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Wide-Body Aircraft Guide

All wide-body jets in Headwinds compared: seats, range, lease cost, fuel burn, and per-seat economics. Pick the right twin-aisle for long-haul expansion.

Widebodies are how a Headwinds airline goes intercontinental — and how plenty of them go bankrupt. A twin-aisle jet carries two to three times the passengers of a narrow-body, costs several times as much to lease, and burns fuel accordingly. On a dense long-haul trunk route it prints money; on a thin route it is the fastest way to destroy a healthy balance sheet.

Fill rate is everything at this scale. A 300-seat jet at 85% load is a triumph; the same jet at 45% is a weekly six-figure loss. Before leasing any aircraft on this page, be confident the city pair can actually fill it — big populations at both ends, ideally with hub feed behind one of them.

How to choose

Modern twins (787, A350, 777) dominate the efficiency table and should be your default for new long-haul flying. Older types — A340s, early 777s, the 767 family — lease for dramatically less and remain sensible on routes you have already proven, or as a bridge while you build cash. Watch range carefully: ultra-long-range variants carry a lease premium you only earn back on routes that actually need it.

All 30 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 aircraft that announces itself

A twin-aisle is the least private decision an airline can make. Rival profiles in Headwinds list every player's fleet by type and their moves week by week, and new-build widebodies arrive on a delivery lead time — so the order is visible long before the aircraft is. By the time your 787 lands, every player in the world who was paying attention has had months to work out which long-haul market you must be about to open, and to decide whether to be there first.

That single fact reorganises widebody strategy in multiplayer. In a solo save the question is whether the route can fill the jet. Here the question is whether the route can fill the jet after somebody else has had a season's warning. The answer is much more often yes when the demand is genuinely enormous, when you already control the feed at one end, or when you take delivery into a market you are already flying rather than one you are announcing.

Growth when the airport is full

In gate-scarcity worlds, airports have a fixed number of gates — 25, 100, 250 or 500 by size — with a 60% ceiling on any one airline and an 80% ceiling on any one alliance. Above 90% occupancy everyone pays a 20% congestion surcharge. Fresh gates appear only through sealed-bid auctions opening in week 40, or from another player willing to sell you theirs.

Those constraints bite hardest at exactly the airports worth having, and they make widebodies the answer to a question narrow-bodies cannot answer: how do you keep growing at an airport that has stopped issuing gates? One gate carrying a 300-seat twin does the work of two carrying 150-seaters, and it does it without entering an auction against players who want the same slots. At a capped mega-hub, upgauge is not a preference — it is the only remaining growth vector, and the airlines that understood that a year earlier are the ones holding the trunk routes when the world matures.

The same logic runs in reverse on thin routes. A widebody at 45% load is a weekly six-figure loss whatever the gate situation, and in a contested market a rival only has to take a third of your traffic to push you there. Widebodies punish optimism faster than any other category in the game.

Feed is the whole problem

Filling a twin-aisle from local demand alone works on a handful of city pairs per world. Everywhere else you are filling it with connections, and in Headwinds connections come from two places: your own network, and your alliance.

Player-founded alliances hold up to eight members, charge a weekly fee, and give members a demand boost where a partner also flies plus interline revenue on itineraries that cross member networks. For a widebody operator that is not a perk, it is the business model. An ally hubbed on another continent turns your long-haul trunk into the spine of two networks; an ally at the airport next door mostly splits the demand you were already serving. Choose the alliance your widebodies need, not the one with the best standings — and do it before the aircraft arrives, because an alliance negotiated after you are committed is negotiated from weakness.

A grounded twin is a strategic event

Mechanical failures cost real money in Headwinds, and the bill is a percentage of the airframe's purchase price scaled by an age curve — around three times the base rate at twenty years, five and a half at thirty. On a widebody, a percentage of purchase price is a large number, and the downtime lands on the route carrying the largest share of your weekly revenue.

Two defences, both of which have to be planned before you need them. A jet base certified for the aircraft's family cuts both the cost and the time, but a heavy base consumes three gates at the airport it sits at — real flying capacity, and a genuine decision at a congested field. A reserve covers a grounded tail only if it is the same type standing by at the same hub, which means a two-widebody airline is effectively uninsurable and a six-widebody fleet in one family is not. Older twins — the A340s, the early 777s, the 767 family — lease for dramatically less and remain sensible on proven routes, but they sit at the wrong end of that age curve. Fly them where you have cover.

Don't fight a fare war up here

When two airlines meet on a long-haul pair, the demand model splits the traffic on fares, frequency, quality and reputation. Every one of those levers is more expensive on a widebody. Adding frequency means committing another very large aircraft; cutting fares means discounting three hundred seats instead of a hundred and fifty; the losing side burns cash at a rate that can end a mid-sized airline inside a game year.

Which is why long-haul is where Headwinds diplomacy is most worth your time. Quiet market carve-ups, capacity understandings and interline deals between two players who both know what a contested trunk costs are common, and the game deliberately doesn't enforce any of them. If you intend to hold a long-haul market for the rest of a world, the message you send before you deploy the aircraft is worth more than the aircraft. The route economics guide covers how a contested pair actually divides; hub strategy covers building the feed that makes your side of the split defensible.

Type-by-type notes