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Freighter Aircraft Guide

Every cargo aircraft in Headwinds compared: payload, range, lease cost and fuel burn. Build a profitable cargo network alongside your passenger airline.

Cargo is a different business with different rules. Freighters fly payload, not passengers: no catering, no loyalty points, no reputation dance — just tonnes, lanes, and yield. A well-built cargo network is steady, high-margin income that keeps earning even when passenger demand wobbles.

Because these aircraft carry no seats, the comparison metric changes: what matters is payload tonnes against trip cost over the lanes you actually fly. Small feeders move parcels into your hub; big intercontinental freighters move serious tonnage between major economies.

How to choose

Start small. A regional freighter on a short, proven lane teaches you cargo pricing at minimal risk. Converted passenger jets (BCF/P2F types) are the mid-market value play — cheap to lease, decent payload. Purpose-built giants like the 747F only pay off on dense long-haul trade lanes with tonnage to fill them, but when they work, nothing else comes close.

All 23 aircraft at a glance

Figures are the game's actual values. Fuel cost assumes the base fuel price of $1.20/litre — the live market price in your save drifts between roughly half and nearly double that, which is why fuel hedging matters.

The one business rivals can't undercut

Everything painful about multiplayer happens in the passenger demand split. Two airlines meet on a city pair, and the model divides travellers between them on fares, frequency, quality and reputation — which means a rival with a deeper treasury can make a market you built unprofitable simply by deciding to. Cargo doesn't work like that. Freighters fly payload: tonnes, lanes and yield, with no fare war to lose and no loyalty programme to out-spend.

That makes a cargo network the most reliable income in a Headwinds world, and its value is highest at exactly the moment your passenger business is under attack. An airline funding a frequency fight out of steady cargo revenue can outlast a rival funding the same fight out of the market they are fighting for. Players who build cargo early rarely lose the wars they choose.

Cash for the auctions

In worlds created with gate scarcity enabled, the way you grow at a desirable airport is by winning gates at sealed-bid auction. Bidding opens at week 40 and settles at the year tick; the highest bids win at their bid price, ties broken at random. There is no second chance until the following year, and the airline that turns up with more cash simply gets the slots.

Cargo revenue is unusually well suited to funding that. It is steady, it is uncorrelated with whatever your passenger rivals are doing to your yields, and it doesn't require you to signal anything about your intentions in the months beforehand. A carrier quietly running freighters through the year and bidding hard in week 40 is a much harder opponent than one whose war chest depends on the routes being contested.

Gates remain use-it-or-lose-it — 24 idle weeks forfeits them and locks you out for another 24. Cargo services count. A freighter rotation is a legitimate way to keep a claim alive at an airport your passenger network hasn't reached yet.

Freighters ride your passenger certification

This is the detail that decides most cargo fleet choices in Headwinds, and it is easy to miss. Jet bases — the hangars that cut what a check or a breakdown costs and how long the airframe is stuck — are certified by aircraft family, and a freighter is covered by its passenger family's certification. If your maintenance network already covers the 767, a 767 freighter arrives fully supported on day one. If you buy into a family your airline has no other reason to touch, you are funding a whole new certification, or flying uncovered.

So the right cargo aircraft is very often the freighter variant of something you already operate, even when a different type looks marginally better in the tonne-kilometre column below. The maintenance saving is real money every week; the efficiency gap usually isn't. Where you have no relevant family at all, pick the one whose passenger side you can imagine wanting later, and get two uses out of the certification.

Reading a cargo network from outside is hard

Rival profiles show every player's route map, hubs, fleet by type and week-by-week moves. Your passenger expansion is therefore visible and legible — a widebody order announces a long-haul plan months before the aircraft arrives. Cargo is far more ambiguous. A freighter can serve half a dozen lanes across a region, and what a rival sees is capacity without an obvious target.

That ambiguity is worth something. Building cargo doesn't provoke pre-emptive defensive moves the way a passenger build-up does, and a cargo-funded airline's real strength is systematically underestimated in the standings, which rank by market cap rather than by resilience. If you want to grow without inviting company, this is the quiet way to do it.

Where the risk actually sits

Two cautions. First, big intercontinental freighters carry the same problem as big passenger jets: mechanical failures cost a share of the airframe's purchase price, scaled by an age curve reaching roughly triple at twenty years and five and a half at thirty, and a percentage of a very expensive aircraft is a very expensive week. Older freighters are the classic value play and the classic way to get hurt — base them, or keep a same-type standby at the hub, because reserve cover only works type-for-type.

Second, cargo is steady, not free. Lanes still need real tonnage at both ends, and a freighter flying half-empty loses money as reliably as any passenger aircraft. Small feeders moving parcels into your hub are the low-risk entry; scale up only once a lane has proven itself. The route economics guide covers the underlying maths, and fleet planning covers when a cargo arm is worth starting at all.

Type-by-type notes