Home › Aircraft › Turboprop Aircraft Guide

Turboprop Aircraft Guide

All turboprops in Headwinds compared: seats, range, lease cost, fuel burn, and per-seat economics. The cheapest way to fly short, thin routes.

Turboprops are the most misunderstood aircraft in Headwinds. New players skip them because they look slow and small; experienced players quietly build entire profitable sub-networks on them. Below roughly 800 kilometres, nothing else in the game touches their trip costs — the fuel table below makes the point better than any argument.

Their weekly leases are the lowest in the game, which also makes them the lowest-risk way to experiment. A failed turboprop route costs you pocket change; a failed widebody route can cost you the company.

How to choose

The ATR 72 and Q400 are the modern workhorses — the ATR cheaper to run, the Q400 faster and better over longer regional sectors. Smaller 19–40 seat types unlock genuinely tiny markets (island hops, mountain fields, remote communities) that no jet can serve economically. Range is rarely the constraint; matching seats to a thin market is the whole art.

All 32 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 markets nobody comes to take

Every guide to multiplayer airline strategy eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable observation: the routes you are proudest of are the routes most likely to be attacked. High loads at high fares are visible in the standings, and human players hunt exactly the way you do. Turboprop markets are the striking exception. They are small, unglamorous, and beneath the notice of a player building a widebody network — which means the demand split that governs contested routes frequently never happens to them at all.

An uncontested route earns its full yield indefinitely. That is the quiet case for this category in Headwinds, and it is much stronger than it looks on a spreadsheet: a modest margin you keep for an entire world beats a fat margin you defend for eight weeks and then split with somebody who arrived with newer aircraft and a bigger treasury.

Presence as a resource

In worlds created with gate scarcity enabled, gates are use-it-or-lose-it. Stop flying to an airport for 24 consecutive weeks and your gates there return to the pool — and you are locked out of leasing at that airport for a further 24 weeks. Half a game year, unable to re-enter a market you had already paid to be in, while rivals fly it.

Turboprops are the cheapest aircraft in the game to keep a claim alive with. Their weekly leases are the lowest on the map, which makes a token schedule into a genuinely inexpensive way to stay resident at an airport you intend to grow into, to hold a field you won in a sealed-bid auction before your jets are ready for it, or to remain in a region you have temporarily retreated from. Players who think of gates as territory rather than as a line item end worlds holding ground that other airlines are barred from entering.

The same low lease makes turboprops the lowest-risk way to probe a contested region. A failed turboprop route costs pocket change and tells you what the local demand actually is. A failed widebody route can cost you the company.

Where they can't help you

Be equally clear about the limit. A turboprop cannot defend a trunk. The moment a rival puts a jet into a market you serve with props, the split model turns against you on frequency-adjusted comfort and journey time, and there is no fare low enough to fix that without losing money on every seat. Turboprops win markets that jets can't profitably enter; they lose markets that jets want.

So read the map honestly. If a route is thin enough and short enough that nobody with a narrow-body will ever bother, it is yours for the whole world. If it sits one demand tier below a market a growing rival will eventually need, treat your prop service as a placeholder that earns while you build the case for upgauging — not as a position you intend to hold under pressure.

Cheap to run, cheap to break

Mechanical failures in Headwinds cost money as well as downtime, and the repair bill is a share of the airframe's purchase price scaled by an age curve that reaches roughly three times the base rate at twenty years and five and a half at thirty. Because turboprops are the least expensive aircraft in the game to buy, they are also the least expensive to have go wrong: the same percentage of a much smaller number. A category that looks unexciting in the efficiency table turns out to carry the mildest downside risk in the game.

They are still worth basing. A jet base cuts what a check or a breakdown costs and how long the aircraft is stuck, and it is certified by aircraft family — so a network built on ATRs, or on Dash 8s, is covered by a single certification, while a mixed bag of 19-to-70-seaters from four manufacturers is covered by none of them. A line station consumes one gate, which at the uncongested spoke airports turboprops live at is an easy price to pay.

Feeding somebody else's long-haul

Player-founded alliances hold up to eight members and pay interline revenue on itineraries that cross member networks, plus a demand boost on routes a partner also flies. A turboprop network reaching the small fields nobody else serves is unusually valuable inside an alliance, because it produces connecting traffic that no partner could economically produce themselves — and it produces it without competing for a single one of their markets.

That is a real negotiating position. An airline flying twelve thin sectors into a hub where an ally operates widebodies is contributing revenue to their trunk routes every week, and is worth keeping happy. If you intend to build a small-aircraft network, build it toward an alliance partner rather than in isolation — see rivals & alliances for how those arrangements work, and route economics for the pricing underneath them.

Type-by-type notes