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Narrow-Body Aircraft Guide

Every narrow-body jet in Headwinds compared: seats, range, lease cost, fuel burn, and per-seat economics. Find the right single-aisle workhorse for your airline.

Narrow-body jets are the backbone of almost every successful Headwinds airline. They cover the busiest segment of the route map — short and medium-haul city pairs with strong, repeatable demand — and they do it with economics that widebodies simply cannot match on those stage lengths. If your airline only ever mastered one aircraft category, it should be this one.

The core trade-off inside the category is capacity versus cost. Smaller types like the A318 or 737-700 are cheap to lease and easy to fill, which makes them forgiving while you learn a market. Larger types like the A321neo or 737 MAX 10 carry far more passengers for only modestly higher trip cost — brilliant on proven routes, punishing on speculative ones. The table and per-type notes below use each aircraft's actual in-game numbers, including fuel cost per seat-kilometre, the single best measure of how cheaply a jet moves one passenger one kilometre.

How to choose

Match seats to demand first, then range to mission, and only then look at price. A jet that is 30% too big for its route flies half-empty and loses money regardless of how efficient it is on paper. New-generation types (neo, MAX, A220, E2) burn noticeably less fuel per seat than the classics they replaced, but lease for more — they reward busy networks that keep them in the air. Older classics are the value play for cash-strapped early airlines: higher burn, far lower weekly lease.

All 44 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.

Single-aisles when the rival is a person

Everything below this section is arithmetic: seats, range, burn, lease. It is the same arithmetic in every airline game ever built. What changes in Headwinds is what the arithmetic is for — because the seat you add is a seat somebody else now has to respond to, and the response arrives within a game week or two.

The single most important property of the narrow-body fleet in multiplayer is that it is divisible. Two A320s give you fourteen weekly departures on a contested pair; one widebody with the same seat count gives you seven. When a rival moves into your market, the demand model splits passengers on fares, frequency, quality and reputation — and frequency is the only one of those four you can escalate without also destroying your own yield. A fare war against a human is a war of attrition that the deeper treasury wins. A frequency war is a war your fleet composition can win outright, and narrow-bodies are how you fight it.

Seats per gate, not seats per dollar

In worlds created with gate scarcity switched on, every airport has a hard capacity — 25, 100, 250 or 500 gates by size — no airline may hold more than 60% of it, and once an airport passes 90% occupancy everybody flying there pays a 20% congestion surcharge on their leases. New gates only enter the world through sealed-bid auctions that open in week 40 and settle at the year tick, or by buying them from another player who is willing to sell.

That turns a gate into a fixed, contested asset that costs the same whatever you park on it, and it quietly rewrites the table below. The efficiency column tells you cents per seat-kilometre; in a congested world you also want to read the seats column as seats per gate. This is where the top of the narrow-body range earns its lease premium: an A321neo or a 737 MAX 10 is not merely a bigger A320 with slightly better unit costs, it is roughly 40% more capacity through the same finite slot. At an airport where you physically cannot acquire another gate until next year's auction, upgauging is the only growth you have left.

Practical read: in an uncongested world, size the aircraft to the route. In a scarcity world approaching capacity, size the aircraft to the gate — and treat the smallest types on this page as things you fly out of spoke airports, not into full ones.

Commonality stopped being a style preference

Solo players are told to limit fleet types as a soft discipline — easier crewing, tidier planning. Headwinds gives that advice teeth in two places.

The first is your maintenance network. Jet bases are hangars you build at airports where you already hold gates, and each one is certified for specific aircraft families, not for your fleet in general. A base cuts what a check or a breakdown costs you and how long the airframe is stuck. Every extra family in your fleet is either another certification to fund or another family your network simply doesn't cover — and a line-station base consumes a gate, a heavy base three, so the coverage competes directly with your flying.

The second is reserve cover. A reserve aircraft stands by at one of your hubs and steps in when a tail in your fleet is grounded or in a check, but only for an identical type. Twelve A320s can be protected by one standby A320 for a readiness premium and a parking fee. Twelve aircraft spread over five families cannot be protected at all without five standbys, which no early airline can afford. Narrow-body operations are the one part of the fleet big enough for that maths to work in your favour — which is exactly why the discipline matters most here.

The classics are a different bet here

The value play on this page is real: a 737-300 or an MD-80 leases for a fraction of its modern equivalent and will happily earn its keep on a proven route. But mechanical failures in Headwinds cost money as well as downtime, and the repair bill scales with the airframe's age — roughly three times the base rate at twenty years and five and a half times at thirty, with genuinely elderly aircraft occasionally written off outright.

In a solo save that's an annoyance you recover from at your own pace. In a live world it is a grounding that happens while a rival is mid-incursion into your best market, and the world clock does not pause while you sort it out. Fly the classics, but fly them where a lost week is survivable, and keep the fleet dense enough that a reserve can cover them.

Your fleet is public

Open any rival's profile and you see their network, their hubs, their fleet broken out by type, and their moves week by week — every lease, every order, every route opened or closed. They can see the same about you. A steady accumulation of 180-seaters is a legible statement of intent: it says you are going after dense short-haul, and a player who reads it can be waiting in the market you were about to enter.

You can use that. Sequence is information. Ordering capacity you don't yet have routes for invites a pre-emptive move; opening routes first and upgauging into proven demand keeps your plans quiet until they are already working. When you do want to be read, a visible narrow-body build-up at a contested hub is a cheap way to tell a rival that contesting it will be expensive — a message that occasionally saves you the fare war entirely. See rivals & alliances for the negotiations that follow, and fleet planning for sequencing the fleet itself.

Type-by-type notes