Devlog

August 7, 2026

A career that outlives the world, and codeshares that both airlines agreed to

Two days of work across a twenty-eight item audit. Most of it was engine and economy — fuel hedging, crew costs by aircraft size, union grievances, freight seasons, hub connectivity, real load factors, and a fair bit more — and because that engine is shared, it is written up on the Tailwinds devlog. It all landed here too, and some of it moves your numbers noticeably. This entry covers what changed in the multiplayer game itself.

Your record now survives the world it was set in. A season ended, the standings were computed, and then they were thrown away — they existed only inside the transaction that wrote the final week. There was a column in the database waiting for a career since the day the game launched, and nothing had ever written to it.

• Every finished season is recorded against your account: the world, the airline you flew, where you finished, how many weeks you were in it, and your lifetime passengers carried.
• Badges are earned from that record — champion, podium, veteran, a million passengers, and phoenix for finishing a season you went bankrupt in. They are worked out from your history every time they are shown rather than stored, so the rules can improve without anybody’s past being rewritten.
• An airline that never went public is unranked, not last. Staying private is a decision, and recording it as “20th of 20” would misreport it. A bankrupt airline still gets its season on the record — you were there.
• Worlds that ended before this shipped are backfilled from their final standings. Lifetime passengers for those seasons read as unknown rather than zero, because the honest answer is that the figure is years stale.

Your career panel appears under the worlds screen once you have a finished season. Before that it shows nothing at all — a hall of fame full of zeroes is worse than none.

A codeshare is a deal now, not something you do to someone. Signing one against a human rival took a fee off you and paid you interline revenue computed from a real player’s network — while that player was never asked and never told. It was the only bilateral agreement in the game that was not, in fact, bilateral.

• You offer, they accept. Offers appear on both airlines’ Alliances tab. Accepting writes the agreement to both sides in one transaction — if either side’s engine refuses it, the whole thing is refused, because half a bilateral agreement is worse than none.
• Offering someone who has already offered you signs it immediately. Both of you plainly consented; there is no reason to make you wait.
• Cancelling ends both halves. Ending only your side would leave the other player paying a weekly fee for a partner who had stopped carrying their passengers.
• Unanswered offers expire after eight weeks — not just tidiness: a dead offer sitting between two airlines would have blocked them from ever offering again.

An airline that fails now leaves something behind for everyone else. Bankruptcy was a status change and a single news item. The fleet froze inside a save nobody would read again, the orderbook stopped existing, and the gates went back to the pool in silence — and only on gate-scarcity worlds, because that was the one branch anybody had written. A carrier could go under with forty aircraft and a dozen slots at a fortress hub and leave the world exactly as it found it.

• The fleet goes to the used market at a distressed price. An administrator sells into a market that knows it has to, and the listing names the airline that failed.
• The gates are listed as administrator’s sales on worlds where gates are scarce, priced off each airport’s own auction reserve — a Heathrow slot is not valued like a regional one.
• Nobody gets paid. The money leaves the world rather than being credited to a company that no longer exists. Every check that protects you as the buyer still applies.

A rival going under should be an opportunity for everyone still flying, and now it is.

The interest rate on your loans is no longer the client’s to choose. A modified client could ask for the 3% floor on a loan that should have cost 18%, and the server would write it down as asked — about $790,000 a year of interest that simply did not happen. Credit scoring now lives in the shared engine, computed from what your airline actually earned rather than from a forecast the server never had, and the server prices every loan itself.

Batched fleet actions are safe in multiplayer. Selling, retiring, scheduling checks or extending leases across a selection runs inside one write, with the number of aircraft capped so a huge list cannot hold row locks while everyone else waits. If one aircraft cannot be actioned it is skipped and reported rather than aborting the batch — seven of twelve checks scheduled before the money ran out is the honest outcome.

Come and complain about any of it on the Discord.

August 2, 2026

The map stays where you put it

Straight from the Discord: “when you zoom in and pass your mouse over a route, it resets your zoom.” It did, and it should not have.

• Hovering a line snapped you back out. Zoom into a corner of your network to read two lanes, brush a route with the cursor, and the map jumped straight back to a view of everything you fly.
• The weekly tick did it too. Time moving on re-drew the map, and the re-draw re-framed it — so any zoom you had set was gone. Focusing a route and panning away had the same problem: the next week yanked the camera back onto the focused route.
• Now the map only moves for a reason. It frames your network when the network actually changes — a route opened, a route closed, or a map filter narrowed what is on screen — and it flies to a route when you click it. Nothing else touches your zoom.
• Lines and tooltips are steadier as a side effect. The map was rebuilding every line on screen each time your cursor crossed one; it no longer does.

Clicking a route still frames it, and “Clear focus” still returns you to the whole picture.

July 31, 2026

The route map was reporting the wrong load factors

Straight from a player: “why in one screen does it say my loads are 100% and then in two others it says they aren’t?” A fair question, and the map was the screen that was wrong.

• Network was simulating your routes on its own. The map and the route list underneath it ran their own quick estimate instead of reading the same weekly forecast the rest of the game uses. That estimate handed you the entire demand pool on every city pair — as if the rival airlines flying against you weren’t there at all. It also ignored your fuel bill, your labour agreement, how hard your fleet is being worked, your on-time record and any live events.
• What that looked like. Contested trunk routes pinned at 100% with fat profits on the Network tab, while the Dashboard and Finance → By Route showed the truth — often ten to fifteen points lower, and sometimes a loss where the map showed a gain. In a world full of other players that gap is wider than it ever was in single-player, because every one of them is taking a share.
• Freight had the same problem, twice over. Cargo lanes on the map also missed the shared-lane demand pool, so two of your own freighters on one lane each looked like they had the whole market.
• Now they all agree. The map reads the same forecast as everything else, cell for cell — load factor, profit, tooltips and all. Routes you genuinely have to yourself and genuinely fill still say 100%.

If your loads look lower on the Network tab than they did yesterday, that is the honest number and it always was — the other screens have been showing it all along.

July 31, 2026

Old jets stop being free money

Every out-of-production airliner was being delivered brand new — zero hours, full service life, 1970s price — so a $4M Trident 3B returned about six times the capital of a 737 MAX. 92 classic types now arrive 6 to 16 years old and start on a steeper maintenance curve, 23 vintage frames priced off scrap values have gone up (most doubling), and the re-engined generations now deliver their real 13–14% fuel advantage instead of 4–5%, so new metal finally breaks even at a lower load factor than the classics beside it. Also fixed: the E-Jet runway figures had the E175 needing more runway than the heavier E190, and the 737-500 was seating as many as the longer -300.

If you fly classics, expect a higher lease bill and faster-climbing maintenance. Full detail in the Tailwinds devlog.

July 31, 2026

Brand awareness sells seats now, instead of quietly changing your fares

A player asked a good question: his margins were thin when he started, but months later brand-new routes were printing 37–70% margins at the reference price, and his revenue had climbed steadily for a year while he opened no routes and changed no prices. He was right that this made no sense — revenue cannot rise when neither your price nor your load factor moves. It was a bug, and it was one of the oldest in the engine.

Brand awareness, reputation, your loyalty programme and your alliance were being multiplied onto route revenue — after the aircraft was already full. They moved no passengers at all. A brand-new airline wasn’t reaching 45% of its market, as intended; it was selling every seat at 45% of its own ticket price. That is why your first routes lost money with full cabins, and why raising fares felt like the only way out. Worse, the payout was biggest on routes already at 100% load — exactly where a stronger brand cannot sell another seat.

All of it now works the way it reads:

• Your brand wins passengers, not fares. On a route you have to yourself, an airline nobody has heard of simply reaches less of the market — those travellers drive, connect elsewhere, or don’t go. On a contested route, they go to your rival. Either way you fly emptier aircraft at the price on the ticket, instead of full aircraft at a price you never set.
• Revenue ÷ passengers is now your actual fare. It wasn’t before. Per-cabin revenue didn’t add up to the route total either, and the yield figure on your Finance page had been drifting upward for months on routes nobody had repriced.
• What your brand is really worth is pricing power. Once your aircraft are full, a stronger brand doesn’t add passengers — it lets you hold a higher fare without emptying them. On a typical trunk route a well-known carrier can sustain around 1.6× the reference fare at a full aircraft where an unknown one tops out near 1.2×. If your routes are pinned at 100% load, that is the game telling you there is room in your prices.
• Multiplayer is symmetrical again. Rivals were being scored as established brands regardless of how new they were, so in a young world two week-one airlines each treated the other as famous. They now carry their real standing.

Expect your numbers to move. A mature, well-known airline will see revenue ease back a few percent — it had been collecting a fare premium it never charged. A younger or mid-sized one will see revenue and margins improve. Nothing about your operation changed; the aircraft were always this full.

July 31, 2026

Finance answers “why isn’t my company margin my route margin?”

Your Routes page might say 52% while the company runs at 28%, and until now nothing in the game joined those two numbers up. The Cost Bridge on the Finance › P&L page now walks the whole way down: route revenue, direct flying costs, the leases and maintenance on the aircraft that flew, and then — line by line — every cost no single route carries. Gates and slots, staff, HQ and insurance, marketing and loyalty, distribution and partner fees, financing and tax. Both margins are stated at the top, and the gap between them is itemised rather than implied.

Two things it makes visible for the first time: aircraft that flew nothing this week still owe their lease and base maintenance, and no route was absorbing it — parked tails now have their own line. And your marketing spend appears as what it is: a cost here, and the reason you can hold a higher fare on the routes above it.

July 31, 2026

Reserve aircraft stop pretending to be idle

A jet stationed at a hub as a reserve was still counted as idle everywhere — and still sat at the top of the route planner, where deploying it by accident quietly ended the standby cover you were paying for. Reserves now have their own 🛡 Reserve tab on the Fleet page, are out of every idle count (Fleet chips and stats, the dashboard alert, the Routes header) and get their own bucket in fleet utilisation. In the route, cargo and tag planners they are labelled with their base and sorted last, so the one-click Open Route button always reaches for a free aircraft first — you can still fly a reserve when you mean to, with a line telling you it comes off standby.

Full detail in the Tailwinds devlog.

July 29, 2026

Your share price finally tracks your airline

A player floated a quarter of his company, watched a rival buy in, and saw his share price fall 17.3% in a week — while profit, revenue and fleet were all climbing. He was right to be annoyed: that drop was arithmetic, not judgement. Selling new shares split the company instantly, but the valuation those shares were divided into was only allowed to move 8% a week, so the dilution landed in one tick and the money you raised took two months to show up. Three fixes, and they change how the market reads for everyone.

• Raising capital costs you the discount, and nothing else. The cash an offering brings in now joins your valuation at the same instant the new shares appear. Floating 25% of that same airline moves the price about 1% instead of 17%. The same goes for a secondary offering, and for buybacks in reverse — retiring stock no longer looks like a loss on the way out.
• See it before you commit. The Stocks tab now shows the offer price, the proceeds, how much investor money is actually available, and your share price after the offering settles — before you click. And you choose how much of the company to float, anywhere from 10% to 35%; it used to be a fixed quarter with no say in it.
• A price that can re-rate. Share prices move gradually on purpose — one good week shouldn’t double your company. But the weekly limit was flat, which meant an airline growing faster than the limit could never catch up to what it was worth; one carrier’s quoted price had drifted to a fraction of a percent of its real value over three years. The limit now stretches when the price is a long way from the business it represents, in either direction, so a genuine boom — or a genuine collapse — reprices in weeks rather than years. An ordinary week is unchanged.
• A private airline is now valued honestly. Before listing there is no market, so there was nothing real to quote — and your IPO was priced off that stale number, which is how you could sell a quarter of a very large airline for pocket money and hand a rival a bargain. Private airlines are now marked at what the business is worth, so you list at a fair price.
• Offerings the market can’t fully fund now say so. Investor capital in a world is finite. If there isn’t enough to take your whole offering, the market buys what it can and tells you how much it took, instead of a button that appeared to do nothing.

Expect prices to move in live worlds. Carriers whose quoted price had fallen behind their business will climb over the coming weeks until they catch up, and since the standings rank on value per share, positions will shift with them. Nothing about your operation changed — the scoreboard is just telling the truth now.

July 28, 2026

Maintenance moves to its own page, and jet bases arrive

Headwinds and Tailwinds share an engine, so this week’s maintenance overhaul lands in both. Maintenance is now its own page under Company, breakdowns carry a real repair bill that scales with airframe age, very old aircraft can be written off, and you can build jet bases — hangars certified for specific aircraft families that make checks and repairs cheaper and faster, and offset most of the outsourced MRO contract for the families they cover. Bases consume gates at their airport, so siting one at a contested field costs you flying capacity.

Full detail in the Tailwinds devlog.

July 27, 2026

Reserve aircraft — station a spare and let it cover your breakdowns

Straight from a community request: an idle aircraft can now be stationed as a reserve at one of your hubs or focus cities, and when a same-type aircraft at that base is grounded or goes into a C/D check, the reserve takes over its routes automatically — from the first lost week — and hands them back the week the original returns. In a shared world that downtime was your rivals’ gain; now it’s a fleet-planning decision.

• Fleet tab → any idle aircraft → Reserve Standby. Pick a base, see exactly what it could cover there and what standby costs per week, and hit Station.
• Identical type only. The reserve must match the broken aircraft’s type — a true like-for-like swap, and a real payoff for running a common fleet.
• Standby has a price. A readiness premium on line maintenance plus a hub parking fee scaled by aircraft size and airport tier — suspended while the reserve is out covering. Free insurance it is not.
• Honest coverage. Per-route, highest revenue first, capped by the reserve’s block hours; gaps are reported with the reason in toasts, the Weekly Debrief and a new Reserve Coverage card in Operations. The covering plane wears toward its own checks while it flies.

Works identically in solo Tailwinds. Strikes are not covered — that’s a crew problem, not an airframe problem.

July 27, 2026

The gate auction stops hiding — and you can’t bid for gates that don’t exist

Gate auctions are the one thing in a scarcity world you cannot come back to later. Bidding opens at week 40, resolves at the new year, and if you miss the window the gates are simply gone for a game year. Two things were making that easier to miss than it should have been.

• The bid quantity now matches the lots on offer. The quantity selector always offered ×1, ×2 and ×3 — even at a small airport where only two gates were going under the hammer. A three-gate bid there was quietly trimmed to two at resolution, which meant you had committed to a price for a number of gates you were never going to get. The selector now only offers what the auction can actually fill, and a bid for more than the lot count is refused up front with the real number in the message. Bids placed before this landed display against what they can win, so nothing shows you a phantom third gate.
• The Gate Market comes to you while an auction is running. It used to sit below your gate list, which on a large network meant scrolling past everything you already own to find the thing with a deadline on it. While any auction in the world is live, the Gate Market now floats to the top of the Airports tab instead.
• News items about gates are now doors. When an auction opens, the item in your News feed is clickable — it carries a Place a sealed bid prompt and takes you straight to the Gate Market, scrolling it into view and flashing it so you land on the auction rather than at the top of a tab. Gates won and gates sold link the same way.

Bids are still sealed, still capped at three gates per bid, and still resolve highest-first with ties settled by coin flip — and the per-airline ownership cap still applies on top, so a winning bid gets trimmed if it would take you over it. See the Wiki’s gate section for the full auction rules.

July 27, 2026

Also landing from the shared engine

Headwinds runs the same simulation as Tailwinds, and a batch of engine and interface work shipped to both games in the same run. The short version, with the full write-ups on the Tailwinds devlog:

• Hub congestion was measuring against the wrong gate. A gate holds 50 departures a week — the number the game enforces and the Airports tab quotes — but the congestion warning was measuring against roughly 16. Every hub you actually used read “Congested” at about a third of its real capacity, and pinned at the worst-case penalty. Thresholds now run 30 to 45 departures per gate depending on tier, the penalty ramps with how overloaded you really are, and buying a gate moves the meter immediately.
• The aircraft picker only offers aircraft that can fly the route. The dropdown used to list your whole passenger fleet, including aircraft the game was always going to refuse. It now shows only what's genuinely eligible, re-evaluates when you change airports, and explains the rule when nothing qualifies.
• Contested routes count your whole operation. If you worked a city pair with more than one aircraft, the Competition tab was only counting one of them — so a rival could look like they were burying you on a pair you were winning. Frequency and seats now add up across every aircraft on the pair, in both directions, with fares and quality blended by frequency. In Headwinds this also fixed what your human rivals look like to you.
• Filter the Routes page by airport, and a table view for freight. Scope the whole page — passenger, multi-stop and cargo together — to one airport, with one-click chips for your hubs. Cargo routes gain the sortable table the passenger list already had.

July 27, 2026

Capital markets: your share price is the scoreboard now

Read this one before you next open your airline, because your numbers are going to move. Valuations across every live world have been rebased, and most airlines will see their market cap drop by roughly half on the next tick. Nothing has gone wrong and you haven’t lost anything — the old valuation was simply wrong, in a way that made the stock market a money printer.

Here is what was broken. An airline’s value was built on its profit multiplied by up to 32, which meant every extra $100k a week of profit added something like $166M of market cap. One good route was worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Prices then climbed toward that number at a capped 20% a week — smoothly, predictably, for weeks on end. A stock that reliably returns 20% a week against a 3% round trip isn’t an investment, it’s a vending machine.

Airlines are now valued the way real airlines are: the lowest-multiple, most cyclical business there is, on a P/E of roughly 5 to 13, with the earnings component capped against actual revenue so no valuation can outrun the business underneath it. Prices move at up to 8% a week instead of 20%.

The market moves, not just your airline

Every world now has a market index: one shared sentiment number that lifts or depresses every airline’s valuation together, drifting through bull and bear phases, and levered to the fuel price. When fuel spikes, the whole sector re-rates down. A rising share price can now mean the market rose rather than that you did well — and a genuinely good quarter can be swamped by a bad market. Timing matters.

You’re ranked on value per share

This is the real change, and it is the reason for everything else. The world standings used to rank on market cap. Market cap measures how big you got, and that quietly made the game reward the wrong things: hoarding cash raised your score, and returning a single dollar to your shareholders lowered it. Every dividend, every buyback, was a self-inflicted wound on the leaderboard. No sane player would ever pay one.

Standings now rank on shareholder value per share — your share price, plus every dividend you have ever paid. It measures what you created for each unit of ownership rather than how much empire you accumulated. Growing a big, profitable airline is still the dominant way to win. What changed is that capital allocation is no longer free.

Your rank will not jump the day this lands: every airline is on the same share count at the moment of the change, so the new ordering starts out identical to the old one. It only begins to diverge as players start issuing and retiring shares.

Your company, on the Stocks tab

There’s a new Your company panel, and four decisions in it that didn’t exist before.

• Go public. New airlines are now incorporated private: no tradable shares, nobody on your register but you, and no place in the standings. From week 26, with a trading record behind you, you can list — selling 10–35% of the company to investors and putting the cash in your treasury. IPOs price at a discount, and the discount is smaller the longer and more profitably you have traded. Staying private is a legitimate way to play. It just isn’t a way to win.
• Share offerings. Raise more later, up to 15% of your shares a game year. The discount widens each time you go back to the market, and narrows if you have a record of returning capital — being good to your shareholders buys you cheaper money later.
• Buybacks. Retire stock from the float. Cash leaves, but the share count falls faster, so it lifts per-share value when your stock is cheap or your cash is sitting idle.
• Dividends. A standing policy, up to 60% of trailing-quarter profit, paid every 13 weeks. Only shares held outside your founder block get paid, so a dividend costs you in exact proportion to how much of yourself you have sold. Miss a quarter and it suspends automatically — publicly.

One more thing worth knowing: idle cash is now credited at a fraction of face value. The market does not reward a lazy balance sheet. Once you have run out of gates to take and aircraft to order, a pile of unspent cash actively drags on your valuation, and returning it beats sitting on it. That is precisely the point at which real airlines start paying dividends.

There is a real person on the other side of your trade

Trades used to be filled by nobody. Selling shares conjured cash into the world out of thin air, which is why late-game worlds turned into a glut of money. Every world now has a finite float pool of outside-investor cash and shares. Your buys pay into it, your sells draw out of it, and IPOs and offerings are funded from it. As it runs down, sellers get worse fills; if it empties, the equity window shuts and you cannot raise capital at all, because there is no money on the other side. It heals slowly. First mover to the market gets the cheap capital.

Trading is also properly frictional now. A large order moves the price against itself in proportion to how much of the free float it represents, so a big stake can no longer be accumulated at the marked price, and realized gains are taxed at 25%. Reading a rival’s numbers and backing your judgement still pays. It just isn’t free money any more.

If the re-rating looks wrong on your airline, or the new standings read oddly to you, say so in Discord. This is the largest change to how Headwinds is scored since launch and I would rather hear about it early.

July 27, 2026

A proper News tab — and the activity feed finally makes sense

A player put it bluntly on Discord: there wasn’t really a news feed, and the one that was there was redundant and often flooded with noise. Fair. It’s been rebuilt as a full News tab, and the old activity drawer is now just a headlines ticker that points at it.

• Aircraft counts are back. A twelve-frame order used to report as “ordered a 737-800” — the number vanished on its way out of the server. It now says twelve, and aircraft are named properly instead of by their internal code.
• Moves are grouped. A rival opening eight routes out of Denver is one line — “opened 8 routes from DEN” — that you can expand for the full list. Orders are summed by type, gates grouped by airport, and a week of buying into the same rival collapses into one tape line.
• No more join spam. Every airline in the world used to reappear as a “joined the world” item on every page, which in a busy world could push out everything that actually happened that week.
• The world economy is news now. Fuel spikes, recessions and regional demand shocks hit everyone in your world in the same week — and you can finally see when one starts and ends, instead of only spotting it in your own weekly debrief.
• More of the world reports in: used aircraft changing hands, airlines going under, and airlines climbing into or falling out of the top 5.
• A public share tape. Every share purchase and sale between airlines prints, with the resulting stake. If someone is building a position in you, you will see it.
• Three filters: big moves only, near my network (anything touching an airport you serve or a pair you fly), and hide my own moves.

News is kept for one game year. Nothing private is reported — cash, loans, budgets and route profit stay yours; the feed carries only what an observer at the airport could see anyway.

Thanks to Kat for the push. If something in the game reads as noise to you, say so in Discord — that’s how this one got fixed.

July 27, 2026

One world, one calendar

Players kept reporting that they and their rivals were seeing different dates in the same world, and they were right. This one is worth explaining, because it was doing more damage than a wrong number in the top bar.

A new airline was always created at Year 1, Week 1, no matter what the world clock said. Join a world sitting at Year 3, Week 12 and you didn’t join it in the spring of year three — you started your own private January and ran it alongside everyone else’s calendar for the rest of the game. Because the simulation reads the season off your week, that wasn’t cosmetic: you were flying a different season to your rivals in the same market, catching the summer peak on transatlantic routes while the carrier competing with you was in the depths of February. Anything scheduled by date — aircraft deliveries, fuel hedges, the quarterly rhythm — was keyed to your calendar rather than the world’s.

• You now join in the world’s here-and-now. A late joiner lands on the current world date, in the current season, on the same week as everyone else.
• Existing worlds have been corrected. Airlines already running on a private calendar were rebased onto the world clock, with anything scheduled ahead of them shifted to match, so nothing pending was lost in the move.
• “Joined at” means something now. Your join date used to record the week of the year and throw the year away — someone joining in year three was filed as having joined at week 12. It records the real point in the world’s history.

And the December Week 4 freeze

The same investigation turned up the cause of a bug several of you had reported and none of us could pin down: the game appearing to stop dead at December, Week 4, with ticks landing on the server but nothing moving on screen until you reloaded the page.

The client decides whether to accept a new week by checking that it’s later than the one on screen — and it was comparing the week of the year. Every New Year, week 52 became week 1, which reads as time running backwards, so the client rejected the new week as stale and sat there. It now compares the actual position in the world’s history, so the year rolls over without you touching anything. If you have been reloading every December to unstick your world, you can stop.

July 25, 2026

Rename your airline and have it stick everywhere

Change your airline's name mid-game from the branding box and it now updates everywhere — not just at the top of your own screen. Previously a rename showed up in your cockpit but the rest of the world kept calling you by your original name: the activity feed and the world standings would still list the old one. That's fixed. Your new name now travels with you across the world feed, the leaderboard, and how rivals see you.

Airlines that were already renamed before this update will correct themselves the next time they take any action in-world.

July 24, 2026

The used aircraft market: buy secondhand, sell your old jets

Not every airline needs a brand-new jet straight off the line. Headwinds now has a used aircraft market — a world-wide secondhand lot, stocked entirely by the planes other airlines sell. When any carrier sells an owned aircraft it no longer just disappears: it goes up for sale at its depreciated value, and anyone can buy it. Find it in the new Used Market tab, grouped under Fleet.

• Cheaper than new, and faster. A used jet is priced at its current book value — well below a new one, because it has already flown some years — and it skips the factory queue entirely. Buy one and it is delivered on the next weekly tick, not weeks out.
• You get the actual airplane. A secondhand tail arrives exactly as it was: its real age, its cabin layout, its engines and its maintenance history all come with it. That is the trade-off — it costs a little more to run and has fewer years left than a fresh delivery, but it is flying for you a week from now at a fraction of the price. A well-kept airframe is worth more on the lot than one that has been run into the ground.
• Selling feeds the market. Selling an owned aircraft works just as before — you are paid its value minus a small handling fee, on the spot, whether or not a buyer ever turns up. The only difference is that your old jet now goes on the lot for a rival to snap up instead of vanishing. One airline's retirement is another's bargain.
• A real secondhand economy. The lot fills out as a world matures — carriers re-fleeting from narrowbodies to widebodies, someone downsizing, a struggling rival running a fire sale. A jet nobody wants sits at its price until it sells; if it is still there after two years, it is scrapped.

It is the question every fleet planner eventually faces from the other side: is that twelve-year-old narrowbody on the lot a smart piece of cheap capacity, or someone else's problem? Now you get to decide.

July 24, 2026

Heavy maintenance: your fleet now visits the hangar

Aircraft don't fly forever without care. Headwinds now models the real airline maintenance calendar: your planes build up wear as they fly, and periodically they have to come out of service for a heavy check — the multi-week hangar visits every real carrier plans its fleet around. The light A- and B-checks stay folded into your weekly maintenance budget; the two big ones, the C check and the D check, are now yours to schedule.

• Wear comes from flying, not just the calendar. Every block-hour an aircraft flies brings its next check closer. Work a jet hard nine times a day and it comes due in months; keep it as a spare and it ages on the calendar instead. A C check lands roughly every two years, a D check every six — and a D covers the C.
• Checks take planes out of service. A C check is a week or two in the hangar; a D check is a month or more on a widebody, and it isn't cheap — cost scales with the aircraft's value. Time it for a demand trough with a spare ready to cover the route and it barely registers. Get caught in the summer peak with no cover and it hurts.
• Schedule it your way. Open any aircraft and start a check now, or book one for a future week when the timing suits your network. The Fleet list flags every airframe — due soon, due, overdue, or in the shop.
• Miss the deadline and the regulator acts. Blow past the grace window and your aircraft is grounded on the spot: longer than a planned check, half again as expensive, and a hit to your reputation. Fleet planning is now a real job.
• Fresh checks pay you back. A checked airframe breaks down far less often, a D check knocks years off its running costs, and a well-kept plane holds its resale value — while one that's overdue sells at a discount, because nobody overpays to inherit someone else's deferred maintenance.
• Your crew and hubs help. A happy maintenance team and an in-house base at one of your hubs both bring check costs down — the same standardisation that already rewards a focused fleet.

It's the call every real fleet planner faces: pour money into a 22-year-old airframe's D check, or sell it and move on. Now it's yours to make.

July 24, 2026

Order big, pay less: bulk fleet discounts

Buying aircraft now works the way it does in the real world, where nobody pays sticker price and a launch order of a hundred jets is a very different conversation from buying one. The more of a type you order in a single deal, the deeper the discount — scaling all the way to 20% off a 100-aircraft order.

• Volume is the lever. A small top-up earns a few percent; commit to a fleet and the manufacturer sharpens its pencil. Single orders now run up to 100 frames, and the discount applies to every aircraft in the deal.
• Order, don't hoard. This replaces the old discount that simply rewarded already owning a lot of a type. Now it's the size of the order in front of you that counts — so a decisive fleet bet actually pays off.
• A pricing tune-up, too. We went back through the whole catalogue against real 2026 market values and corrected the outliers — most notably the COMAC C919, which had drifted well above what the world's most heavily-discounted narrowbody actually sells for.

July 22, 2026

Gate scarcity: fight for the airport, not just the route

New worlds can now be created with gate scarcity on — look for the ⛩ badge in the lobby. In these worlds every airport has a fixed number of gates (25, 100, 250 or 500 by size), and once they're taken, they're taken. The airport itself becomes something you compete for — the defining constraint of the real airline industry, where a single Heathrow slot pair has sold for tens of millions.

• Finite capacity, visible everywhere. The Airports tab shows every airport's availability, a FULL flag when nothing is left, and exactly why a lease is blocked. No airline may hold more than 60% of an airport's gates, and an alliance's members no more than 80% combined — nobody corners JFK alone, or with friends.
• Yearly gate auctions. When an airport fills up, new gates go under the hammer: bidding opens at week 40 and resolves at the new year. Bids are sealed — nobody sees yours — the highest bids win and pay what they bid, and exact ties are settled by coin flip. Won gates permanently grow the airport.
• A player-to-player gate market. Sell gates you don't need at your own asking price, or buy your way into a full airport from a rival who's scaling back. Gates won at auction or bought secondhand can't be re-listed for 12 weeks, so the market rewards operators, not scalpers.
• Use it or lose it. Hold gates at an airport you haven't flown to for 24 straight weeks and they're forfeited back to the pool — with a 24-week lockout on top. Warnings start at week 16. Squatting on LHR to spite your rivals is now a very expensive hobby.
• Congestion pricing. While an airport sits over 90% full, everyone pays +20% on their gate fees there — a nudge to release what you're not using before the forfeiture clock does it for you.
• Nobody gets locked out of home. Every airline is guaranteed up to 5 gates at its own hub, even at a packed airport — and those first five can never be sold out from under you.

Classic worlds are untouched — unlimited gates, exactly as before. Gate scarcity is chosen when a world is spawned, so watch the lobby (and Discord) for the first scarcity worlds. The in-game Help has a new Gate Scarcity chapter with the full ruleset.

July 22, 2026

Board objectives arrive: ten goals, $6.8M in bonuses

Every airline now gets a board of ten objectives that walks you from your first departure to your millionth passenger — and every one pays a cash bonus into your treasury the week you earn it. Complete the whole board and you'll have banked $6.8M on top of your starting capital, right when a growing airline needs it most.

• A guided path off the ground. The early goals mirror the moves every strong airline makes anyway: launch your first route ($250K), open your first international route ($350K), post your first profitable week ($400K), and build out to five city pairs ($500K).
• Growth pays. Reach five aircraft for $500K and ten for a cool $1M. Upgrade a hub to Tier 2 — the classic mid-game power move — and the board pays $750K toward the capex.
• Passenger milestones. Your airline now counts every passenger it has ever flown. Carry 10,000 for $300K, 100,000 for $750K — and your millionth passenger is worth $2M.
• Fair to worlds already in progress. Existing worlds get the board at their next weekly tick. Anything you've already achieved is marked complete without a payout — bonuses only reward new progress, so established airlines don't collect a windfall over newer rivals. Lifetime passenger counts start from this week for everyone.

You'll find the board on your Dashboard, and each completion pops a toast the moment the bonus lands. Race a friend to the millionth passenger and settle it on Discord.

July 20, 2026

The stock market opens: buy shares in your rivals

Every airline in your world is now listed on a stock market — and you can trade. The new Stocks tab (under Company) lists every rival at a live share price, with a price chart, weekly moves, and a one-click trade ticket. Think a rival's about to take off? Buy in before everyone else notices. Watching someone overextend? Wait for the fall and buy the recovery. Your read of the competition is now worth real money.

• Prices follow real fundamentals. A share price is built from what an airline actually is: its profits and growth, its cash, its owned fleet, minus its debt. Prices move once per weekly tick — capped at ±20% a week, with a touch of market noise — so they track genuine performance instead of teleporting. Everything you can already see about a rival on the Rivals tab is exactly what moves their stock.
• Gains count where it matters. Holdings are marked to market every week and sit on your balance sheet as investments, so a smart position lifts your own market cap — and your leaderboard rank. Sell to turn paper profit into cash; realized gains show on the Finance page as investment income.
• Trading has real friction. Buys fill 1% above the market and sells 1% below, plus a 0.5% commission each way — about 3% for a round trip. Churn loses money by design; conviction pays. You can own up to 20% of any one airline, and your total invested cost is capped at 40% of your own market cap — so nobody turns into a hedge fund with a plane problem.
• Risk is real too. If an airline you hold collapses or leaves the world, the position is force-liquidated at a haircut. A struggling airline can be a turnaround bargain — or a write-off. That's the game.
• A fairer scoreboard underneath. The valuation model itself got a ground-up rework. Debt now counts against a market cap, so borrowing can't inflate one; owned aircraft finally count for you, so investing in your fleet no longer lowers your value; and a few lucky early weeks can't rocket a brand-new airline past established ones. Expect market caps to glide toward their new fair values over the next few weeks — the leaderboard is settling into a more honest shape.

Your own airline isn't tradeable — your share price is the scoreboard. The in-game Help has a new Stock Market chapter with the full rules. Tell us about your best trade on Discord.

July 20, 2026

Runways matter: real field lengths at 2,000+ airports

Airports now have real runway lengths, sourced from real-world data, and every aircraft type has a minimum field length it needs to operate. Picking the right aircraft for a route now depends on where it has to land, not just how far it has to fly.

• Short strips are short. A widebody won't squeeze into a small regional airfield anymore. The route planner and aircraft pickers check both ends of the route and won't offer a plane the runway can't take — with the reason shown, so you always know why.
• London City plays by its famous rules. LCY's short runway and steep approach now admit only aircraft that can genuinely handle it — regional jets, turboprops, and steep-approach certified types like the A220-100 and A318. Some real-world quirks came along for free: La Guardia takes a 737-800 but not the stretched 737-900ER.
• Your existing network is safe. Routes you already fly are grandfathered — nothing gets grounded. Ones that wouldn't pass today wear a small "runway waiver" badge in the Routes tab, so you can rework them on your own schedule.
• Check before you buy. Airport pages now show runway length up top, and the aircraft Market lists each type's runway requirement — worth a glance before you build a fleet around a short-field hub.

July 20, 2026

One shared world: the same fuel and the same weather for everyone

In a game where your rivals are real people, everyone in a world should be trading in the same market. This update makes that true, and brings a big pass on speed and fair play underneath.

• Fuel prices are now shared across your world. Until now, each airline quietly ran on its own fuel price, so two rivals could pay different amounts in the same week. From here on there is one fuel market per world: when prices spike, they spike for all of you at once. Reading the fuel trend, and timing your hedges, is now a real shared skill instead of private luck.
• World events land on everyone together. Booms, downturns, and regional shocks now hit every airline in the world in the same week, with the same strength. When a demand surge lights up a region, it is on for the whole world to compete over, and nobody gets a quiet windfall their rivals never see.
• Tighter fair play. The server now re-checks the big money and fleet moves against the same limits you see on screen, so loans, leasing, and cabin layouts always stay within the real rules of the game. The leaderboard should reflect who played best, not who went looking for edges.
• Faster, lighter, and ready for bigger worlds. The game now sends and stores a lot less data as you play, so it feels snappier and the weekly tick stays reliable even as more players crowd into a world. It also keeps our running costs down, which is part of keeping Headwinds free.

One heads up: because fuel and events are now shared, each world switches over at its next weekly tick, so everyone changes together at the same moment. Notice something off? Tell us on Discord.

July 19, 2026

Two multiplayer fixes: bulk route-closing and a fresh-airline hiccup

Both of these came in from players on Discord — thank you. They only touched the multiplayer game, where every move is checked and saved on the server as you make it.

• Closing lots of routes at once now works. Selecting a big batch of routes and closing them together used to overwhelm the server: only one would actually close, and the rest bounced back with a "your airline just changed" error. Closing routes in bulk is now a single, instant action, however many you pick.
• No more refreshing to get going in a new airline. After hopping between worlds, a brand-new airline could open still showing a trace of your last one, so your very first aircraft order seemed to do nothing until you reloaded the page. Each airline now opens clean — first order and all.
• Bulk selling and retiring got the same treatment. The underlying fix covers any burst of moves, so selecting several aircraft to sell or retire at once now goes through reliably instead of quietly dropping some along the way.

Hit a rough edge we missed? Tell us on Discord.

July 17, 2026

A polish pass: cleaner dialogs, grouped menus, less clutter

A sweep through the interface to make the whole game feel more finished. Nothing changes how the game plays; everything here is about it looking and feeling right.

• No more browser popups. Selling an aircraft, closing a route, repaying a loan, deleting a save: these used to trigger a plain grey browser box that looked nothing like the rest of the game. They now use dialogs that match, with clear titles and the numbers laid out properly.
• The top menu is grouped. Sixteen tabs are folded into a handful of menus (Network, Fleet, Airports, Company), with Dashboard, Finance and Help still one click away. Nothing gets cut off on smaller screens anymore.
• Finance is easier to navigate. Its eleven views are now sorted into four areas: Statements, Planning, Analysis and Breakdown. Pick an area, then the view you want.
• A tidier dashboard. Dropped the duplicate date tile (the date is already up top) and moved last week's cash change onto the cash tile where it belongs.
• Consistent icons. A few buttons were still showing raw emoji that clashed with the game's line-icon style. Edit, delete, add and the rest now match everything else.
• Charts and tables behave. The financial history chart now fills its card instead of hugging one side, and the aircraft market's table keeps its column headers in view while you scroll.
• Plainer writing, fewer dashes. A pass over the on-screen text to make it read like a person wrote it: shorter, clearer, and without the dash-heavy style that had crept in.

Found a rough edge we missed? Let us know on Discord.

July 17, 2026

One header, a searchable market, and sliders that slide

A round of interface upgrades driven by player feedback, focused on the Market, the cabin configurator, and the game's chrome.

• One clean header. The separate bar above the game is gone. The tick countdown now lives under the date, and the lobby link, world feed, and messages sit in the game's own top bar — no more doubled-up Headwinds branding, and a full row of screen space back.
• Search the aircraft market. A search box now sits above the filters — type a model or manufacturer and the list narrows instantly.
• New table view for comparing aircraft. Switch the Market between photo cards and a compact table with sortable columns (seats, range, fuel per seat, efficiency, maintenance, lease and purchase price, delivery time). Click a column header to sort. Your choice is remembered.
• Faster cabin configuration. Every class has plus/minus steppers and a Max button that fills the remaining floor space with that class in one click — an all-first-class cabin is one tap away. Each class also shows its revenue per unit of floor space, and new tooltips explain how seat quality (the hardware) differs from cabin classes (the layout).
• Flight frequency shows its real limit. The route planner caps the flights-per-week slider at what one aircraft can physically fly on that distance (each airframe has 140 flying hours a week) and labels 7× as what it is: daily service. No more guessing why a long route won't take another rotation.
• Sliders are actually draggable. The pay, maintenance, and frequency sliders had a tiny grab area that often started a text-selection drag instead. They now have a proper hit area and drag reliably.
• Copy cleanup. Aircraft descriptions and interface text were rewritten to be shorter and plainer.

Spotted something clunky? Tell us on Discord — feedback like this is what shapes each update.

July 15, 2026

The world's routes, resized to reality

The demand model that decides how many passengers want to fly between any two cities has been recalibrated against real-world airline traffic data. The short version: the game's biggest markets are now the same ones real airlines fight over — and in a game where your rivals are other people, knowing which corridors are truly huge just became a real skill edge.

• New giants on the map. Routes where flying is the only way — Seoul–Jeju, Tokyo–Sapporo, Sydney–Melbourne, Jeddah–Riyadh — now carry demand worthy of their real-world rank. If nobody in your world is flying them yet, that's an opening.
• Borders, wealth and tourism now count. Domestic trunks outdraw same-sized international pairs, strong ties (UK–Ireland, Australia–New Zealand, Gulf corridors) keep cross-border demand high, tourist magnets like Cancún, Bali and Orlando draw on their visitors — and long thin routes between weakly connected cities are as marginal as they are in real life.
• Bigger markets overall. Popular routes carry roughly 1.5–2x the passengers they used to, so expect stronger demand across your network and more room to add frequency — and expect your rivals to notice too.
• Applies to everyone at once. Your world picks up the new demand at its next weekly tick, hitting every airline in the same moment — nobody gets a head start.

The full breakdown of what changed and why is on the Tailwinds devlog, where engine changes are chronicled.

July 14, 2026

Price every seat, right from the start

Fares used to be a two-step dance: set an economy price to open the route, then dig into the route list afterwards to price the premium cabins. No more — pricing is now one job, done up front.

• Every cabin, priced before you fly. Opening a route now shows a fare for each cabin your aircraft actually carries — first, business, premium economy and economy — pre-filled at the market rate and ready to adjust before the first departure.
• One fare editor everywhere. The same editor appears in the route planner, the add-flights form and the route list, with the market reference, your position against it, and a one-click reset. On the Routes tab, look for the Edit button in the Fares column.
• Honest benchmarks. The reference fares shown for premium cabins were overstated relative to what passengers actually compare against — business and first looked further below market than they were. The benchmarks now match the demand model exactly, so a fare 10% over reference really is 10% over.
• Forecasts you can trust. The planner's revenue and load projections now use the exact fares you've set, not assumed defaults — what you see before launch is what the route earns after it.

July 14, 2026

Scheduling without the guesswork

A round of quality-of-life work on putting aircraft where you want them.

• Part-time aircraft can take new work. Route planners now offer any aircraft with spare weekly hours — not just idle ones — so a plane flying a short hop can pick up a second route without you juggling assignments.
• Change frequency in place. Every route row has a −/+ stepper to add or drop weekly flights on the spot, and when an increase isn't possible it tells you exactly why — gate slots, block hours, or a regulatory cap.
• Freight explains its ceiling. Long-haul freighters hit their weekly block-hour budget at roughly one rotation a day. Instead of a slider that silently stops, the cargo planner now says so — and points you at the real fix: add another freighter.

July 14, 2026

Seven new airports in Bangladesh

The map grows again: seven regional fields across Bangladesh — Ishwardi (IRD), Thakurgaon (TKR), Lalmonirhat (LLJ), Shamshernagar (ZHM), Comilla (CLA), Sirajganj (SAJ) and Khulna (KHL). Khulna anchors the set with a city of a million and a half; the rest are proper thin-route territory for turboprops feeding Dhaka. Domestic networks in the subcontinent just got a lot more interesting.

July 12, 2026

A dashboard that tells you why

The home dashboard has been rebuilt from a wall of numbers into a read on how your week actually went — and where the money went with it.

• A weekly profit bridge. Last week's result sits next to what's projected for the week ahead, with the big movers — revenue, fuel, overhead — broken out so you can see exactly what changed.
• Know which routes carry you. New True Profit and Last Week views sort your network by what each route really contributes, so the flights holding up the airline — and the ones dragging it down — are obvious at a glance.
• The numbers that matter, with the story behind them. Load factor, yield, passenger satisfaction and fleet age each show a trend against last week, and every one opens a drill-down so you can chase a figure to its source.
• World events you can inspect. Event chips open a detail panel, and the profit chart marks the weeks an event landed — so a surprising week is never a mystery.
• Made to fit how you read it. Hover any chart for exact figures, switch the time range, and collapse the cards you don't need.

July 12, 2026

Cabins, re-priced

Fitting out your aircraft is clearer now, and the trade-offs are easier to reason about.

• One less dial. The separate service-quality setting has been retired from aircraft and route setup — it wasn't a lever worth micromanaging plane by plane.
• Seat quality, honestly priced. Standard economy seats are free, and new aircraft ship that way. Go above it and you'll pay a one-time cost to fit the cabin plus an ongoing cost to keep that standard — so a nicer seat is a real commitment, not a free upgrade.
• Premium cabins cost to install. Adding premium economy, business, or first now carries a per-seat fitting fee — from $200 a seat up to $1,000 in first — reflecting the real cost of putting those seats in the aircraft.

July 12, 2026

Smoother worlds, truer numbers

A round of smaller additions and fixes to keep worlds fair and the figures trustworthy.

• Worlds that start on the clock. A public world can now be set to open at a scheduled time, so a group can agree when a fresh world goes live and all join at the gun.
• Connecting passengers, counted both ways. Routes are round trips, and traffic connecting over your hubs is now counted in both directions — so your connecting numbers reflect everyone you actually carry.
• Polish throughout. The on-order delivery bar no longer sticks at zero, the maintenance-budget figure tracks its slider, cash runway matches the Finance page, route-map tooltips hold steady, and a handful of money and timing exploits are closed.

July 11, 2026

Your airline, charted over time

The Finance tab has a new Statistics page that turns your airline's history into charts — and lets you zoom from the last few weeks all the way out to decades.

• Where your passengers come from. A stacked view splits every week's traffic three ways: travelers flying you point-to-point, passengers connecting over your own hubs, and the feed your alliance and codeshare partners hand onto your flights.
• The numbers that matter, tracked. Revenue, costs and net profit; active routes, weekly departures, destinations served and fleet size; load factor, yield and capacity — each on its own chart, with details on hover.
• Any window you like. Filter from the last 4 weeks up through 6 months and a year, and on out to 3, 5, 10, 20 or 30 years. Longer views smooth the line so a decade of flying still reads at a glance.
• Builds as you fly. Your airline starts keeping these records the moment the update lands, so the picture grows richer with every week you play.

July 11, 2026

Keeping worlds fair: reports and bans

A world full of real people only stays fun if everyone plays straight. Headwinds now has real moderation built in.

• Report a player. A report action is built into the Rivals list, your direct messages, and the Rules page — flag harassment, spam, or cheating and it goes straight to the moderators.
• Account-wide bans. Moderators can remove a bad actor from every world at once, not just kick them out of one and watch them reappear in another.
• The rules, one click away. A fair-play Rules page is now linked from the site nav and footer and from the in-game top bar, so what's allowed is never a mystery.

July 11, 2026

Scout your rivals

Competing against real people is far easier when you can read them. Three new views turn the other airlines in your world into usable intelligence.

• Rival dossiers. Click any airline in the Rivals tab to open a full profile — its fleet, route network, performance trends, and a head-to-head comparison with you.
• A real competitive map. The positioning chart now plots the actual human airlines in your world by price and reputation, instead of the made-up AI brands it used to show.
• Market share, market by market. Airport and route views now show who holds what share of each city pair, so you can see exactly where you lead and where a rival has you beat.

July 11, 2026

Fly a route as often as you like

You've chosen the aircraft — now decide how hard to work it. Route detail gains a frequency control that puts weekly flights in your hands.

• Set flights per week. Pick an aircraft on a route and dial its weekly frequency up or down, right from the route screen.
• Watch utilization as you go. The card shows block-hour utilization live, so you can push an aircraft toward full use without overreaching.
• The sim keeps you honest. The stepper only lets you go as far as your peak monthly block-hours, gate slots, and regulatory limits allow — and tells you which one you've hit.

July 11, 2026

Your first two aircraft, on day one

New airlines used to sit on the ramp waiting for deliveries. In Headwinds, your Starter Fleet is different.

• Instant first deliveries. The first two aircraft you order arrive immediately — no watching a delivery queue before you can fly your first route.
• Get in the game sooner. Stand up a network and start earning while the world is still young, instead of losing your opening weeks to the clock.

July 11, 2026

Sign in with Discord

Google was the quick way in; now there's a second one. You can sign in to Headwinds with Discord as well as Google — whichever account you already live in. It's still one account for all your worlds, on any device.

July 11, 2026

A new look

Headwinds has a mark of its own now — a plane climbing left into the head-on gusts, in Headwinds teal.

• A logo of its own. The new mark shows up across the site and in the lobby header, with the favicon, social preview, and app icons all refreshed to match.
• Teal, everywhere. Info pages and in-app footer links now carry the Headwinds wordmark and palette, so the whole thing reads as one product.

July 11, 2026

Talk to your rivals: in-game messaging

Competition is more fun when you can gloat, negotiate, or plead. Every world now has a messaging system built in — look for the ✉ Messages button in the game bar.

• Direct messages. Write privately to any airline in your world. Propose a truce over a contested route, warn someone off your hub, or just talk shop.
• Alliance chat. Every alliance gets a shared board only its members can read — coordinate hubs, split markets, plan the next move together.
• Guardrails. Message limits keep spam down, and you can block any airline that won't take a hint — blocked senders can't reach you at all.

July 11, 2026

Player-founded alliances

Alliances in Headwinds aren't the scripted blocs from the solo game — there are no scripted anything in Headwinds. They're founded, grown, and run by players.

• Found one from the world lobby. Name it and you're the founder. Other airlines request to join; you accept or reject them. Up to 8 active members.
• Real benefits. Members feed each other connecting traffic, get a demand boost on routes where a partner also flies, and pay a weekly fee that keeps membership a real decision rather than a checkbox.
• Real governance. If the founder walks away, leadership passes to the longest-serving member — or the alliance disbands. Choose your allies like it matters.

July 10, 2026

Humans are the competition

The biggest design decision in Headwinds, made permanent: there are no AI airlines. Every competitor on the map is a real person running a real network in your world.

• Contested routes are player-vs-player. When two airlines fly the same city pair, the demand model splits passengers between them based on fares, frequency, quality, and loyalty — the same economics as always, but the other schedule belongs to a human who will react.
• The Rivals tab. In multiplayer, the Competition tab becomes Rivals and shows the actual players in your world. The world standings do too — click any airline to open its profile: route network, fleet, alliance, and its recent moves, week by week.
• No scripted drama. AI fare wars, scripted bankruptcies and startup carriers are all gone. If a fare war breaks out, it's because someone chose to start one.

July 10, 2026

Headwinds takes off

Headwinds is live at headwindsairlinegame.com — the multiplayer companion to Tailwinds, running the full airline simulation in persistent shared worlds.

• Persistent worlds on a server clock. Game weeks advance automatically around the clock, whether you're online or not. Set up your network to survive without you, then come back to the results.
• The whole game, multiplayer. This isn't a cut-down lobby experience — it's the complete Tailwinds interface (fleet, routes, hubs, finance, loyalty, cargo) running on server-authoritative state, so nobody can edit their save into a 747 fleet.
• Fresh worlds, always. Public worlds spawn on a schedule and wait in the lobby at Year 1 until their first player joins — the clock starts when you do. Pick your pace, from a leisurely week per hour to faster worlds for the impatient.
• One-click sign-in. Google or an email link. One account, all your worlds, from any device.

Join a world →