Aircraft: Choosing a Fleet Against Real Rivals

Headwinds gives you 163 real aircraft, from 19-seat turboprops to double-deckers and Concorde, each with its own seats, range, lease, purchase price, fuel burn and maintenance bill. The category guides below list every one of them with its actual in-game numbers. This page is about the part the numbers don't tell you: how fleet decisions change when the other airlines in your world are people who can see what you bought and respond to it.

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Four things multiplayer changes about fleet choice

The economics underneath every aircraft in Headwinds are the same rigorous simulation as the solo game. What the shared map adds is a set of constraints that don't exist when you're the only airline that matters.

1. A gate is a fixed asset, so seats per gate is a real metric

Worlds can be created with gate scarcity enabled. In those worlds every airport has a hard capacity by size — 25, 100, 250 or 500 gates — no airline may hold more than 60% of one, no alliance's members more than 80% between them, and once an airport passes 90% occupancy every carrier there pays a 20% surcharge on its gate leases. New gates enter the world only through sealed-bid auctions that open at week 40 and settle at the year tick, or by buying them from a player willing to sell.

A gate costs the same whatever you park at it. That makes the seats column below something you should sometimes read as capacity-per-slot rather than capacity-per-route: at a congested hub where you cannot acquire another gate this year, upgauging is the only growth available to you. It also makes small aircraft expensive in a way the efficiency table never shows — and pushes them, correctly, out to spoke airports where gates are plentiful.

2. Maintenance is a network, and it's certified by family

Jet bases are hangars you build at airports where you already hold gates, and each is certified for specific aircraft families. A base cuts what a check or a breakdown costs and how long the airframe is stuck — and it consumes gates to exist, from one for a line station up to three for a heavy base. Every additional family in your fleet is either another certification to fund or another family your network doesn't cover.

Freighters ride their passenger family's certification, which quietly makes the freighter variant of something you already operate the cheapest cargo aircraft you can buy, whatever the tonne-kilometre column says.

3. Breakdowns cost money, and age is the multiplier

A mechanical failure in Headwinds isn't only downtime — there's a repair bill, set as a share of the airframe's purchase price and scaled by an age curve that reaches roughly three times the base rate at twenty years and five and a half at thirty. Genuinely elderly aircraft are occasionally written off outright.

The classic-jet value play still works; it just carries a risk profile it doesn't have in solo play, because the grounding lands while a rival is mid-move and the world clock doesn't pause for you. The counterweight is reserve cover — a standby aircraft at one of your hubs that steps in for a grounded or in-check tail, but only for an identical type. Fleet density is what makes that affordable, which is the mechanical reason commonality matters more here than it ever did solo.

4. Your fleet is public information

Every rival's profile shows their route network, hubs, fleet broken out by type, and their moves week by week — leases, orders, routes opened and closed. Yours shows the same to them. New-build aircraft arrive on a delivery lead time, so an order announces your intentions well before the aircraft can act on them.

Sequence is therefore information. Ordering capacity before you have routes for it invites a pre-emptive move into the market you were about to enter; opening routes first and upgauging into proven demand keeps your plan quiet until it's already working. Occasionally you want to be read — a visible build-up at a contested hub can be cheaper than the fare war it prevents.

Where to go next

If you're picking your first aircraft, start with how to play and the narrow-body guide. If you're deciding how many types to run and whether to lease or buy, fleet planning covers the sequencing. For the demand model that decides whether an aircraft fills up at all — and how it splits when a rival shows up — see route economics and rivals & alliances.