew, maintenance, airport fees, distribution, and what the flight actually contributed. Every route now keeps 4, 12 and 48 week history for flights, seats, passengers, load factor, fares, costs and on-time.

UI scaling, 80% to 200%, in Settings > Display. If you play on a large or high resolution screen the interface is no longer tiny.

Seven more aircraft, including the Cessna 402C and Tecnam P2012 Traveller. The catalogue now runs from piston twins up to the A380.

DEMAND MODEL

The estimator has been substantially reworked after a player stress-tested the New York airports and found it inventing traffic that could not exist.

- It now knows about roads. Demand between two airports accounts for how far it is to drive between them, so JFK to LaGuardia is no longer a market. Islands, fjords and anywhere the road goes the long way round keep their flying. - A winding road counts for more than its length, because a mountain road is slower than a motorway. - Missing data is now treated as information. European routes below the reporting threshold are held small instead of being invented. - Estimates for regions without published route data were about 6.5x too low. That covered most of Asia, Africa, South America, Russia, Canada and Australia. - Norwegian domestic routes were missing from the world entirely. Restored, so northern Norway is a real network again.

CHANGED

Certification programmes are much shorter. Average two weeks, five at most, down from roughly eight and sixteen. Difficulty should come from what a certification demands, not from waiting.

ETOPS is now based on how remote a route actually is rather than raw distance, so transcontinental flights that are never far from an airfield no longer need it.

FIXED

Direct composition is now a setting under Display, for the alt-tab ghost windows some players saw in fullscreen.

Route cards show the real haul category instead of the frequency obligation flag.

KNOWN

Very long haul markets, above about 6,000 km, are still under-estimated. Next on the list.