Devlog

September 19, 2026

The plane finder knows what month it is — and can rank the whole year

Two requests from the Discord, ported across from Tailwinds. Both are about the “Best aircraft for this route” panel in the Route Planner.

• Pick the season the ranking is for. Demand on a lane rises and falls with the calendar, so on a ski or beach market the plane that wins in February and the plane that wins in July can be different aircraft. The panel now says which month it is pricing, and a “Ranked for” picker lets you ask about any other month. Only the season changes — demand growth is not wound forward, so it is a like-for-like comparison, not a forecast of the future.
• Profit by month, on every shortlisted row. Each of the top five candidates now carries a twelve-bar strip showing what it would clear in each month, drawn to one shared scale so the rows compare with each other. A plane that wins the month you are looking at but sits in the red for half the year is a plane you will be parking. Months outside your route’s operating window are left blank rather than counted as losses.
• Average over the year. The same picker offers an annual ranking: every candidate priced in every month the route flies, sorted by the mean. On a seasonal lane this is often a different winner from the peak month, because the big cabin’s peak is bought with a trough the smaller one never sees. The Net column relabels itself so you can tell which view you are in.

The month picker and the strip cost nothing until you use them; the annual ranking is roughly a dozen forecasts per candidate, so it runs only when asked for. See route economics for how seasonality feeds the numbers.

September 16, 2026

A faster Route Planner, and a plane that was never short

Two fixes ported across from the Tailwinds bug channel, both of which apply just as much here.

• The Route Planner’s plane finder is around six times faster. Following the September lag reports: the “best aircraft for this route” ranking was re-running the entire network model once per candidate aircraft — seventy-five times — on every keystroke, fare change and frequency change. The model does not depend on which aircraft you are looking at, so it now runs once and every candidate reads the same answer. On a busy world that is roughly 150 ms down to 25 ms per change, and every figure is the same as before. Tag-route and cargo planners share the gain.
• The planner now tells you which aircraft is actually short. When a type is listed because one tail with a lighter cabin or wingtips can reach a lane, but that tail is busy elsewhere and your idle ones fall a few dozen kilometres short, the planner used to say the whole type was “flying other networks” — false about the parked ones, and pointing at a fix that would not help. It now names the tails that reach the lane and what stops each of the others, with the fix that would: lighten a cabin, fit wingtips, or route the long-legged one through the airport first.
• A plane flying through your origin on a multi-stop route is no longer ruled out. The planner counted only a route’s two ends as airports an aircraft serves; the game itself has always counted every stop. The two now agree.

September 10, 2026

The world list rebuilt — you can now tell the worlds apart

The lobby is the first thing every player sees, and it was a spreadsheet: a code where the year should be, a tick rate where the pace should be, and five rule tags whose meaning lived in a tooltip you couldn’t reach on a phone.

• Every world is a card. The year reads as a year — “Year 8 of 100”, or the calendar year in a historical world — with a bar showing how far the season has run, and a seat meter that warns you when a world is filling up.
• Pace in plain English. “A game year every 2 days” instead of “1 week / 1 hr”. The tick rate is still there in small print, but the number you actually want is how fast a season goes past.
• The rule tags say what they do. Restricted leasing, crew pipeline, rival connections, gate scarcity and historical starts now share one badge style, and a “what the world tags mean” panel under the list explains each in a sentence. Worlds running the standard ruleset say so instead of showing nothing.
• Joining late is flagged. A world past four-fifths of its length now warns you before you commit — starting from scratch against fifty-year-old incumbents is a different game, and the list now puts the youngest worlds first.
• Your airlines lead with the world. If you fly the same airline name in four worlds, the world’s name is now the headline on each card, with your cash beside it — and a negative balance is impossible to miss.

September 3, 2026

Three more propliners — and cruise speed is on the card at last

All from one Discord thread, out of a world started in 1947.

• Curtiss C-46 Commando. The catalogue’s earliest freighter was the 1959 An-12, which meant cargo simply did not exist in a 1950 world. The C-46 fixes that: war-surplus, 6.8 tonnes, off a 3,600 ft gravel strip, slow and thirsty for what it lifts, and orphaned — Curtiss-Wright left the aircraft business in 1951, so it carries its own parts problem and its own maintenance family.
• Canadair North Star. A DC-4 airframe with a DC-6 nose and Rolls-Royce Merlins instead of radials: 520 km/h against the DC-4’s 365, 6,200 km against 4,000, and 55 seats against 44. You pay for it in fuel, in an overhaul bill no other type shares, and in a cabin so loud that passengers complained in writing.
• Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation. The stretched Connie as first delivered, four years before the 1049G already in the game: plain R-3350s, no tip tanks, 88 seats. In 1951 it is the only alternative to a Stratocruiser above 80 seats — and unlike the G it will not cross an ocean.
• Cruise speed is a listed specification. It always drove block time — how many rotations a week a frame can fly — but you could only infer it. It is now a stat on every market card, a sortable column in the comparison table, on the checkout header, and in the aircraft guide. A 350 km/h propliner flies a third of the sectors a jet does on the same route, and now the market says so before you buy.

September 3, 2026

The head-to-head card now tells you who actually wins

“Why am I losing this battle?” — asked, fairly, by a player whose contested-route card showed them ahead on price, quality and frequency while their planes flew half-empty. The card was only showing the rows where they were winning.

• Projected share. Every contested route now shows how the market actually splits between you and your rivals — straight from the same demand model that books your passengers each week, so the card can never disagree with your results.
• Brand awareness warning. A young airline isn’t considered by most travellers yet, whatever it charges — an unknown brand reaches less than half the market. When low awareness is what’s costing you the fight, the card now says so, instead of leaving you to blame your fares.
• Business cabin warning. All-economy on a pair where a rival sells business class means the entire business segment books away from you. The card now flags it and tells you the share of the market you’re conceding.

September 2, 2026

Every aircraft is back on the classic market — the old ones arrive old

Reported on the Discord: the DC-4, DC-6, DC-7 and C-47 had vanished from a 2026 world. They had — the 1950s propliners added for era worlds were showing up in present-day worlds as the cheapest seats in the catalogue by a mile (a Vickers Vanguard leased for a fifth of an ATR 72, per seat, with the same maintenance bill), so they had been hidden for a night. Hiding aircraft is the wrong fix.

• The whole catalogue is on the 2026 market again, propliners included. The only type you can never buy in a classic world is the Comet 1, whose certificate was pulled in 1954.
• Vintage metal now arrives at a vintage age. Out-of-production types have always been delivered used — sixteen years old at most. That was tuned for 1970s and ’80s jets; for a line closed in the 1950s it made no sense. A type whose line has been closed fifty years or more now arrives twenty years old, climbing a year per year to a ceiling of thirty, and the card says so. At thirty years the maintenance curve bills 5.5× base rather than 2.28×, which is what makes a DC-6 a labour of love rather than a business plan.
• Vintage types are bought outright. No lessor stocks a sixty-year-old airliner, restricted world or not; the lease button says why. Anything with a younger line — the 737-200, the F27, the L-1011 — leases as before.
• Frames already in a fleet keep the age they were delivered at. Nothing anyone owns changes.

September 2, 2026

Era worlds: new-metal prices, honest ages, and the C-47

Reported on the Discord after the first 1950 world opened: aircraft that were plainly in production were showing up as used, and the Viscount was on sale three years before it flew.

• In-production types now arrive new — and say so. The market was quoting every 1950s type at its present-day second-hand age, so a Convair 240 with the line still open read as sixteen years old with the maintenance bill to match. The frames you actually received were always new; the store now says what the hangar delivers. Once a line closes, frames arrive progressively older, and thirty years after the last one rolled out there are none left to buy.
• “Not yet in service” is on the card. Types listed up to three years ahead of their entry into service — so you can plan the fleet you’ll be buying — now carry a badge saying so on the card and in the table, not just a locked button.
• New metal costs new-metal money. Every price in the catalogue is a present-day figure, and for a type whose line closed decades ago that is what a used one fetches today. Era worlds were selling a factory-fresh Convair 240 in 1950 at that used price. While a production line is open, a type now sells and leases at two and a half times its catalogue figure, sliding back down over the twelve years after the line closes as the used market fills. Leases already signed keep their rate for the term. The same fix closes a hole where a new-built aircraft was valued far above what you paid for it the week you bought it.
• The Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Most postwar start-ups didn’t begin with a DC-3; they began with the surplus military version of it. The C-47 joins the catalogue: same airframe with a cargo door and a bare cabin re-seated to 28, cheaper per seat than the DC-3 and rougher to keep running. It’s the cheapest way into the air in a 1950 world.

August 27, 2026

Every hub you build now wears a gold pin on the network map

Reported on the Discord: a map showing four hubs as ordinary spokes.

• The map was only ever pinning the airport you founded at. Hubs and focus cities you designate later — the ones you bought gates for, paid the construction bill on and now run connecting banks through — drew as plain blue dots like any spoke. Every station you have designated is now gold-pinned, and the pin grows with the tier, so a focus city, a hub, a major hub and an international gateway are told apart at a glance. Hovering one names its tier.
• A brand-new hub shows up before its first route does. An airport you have designated but not yet flown from was missing from the map entirely; it now appears the moment the designation is live, which is rather the point of looking at the map while you plan. More on what each tier buys you in the hub strategy guide.

August 27, 2026

Multi-stop routes bend on the map — and can finally take more flights and more aircraft

Reported on the Discord: “I fly a multi-leg route, MCI-JFK-ORY. On the map, it shows a line from MCI to ORY” — and “I have several other multi leg routes, and they are all full … you can add more weekly round trips and more aircraft to that route from the routes page, but not for multi leg routes.”

• The map draws every stop. A rotation like MCI–JFK–ORY used to appear as a single arc from Kansas City to Paris, passing hundreds of kilometres from the airport it actually lands at. The line now bends through each stop in order and is drawn in the same purple the routes page uses for multi-stop. Hovering names the whole chain and its leg count; focusing one frames the entire rotation instead of just its ends.
• A rotation is its own route on the map. If you fly both MCI–JFK–ORY and a plain MCI–ORY, they used to be merged into one line and one row with their numbers added together. They are two products and now read as two.
• Filtering the map by an airport finds rotations that stop there, not just the ones that begin or end there.
• Multi-stop routes have a flights-per-week stepper, the same one single-leg routes have. When it refuses, it names the airport that ran out of slots — including the one in the middle, which is usually the one that’s full.
• “+ Add Aircraft” puts a second aircraft on a rotation without closing and rebuilding it. The stops are locked, and the fares it starts from are the ones that rotation already sells, so your two tails don’t undercut each other.
• Freight lanes get the same treatment. Flights and yield were already editable on the routes page; “+ Add Freighter” now opens the freight planner on that lane, so a freighter that has run out of block hours isn’t the end of the lane.
• Slot arithmetic counts the stops in the middle. A rotation calling at an airport uses two movements there per cycle — an arrival and a departure. The gate-slot checks now count them everywhere, so a busy connecting airport can no longer be quietly oversold by a frequency bump or a new route. Passenger and freight also count against each other now: a freighter occupies a gate exactly like a jet, and the two halves of your airline were previously able to book the same slot twice.
• Regulations follow the aeroplane. A one-stop used to be a way around a rule: the legs of a rotation were checked, the market it actually sells was not, so a service into a restricted airport could be flown at any frequency by adding a stop. Each leg is now judged on the departures it operates, and the route is judged on the market it sells — and where an airport’s rules give a limited number of exemptions, a nonstop and a one-stop on the same city pair share one, rather than each taking a full allowance.
• A refused route now tells you which rule refused it, in the regulator’s own words, and on a rotation it names the leg. “Regulatory frequency cap” on a route that is banned outright at any frequency sent people hunting for a cap that was never the problem.

August 27, 2026

Find any airport in the world from the Airports tab

• A search box at the top of Airports now reaches every airport in the game. The old one only searched the region you had opened, so looking up Honolulu meant knowing it was filed under Oceania first — or going to the route finder or the gate list to see its numbers. Type a code, a city, an airport name or a country and click straight through to the airport page: gates and slots, who else flies there, your presence and its connectivity.

August 27, 2026

Cabin refits work — and now take the aircraft into the shop

Reported on the Discord: “cabin reconfigs dont appear to work … it goes through but the plane isnt taken out of service the next week, nor does it actually change configurations”. Two separate faults met in that one report.

• Refits weren’t reaching the world at all. Confirming a new cabin closed the screen and did nothing — no change, no charge, no error. The request was being dropped in your browser before it ever left for the server, so a refit you thought you’d booked simply never happened. Fixed: cabin changes now save like every other decision.
• A refit is real work now. The cost banner has always said the aircraft comes out of service for refitting. It never did. Reconfiguring a cabin now sends the aircraft to the shop: one week for most narrowbodies and regionals, two for widebodies and up, plus a week when you’re moving a quarter of the seats or more. The screen quotes the exact number of weeks before you commit, and any routes the aircraft flies stop earning until it’s back — so re-cabining a fleet mid-season is a decision with a price attached.
• An aircraft already in the shop can’t take a cabin job. Select a tail that’s in a C or D check, or grounded by a failure, and the refit screen says so and leaves it out of the batch. A batch charges you only for the aircraft it actually refits.
• Refitting aircraft say “Refitting” on the fleet list and the route tables, not “Grounded — in repair”. Nothing is broken; it’s in the hangar because you sent it there.
• Maintenance checks now show time until due, not time flown. The check panel used to print hours accrued — the same number under both C and D on a young airframe, which is why it read as total time. It now reads due in ~6w (766h left), estimated from how hard that particular aircraft is actually flying, so a hard-worked jet shows a nearer date than a spare. Thresholds and check costs are unchanged.

August 26, 2026

Your head office now costs what your aeroplanes are worth

This started as an argument on the Discord about whether regional and island-hopper airlines are impossible to run. Rather than trade opinions we went and counted: 144 airlines across six live worlds, 105 accounts. The claim was right, and the reason turned out to be one line in the overhead formula rather than anything about the aircraft.

• The head office was billed per airframe, not per aeroplane. Overhead counted how many aircraft you had and nothing about what they were, so two turboprops and two A380s were charged exactly the same $68,495 a week. Across the fleet, weekly revenue spans about fifty times from the smallest gauge to the largest; overhead spanned less than two. Airlines that opened on aircraft under 80 seats died at 70%, and 11 of 13 never recorded a single profitable week — against 38% for a narrowbody start. A two-turboprop startup flying one round trip a day grossed $48,734 a week against a $68,495 head office. That is 141% of gross revenue before a litre of fuel.
• Fixed costs now follow a curve through seat count. Head-office overhead and all four crew groups read a curve anchored at the same medians every calibrated figure in the game was set against, so nothing that was already right has moved. What has gone is the cliff at each category boundary: a 290-seat 767-200ER used to pay 72% more fixed cost than a 295-seat 757-300, which had quietly handed the 757-300 the lowest break-even load factor in the game.
• The curve now reaches the bottom of the catalogue. It used to stop at 39 seats and clamp, so a nine-seat Islander was charged a 39-seater’s head office and crew, and every type under about 21 seats lost money with every seat sold at the maximum legal frequency. Incapable, not uncompetitive — and it stranded the 25 airports in the game with runways under 4,000 feet, which exist for exactly those aircraft. A Twin Otter on the St Barths shuttle goes from −$4,275 a week to +$12,638, and now wins more missions across the route grid than any other small aircraft.
• Who this moves, and by how much. Extending the curve to the bottom of the catalogue is a pure reduction — nothing under 39 seats got dearer. Replacing the category steps with a curve cuts both ways: of the airlines we measured, 19 are better off and 26 slightly worse, the largest rise being 1.85% of revenue for a fleet of five double-deckers and the largest fall 6.5% for a fleet of 164 turboprops. Everyone in a world moves at the same moment, so relative standings should hold broadly steady.
• Small aircraft still ask something of you. The small operators who were already making money were all doing the same thing — very high frequency on very few short routes; one flies 41 weekly frequencies on a single pair. At four times the utilisation, a turboprop’s head office falls from 141% of revenue to 35%. That lever was always there and nothing in the game taught it. It is worth a read of fleet planning before you write off a small gauge.

August 26, 2026

Three screens that were telling you less than they knew

• The market’s efficiency bar only ever measured fuel. The green bar on every aircraft card scored fuel burn per seat and nothing else — no maintenance, no crew, no cost of owning the thing — under a heading that read like the total cost of a seat. That is how a 767-300ER could sit a point above a 737-800 while billing three times the maintenance. The bar now says Fuel per seat, and cards and the comparison table carry a Maint/seat figure beside the weekly bill — Maint/tonne on freighters, which never had a comparison number at all. Nothing about what aircraft cost has changed; the screen stopped hiding half the answer.
• The route finder credits connecting traffic, and the lease rate you actually signed. Its profit column deducted the catalogue lease rate from every candidate — including aircraft you own outright, which pay no rent at all, and leased tails whose real rate is whatever they signed at. It also ignored the connecting feed a hub generates, which the weekly tick has always credited to the route. Both are in the column now, so a lane off your hub reads as the tick will settle it.
• The watermark across the world map. Reported on the Discord at 6:43 in the morning, which is dedication. Our map tiles come from a third party who changed their terms overnight and began painting “API key required” diagonally across every tile — served as a perfectly valid image, so nothing failed and nothing logged; the only signal was a player’s screenshot. The map now requests tiles with a key.

August 25, 2026

Crew are hired and trained now, not conjured

Labour has been a wage bill with a pay dial on it. In new worlds it is a workforce: people you recruit, pay to train, wait for, and lose if you underpay them. This is the largest change to the operating side of the game in a while, so it goes to new worlds only — switching it on under a live season would strand every airline in a world at the same moment, which is not a thing to do to people mid-season.

• Hiring pays for training up front and delivers later. Each of the four groups has its own lead time and its own bill per crew unit: pilots ten weeks at $45,000 (a type rating and line training), maintenance six weeks at $18,000, cabin crew five weeks at $12,000, ground staff two weeks at $4,000. Ordering aircraft and ordering the people to fly them are now two different lead times you have to line up.
• Pay is a retention decision, not just a cost. Every week a fraction of your people leave, at a rate set by what you pay and how they feel about working for you. Cutting pay to survive a bad quarter now costs you the crew as well as the morale.
• Short-handed degrades long before it grounds. Under 15% short, the operation simply gets worse — on-time performance slips and satisfaction follows it down. At or past 15% on the flight-crew groups, aircraft you have nobody to fly stand down for the week. The crew-hungriest tails park first, so the largest possible number of aircraft keep flying, and a parked tail flies again the moment its crew arrive; nothing is written off.
• Your first two aircraft crew instantly. Headwinds already delivers a new airline’s first two aircraft immediately, so a new competitor can start flying rather than idle for real hours waiting on metal. A ten-week pilot queue would have undone that, so the starter allowance staffs those two aircraft from the day you join.
• Anything already flying is fully staffed. Where the system does apply to an existing airline, it starts fully crewed with nobody in training — you are never handed a staffing crisis you did not create.
• Operations shows the whole picture. Per group: crewed against required, how far short you are, who is in training and how many weeks until they are on the line, and hire buttons that quote the bill and the wait before you commit.

August 25, 2026

New worlds now start with the restrictions on

New World Restrictions have been an opt-in experiment since late July. They are now the default for a newly created world, and classic rules are an explicit opt-out on the create form. Existing worlds are untouched, and always will be.

• Lessors carry single-deck, previous-generation aircraft only. No double-deckers at any age — which matters, because the cheap answer to a ban on the A380 was a 747-400 at 71% of the A380’s seats for a fraction of its rent. The largest thing you can lease is a 777-200ER or A330-300 at 440 seats: 2.33 times a 737-800’s seats per slot, down from 4.51. Buying is untouched, because capital already gates it.
• The lease order book is capped at five aircraft, or a quarter of your active fleet once you are past twenty. A rate limit on how fast a fleet can appear, not a ceiling on how large it can get.
• Head office is charged per departure, by aircraft class — $100 for a turboprop up to $7,500 for a double-decker — rather than by the size of your fleet. Only flights that actually operate are billed, so a dormant seasonal route costs nothing.
• The reference fare ladder sits 5% lower, passenger and cargo alike. It shipped at 15% and that was far too deep — the work of squeezing margins belongs in the cost model, not in a blanket cut to what everyone can charge.

These sit alongside the labour and cost work of the last month, which together bring a comfortable operation’s margin from about 30% to about 15% — a good deal closer to a real airline. If you would rather have the classic game, the toggle is right there when you create the world.

August 25, 2026

The 737 family, priced like a family

A catalogue pass over the most-flown aircraft in the game. Every figure here is a correction to something that was wrong, and the effects reach aircraft you may already own.

• The MAX 8 was carrying the MAX 8-200’s seat count. 210 is the -200’s certified maximum, not the MAX 8’s — which made the -200 dead weight in the catalogue: worse per seat for a discount that never paid back. The MAX 8 is now 189 seats, the 737-800 fuselage it shares; the -200 is 202 and now costs more than the MAX 8, which is the right way round.
• The MAX 7 burns what a stretch of the -700 burns. It had been given the -700’s burn with the re-engine factor applied, which left it beating the MAX 8 per seat — a smaller aircraft undercutting a larger one on unit cost, which does not happen.
• The 737-900ER arrives at the age it should. It was the only NG banded off its own 2007 service entry rather than the production line it was built on, so it turned up on the used market older than it is.
• Classics are a real cheap-entry tier now. The -300 at $9.5M, the -500 at $10.5M and the -200 Advanced at $6M — the -200 had somehow become dearer than a strictly better -300. The -400’s burn and maintenance are corrected, and the 737-300F’s burn was 15% above published block fuel, which had the 18-tonne freighter out-burning the 20-tonne one.
• Store cards quote maintenance as delivered, not factory-fresh. A ten-year-old Classic bills about 1.5 times the base rate from its first week with you. The card showed you the base rate and let you find out later.

August 25, 2026

Bankrupt airlines stop crowding the world

Asked for on the Discord, and fair: a world that has run for a season carries more dead airlines than live ones, and every one of them was still taking up a seat and a row.

• Standings show the airlines still flying. The fallen are counted rather than listed — “N airlines have gone bankrupt or bowed out here” — so the table is the competition, not the graveyard.
• A dead airline no longer counts against the world’s limit. The player cap bounds how many airlines fly, not how many have ever existed, so a world that looked full to a newcomer now has the seats it should. Someone re-founding is still let back in regardless.
• Nothing is deleted. Your row survives, which is what lets you re-found in place, keeps the anti-rejoin guard honest, and lets the season record be banked at the end — a bankrupt season still counts, and the comeback awards depend on it. What is cleared is the week-by-week detail of an airline that will never tick again: 86 dead airlines against 65 live ones were being re-read on every standings poll, which is a fair chunk of why the lobby felt slow.
• The fire sale is unchanged — a failed airline’s fleet still goes to the used market at a distressed price, and its gates are still listed where gates are scarce.

August 25, 2026

Three from the Discord, and an error message you can actually read

• A freighter’s route breakdown said the aircraft was idle. The aircraft detail panel read passenger routes only, so a 767F with ten lanes showed the empty “idle” state directly under a utilisation box reading “10 routes”. Freight lanes now appear where they should, priced in tonnes a week and dollars per tonne-kilometre rather than passengers and ticket price.
• Puerto Rico is US soil. San Juan was being read as a foreign country for hub upgrades, the foreign focus-city cap, international destination counts and even tail numbers — a US carrier’s aircraft registered under an invented prefix. There is now a proper table of territories that fly under a mainland registry: US, French, Danish and Dutch territories and the British crown dependencies. Deliberately unchanged for now: whether San Juan to Miami is a domestic demand pair, which is a balance decision rather than a bug.
• “No cover — 1 route idle” with a spare aircraft sitting at the origin. Both halves of that badge were wrong about how a week runs. Breakdowns are rolled at the end of a tick, so a tail that has just gone tech cannot be covered yet; and the downtime countdown runs before the reserve pass, so a tail with one week left takes its own routes back and correctly needs no cover at all. The badge now runs the real pass against your projected fleet and tells you which it is: “back in service next week”, “cover starts next week” with the reserve named, or the actual reason there is none.
• An error page is not an error message. At about one o’clock Pacific on the 25th, signing in broke for a few hours: our authentication provider’s edge answered with a “connection timed out” page instead of a response. That happens. What should not have happened is what our client did with it — it took the entire HTML page and printed it into the interface, so the sign-in button rendered a couple of hundred lines of raw markup at you. The game itself stayed up and anyone already signed in kept playing; everything was back by the evening. Every player-facing error now collapses markup and walls of text into one readable line.

August 24, 2026

The black screen, and why it happened

On Monday morning a deploy replaced every world screen with a black page — every player, every device, every browser. It lasted most of the afternoon. This is what it was.

• It was not the servers. The API was on the current build, all six worlds were ticking within a week of each other, and every endpoint answered normally throughout. Reports of “the servers are down” were entirely reasonable and entirely wrong.
• It was one line of ours, in your browser. A new annotation on the join form — the count of airlines already based at an airport — was added below the point where the screen returns “loading…”. On the first render the world data has not arrived and that line never runs; on the second it does, and React refuses a render that does more work than the one before it. It refuses by tearing down the whole tree, and what is left is the dark background.
• That is why it “worked fine” for some people. Anyone with a tab already open was still running the previous build and noticed nothing — and anyone who cleared their cache to fix it made their own situation strictly worse. Sorry to whoever spent an hour on that.
• We had a check for exactly this, and it was skipping most of the file. The tool that scans for this mistake stripped string literals line by line, and treated the apostrophe in the words “Auth isn’t configured” as the start of a string — blanking eleven hundred lines of the file, including the screen that broke. It has been rewritten to parse the code properly rather than read it as text, and it carries a regression test with that apostrophe in it.

August 24, 2026

A season ends with a ceremony now

A world reached its final week, the standings were computed, and then they were thrown away. There has been a career record waiting for them since launch. Seasons now finish properly.

• The season is scored and published when the world ends. A champion, a podium, and awards: Iron Throne for the most weeks spent at number one, Busiest for passengers carried, Biggest Network for routes flown, and Best Comeback for the highest finish by an airline that re-founded after going under. An award nobody earned is not given out.
• An end-of-season screen. Champion, podium, the awards, where you finished out of how many, and the full final standings underneath. It opens once when you arrive in a concluded world, and a Results button in the topbar reopens it whenever you like.
• Concluded seasons have a hall of fame on the worlds screen, newest first, each with its champion.
• Every in-game year now gets a year in review in the news feed: who leads, the podium, and the biggest climber of the year. A game year is fifty-two weeks and used to pass without a word.
• An airline that never went public is unranked, not last. Staying private is a decision; recording it as twentieth of twenty would misreport it.

August 24, 2026

Your name, your profile, and messages that follow you between worlds

Until now you existed only inside a world. An airline was a row in a table and the person flying it was a display name with nothing behind it.

• Every player has a public profile. Click a name in the standings, the news feed, a rival dossier, an alliance roster or a message and you get the account behind it: the airlines they are flying now, the seasons they have finished, and the badges they have earned. Private worlds stay private — a finish in an invite-only world reads as “Played” unless it was a podium, and the totals are recomputed from the public subset rather than quietly leaking the rest.
• Usernames. Claim one for free; after that one rename every thirty days, with an audit trail so an old name stays traceable rather than being a way to walk away from a reputation. Your username is your display name everywhere it exists.
• Direct messages at the account level. An inbox in the lobby and beside the feed in-world, so a message reaches you whichever world you are in — or none. Who may write to you is your choice: everyone, people you share a world with (the default, and finished seasons count), or nobody. Blocks and reports work without a world attached, and a refusal reads identically whether it is your policy or a block, so nobody learns they were personally blocked.
• The message button only appears when a message will go through, rather than letting you write one and refusing it afterwards.
• The standings gained a column and a marker. Share value per share replaces market cap in the table (market cap is now a tooltip), and a rival who has not made a move in three real days is marked idle — useful when you are deciding whether the airline squatting on the gates you want is still being flown.
• Re-founding makes the news. “X is back — re-founded”, with the hub. A returning airline reuses its row, so the joined item could never report it.
• The join form tells you what you are walking into — how many airlines are already based at the airport you are typing, before you commit to it.

August 24, 2026

Cargo is contested, and a sweep through the data

The freight half of the game had a strategic hole in it, and the map underneath had a few things wrong. Most of this is shared engine work — the Tailwinds devlog has the fleet detail — but the first item matters more here than anywhere.

• Rival freighters now compete for your tonnage. Cargo demand on a lane was split among your own routes and nobody else’s: a competitor could run freighters on the same lane and take nothing off you. In a world full of other airlines that made an uncontested cargo network the strongest thing you could build, which is not a market, it is a subsidy. Contested lanes now split on capacity and yield like passenger routes do. Lanes only you serve are unchanged.
• The A380 is priced like the flagship it is, three widebodies that were strictly worse than a neighbour got corrections, and double-deckers and the supersonic now pay for the three-pilot flight deck they lay over with, rather than being charged for fewer crew than an ordinary widebody.
• Two of New York’s outlying airports were carrying the whole metro’s population. Westchester and Stewart were each priced as if twenty million people lived on their doorstep, which made them look like trunk airports. They are now sized for the districts they actually serve. Kennedy, Newark and LaGuardia are unchanged.
• City pairs a train does better no longer sell air tickets. Hong Kong to Shenzhen is 38 kilometres; Singapore to Johor Bahru, Amsterdam to Rotterdam and Baltimore to Washington are all under 50. Nobody books those. Only the direct hop is suppressed — both cities keep every other route they fly — and short hops with water in the way are explicitly spared, because Nantucket to Hyannis and Saba to St Maarten are real flights with no road alternative.
• Dakar’s old and new airports no longer sell a route to each other.
• Correctness, in passing: the weekly forecast now includes the lease deposit coming back in an aircraft’s final week. Omitting a twelve-week deposit understated that week every time and always in the same direction — which is exactly the “the week always comes in better than forecast” pattern a forecast exists to avoid. Line maintenance is credited from the best of an aircraft’s routes rather than an arbitrary one. Reserved staff badges can no longer be adopted as an airline name from inside a world. And a world’s share float is seeded for its full capacity rather than for the one player who happened to start the clock, which had been starving stock and capital actions of a counterparty all season on large worlds.

August 23, 2026

Every world stopped ticking for seventeen and a half hours

“Scarce assets server has been stuck at the same week for hours… still stuck on week 4.” It was, and so was every other world. Here is what happened and what stops it happening again.

• One stall, not six. All six worlds were behind by the same seventeen and a half hours regardless of their pace or start date, which is the signature of a single common failure rather than six coincidences.
• The worker was waiting on a database query that never came back and never failed. Nothing crashed, nothing logged an error, and from the outside the process looked perfectly healthy — so nothing restarted it. It sat inside that one call until a deploy that evening happened to restart it, at which point every world caught up.
• There is now a watchdog. A tick pass that runs longer than fifteen minutes — comfortably longer than a full catch-up across every world takes — kills the worker, which restarts immediately and picks up where it left off. Worst case is now a quarter of an hour instead of most of a day, and it recovers without anyone noticing it happened. Interrupting a tick is safe: a half-finished week rolls back and runs again from the start.
• And it says so when it is fine. The worker logs that it is alive every five minutes, so silence is now itself a signal rather than something you have to go looking for.
• Separately: the route and freight planners now measure a lane against the range your aircraft really has, sharklets and cabin weight included, rather than the catalogue figure. Reported by ASAS on the Discord; the Tailwinds devlog covers it in full.

August 18, 2026

A grounded aircraft stays grounded, and the route finder learned what your fleet can do

The grounding half is shared with Tailwinds and written up on the Tailwinds devlog: clearing a broken aircraft’s flights used to cancel its repair outright, and the idle-aircraft alert told you an aircraft you own outright was paying rent. Both fixed, and aircraft that escaped a grounding that way go back to the shop for the time they still owed.

The route finder is the larger piece:

• It searches with an aircraft attached. It used to rank markets by demand and know nothing else — so it offered you airports the aircraft you had in mind cannot land at. There are 774 airports inside a Concorde’s range with too little runway for it. It now runs the same checks the game runs when you actually open the route, with the aircraft in hand.
• One row per market, not one per airport. A city with three fields was three rows competing for your attention over what is one pool of travellers; it is now one row with the sibling fields named.
• Its numbers come from the same projection the planner uses, so the screen you land on can no longer disagree with the row you clicked to get there.
• And it knew nothing about your rivals at the airport next door. Behind a Discord question — “multiple airports in the same city still show a large demand but none of the routes are profitable, are they linked?” — they are, and the preview did not know it. With a rival flying JFK–LHR and you pricing up EWR–LHR, the finder promised 6,160 passengers at a 100% load and $3.13M a week, and reported no competition, against a week that then booked 4,633 at 75.2% and $1.64M. It now runs the same one-fight-per-metro-pair the tick runs.
• A second fault on the same path, affecting every pooled preview: the forecast was not carrying uncapped demand, so its spill model saw demand exactly equal to seats and trimmed routes the tick does not — measured at 7% on a two-airport lane.
• Your fleet is listed first, at your best-equipped tail’s range, instead of buried in a catalogue dropdown — and the planner now explains why a second aircraft on a pair earns less than the first, with different wording for your own service and for a rival at a sibling field.

August 13, 2026

Deposits come back, hubs connect properly, and a failed save says so

A fixes release, mostly shared-engine work — the Tailwinds devlog has the same list in more detail.

• Lease security deposits are refundable again. The twelve weeks of rent taken when you order a leased aircraft now come back in full if you cancel before delivery, and come back when the aircraft returns to the lessor — at end of term or early. The redelivery fee and the early-termination penalty are unchanged; a deposit was never meant to be one of them. It shows as its own untaxed line on the weekly P&L. Buying a lease out already credited the deposit against the price, and still does.
• Connecting traffic no longer depends on route orientation. Passengers connecting between two of your own flights at a hub were only being found when the two routes happened to be stored in opposite directions — build every spoke outward from the hub and the model found none. It now sees every pair of spokes whichever way they were entered. If you run a hub, connecting revenue goes up.
• Statistics agrees with the P&L about cargo. Weekly Revenue and the revenue-mix chart were adding freight revenue on top of a total that already included it. Both now read the figure the rest of the game uses. Weeks already recorded keep their old numbers, so the chart steps at this update.
• A save that fails now tells you rather than failing silently and surfacing at your next refresh. This affects the solo game; multiplayer worlds have always saved server-side.

August 13, 2026

One city, one market — and secondary airports that behave like it

A structural change in the shared engine, and one with real consequences for how you pick a base. The Tailwinds devlog covers the model detail; the short version, and what it means in a world with other airlines in it:

• A metro area is one market. New York to London is a single pool of passengers, whether it is flown from JFK, Newark or LaGuardia. Routes on sibling airports now split that pool and compete inside it instead of each being priced as its own market. Two fields into the same city pair will settle lower than they read last week.
• Airports have appeal. A secondary field pulls fewer passengers than the primary, by an amount that depends on the trip — LaGuardia is a fine domestic airport and a poor long-haul international one. This changes the calculus on gate bidding: a cheap slot at a quiet field is cheap for a reason, and the discount is now priced into what you can carry from it rather than being free upside.
• Your rivals are in the same market you are. A competitor flying the sibling airport on a city pair you serve now takes traffic from you, in the weekly result and in the planner. Basing away from a crowded primary is still a legitimate strategy — it is no longer a way to fly an uncontested copy of someone else's route.
• Freight lanes pool the same way, and are scored on freight handling rather than passenger convenience, so airport appeal does not apply to cargo.
• AI carriers play by these rules too, including on their own home fields.

Everyone in a world is affected at the same moment, so relative standings should hold broadly steady. If you have built deliberately across two fields in one city, expect those routes to converge — and it is worth another look at where your gates are before the next auction.

August 13, 2026

Full is full, rivals with real reputations, and clearer refusals

The second accuracy wave. The demand-model half is shared with Tailwinds — the Tailwinds devlog has the detail on oversubscribed routes filling toward the ceiling, seasonal skew sparing full routes, all-economy pairs keeping their business travellers, and multi-stop routes sharing a pair's market with your own nonstops. In restricted worlds the ceiling change is the visible one: deeply oversubscribed routes now climb toward 95% instead of stalling in the high 80s.

The multiplayer-specific work this round:

• Your rivals' quality scores are real now. The demand model was scoring every human rival at a fixed middle-of-the-road quality regardless of what they'd built. Cabin product, catering, lounges and reputation now carry into how your competitors' offers are weighed against yours — so investing in the product moves your share against real opponents, and a bare-bones operation reads as one.
• Freight and multi-stop routes now explain themselves when they can't open. A cargo or tag route that failed its checks (no gate, out of range, not enough hours) used to vanish quietly after appearing to open. You now get the same clear refusal message passenger routes have had.
• Private worlds are private. Standings, networks and fares in an invite-only world are now visible only to its members. The world card and join flow are unchanged.
• Assorted server-side validation tightened across decisions, the news feed and lease extensions — no gameplay change for anyone playing normally, and a few things that shouldn't have been possible no longer are.

Everything in the shared list applies here too: real brand reach in the share panels, signed lease rates in projections, the Dashboard load factor with multi-stop routes in the network, and an honest "weeks of cash" on the Marketplace.

August 12, 2026

Sharper competition, and screens that agree with each other

An accuracy release. Most of it is shared-engine work — the Tailwinds devlog covers the parts both games share — but the headline change is specific to worlds with real airlines in them.

• Competition on contested pairs has been retuned. Rival airlines reach the demand model through more than one route, and the way those were combined has been reworked so each carrier is weighed exactly once, with their real fares, cabins, quality and brand behind them. The practical effect is that loads and revenue on pairs you share with other players step up from the next tick. This affects every airline in the world at the same time, so relative standings should be broadly stable — but if you have been pricing against loads that looked stubbornly low on a busy pair, it is worth another look at route economics this week.
• Multi-stop routes are contested like any other. Rivals flying your tag route’s segments now compete for that traffic, in the weekly result and in the planner. Routing a trunk through an intermediate stop is still a good way to extend an aircraft’s reach; it is no longer a way to leave your competitors behind.
• Finance › Unit Economics reads from the weekly result. Load factor, RASK, CASK, yield and the break-even badge on that tab are now taken from the same figures the Routes screen and the weekly report use, rather than being recalculated separately. Expect the numbers to move, and to match the rest of the game.
• The fare editor responds properly on shared pairs. On a pair you fly with two or more aircraft, dragging the fare now moves the passenger forecast as well as the revenue line, so the panel shows the trade-off before you commit rather than after.
• Fuel hedging inputs are validated more strictly. No change to how hedges price or settle.

August 10, 2026

Wi-Fi is fitted to an aeroplane, and a lounge is a room you build

This is a shared-engine change, so the Tailwinds devlog has the full mechanics and the numbers. The short version: two products on the Ancillaries tab were policy switches standing in for capital nobody had spent. Ticking “offered” on Wi-Fi gave your whole fleet connectivity that afternoon with no hardware behind it; ticking “offered” on Lounge Passes sold day passes into a lounge you had never built. Wi-Fi is now fitted to individual aircraft — $750,000 on the order form, $1,050,000 as a retrofit, $1,500 a week per fitted airframe whether it flies or sits. A lounge is a $12,000,000 building at one airport where you hold a gate, ten weeks to fit out and $85,000 a week to run.

What is worth saying here is what those two mean in a world with other airlines in it.

• A lounge is a move your rivals can see. Building one goes on the news feed the moment you commit, the same as taking a gate or upgrading a hub — it is a room with your name over the door in a public terminal and there is no building it quietly. Who you let in free is not published: that is commercial policy, and rivals can work it out from your fares and your load factors like everyone else.
• Their lounges count against you. A competitor with rooms at both ends of a pair you fly genuinely beats you for business travellers there, in your simulation as much as in theirs. This was the part that most needed getting right — if one airline’s lounges were invisible to everyone else’s week, the two of you would disagree about who carried whom.
• Alliance reciprocity is worth more here than it is in single player. Switching on access for partner airlines’ members costs you slightly more in servicing than the settlement fee you collect back — what you are buying is your own business travellers walking into a partner’s lounge at every station where they have a room and you do not. In a world where your partners are real airlines building real lounges in real places, that network is somebody else’s capital working for you. You do have to run at least one lounge yourself to trade on it.
• The world prices it, not your browser. As with every decision in Headwinds, what a lounge costs, what a retrofit costs and what you get back for closing a room are settled by the server from the game’s own figures. Nothing in a request can talk its way into a cheap lounge or a free antenna.

• Every aircraft in your world starts without Wi-Fi — read this one. There was no honest way to hand every airline in every live world a fleet full of hardware it never bought. So nothing is fitted, every aeroplane takes the penalty for not having connectivity, and Lounge Passes earn nothing until somebody builds somewhere for them to be used. That is roughly four quality points off your routes until you spend the money, and it lands on everyone in the world at the same time, which is the fairest version of it available. The Ancillaries tab shows how much of your fleet is fitted; the Fleet page will retrofit a whole selection at once.

If you were already the airline flying the newest metal into the best hubs, this is a lever built for you. If you were winning on price, none of it touches your passengers. Fleet planning covers what a fleet costs to keep.

Come and complain about any of it on the Discord.

August 10, 2026

Jet bases can be certified after they are built

Kat the Fox, on the Discord: “maintenance hub upgrades don’t allow additional certifications.” Quite right, and worse than it sounded — a base could only ever cover the aircraft families you ticked the day you built it. Upgrading a Line Station to a Maintenance Base bought a second certification slot there was no way to spend, and paying for a bigger hangar to bring a second fleet type home simply did not work.

That was fixed in Tailwinds on 31 July. It did not reach Headwinds, and it should have. The two games share a simulation engine, so an engine fix normally lands in both on the same day — but the part that was missing here was the button, and buttons do not travel. The engine in your world has been able to certify a base for another family the whole time. Nothing ever asked it to. That is now sorted.

• Certify a base whenever you like. Every base lists the families you fly but aren’t certified for, one button each. Click it and the base covers that type from then on — heavy checks come home instead of going to a third party, and the outsourced contract for that family is offset.
• The price is on the button before you spend. While the level’s included allowance lasts, another certification is free. Past it you pay once up front and a little every week, both shown up front — and the button greys out with the figure if you can’t cover it.
• An upgrade now delivers the allowance you paid for. A Line Station includes one certification, a Maintenance Base two, a Heavy MRO four. Whatever a level includes and you haven’t spent, the card tells you.
• Eight families, one hangar. That was always the engine’s ceiling; the card now shows where you stand against it rather than stopping you at the level’s allowance.
• Build one broad from day one. The build form lets you tick up to eight families, and the quoted price includes the extras instead of quietly dropping them at the moment you pay.
• The server prices it, not your browser. As with every decision in Headwinds, what a certification costs is settled by the world, so no client can talk its way into a free one.

If you have a base that has been stuck on one type since you built it, open the Maintenance page — the families it could be covering are waiting there. Existing bases keep every certification they already hold; nothing was reset. Fleet planning covers how many types are worth flying at all.

Come and complain about any of it on the Discord.

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 →