Airports, gates & hubs

Gates

Airlines lease gates at the airports they serve. Airports & slots lists each airport with your departures, gates held, gates short and gates idle. Lease gates shows what you hold against what the timetable needs and the rent of a gate. Rent is charged monthly for the days held and rises as the airport fills; gates the timetable leaves unused for some months go back. The planner leases the gates a new route needs.

An airport

Every airport has a page: passengers a year now and later, runways, gates leased and yours, capacity in movements an hour and how full its busiest hour is, its rules (slots, curfew), today's departures and arrivals, its charges, the airlines there and every route from it. Plan a route here opens the planner.

Charges follow what the airport charged in the world's year: Heathrow or Frankfurt cost far more a passenger than Atlanta or Delhi, and some countries charge domestic flights less. En-route charges follow the era too. Fees and rent rise as an airport fills.

Slots

At slot-controlled airports you need a slot for each departure and arrival hour. The planner takes free slots for new flights. Slots shows holdings at each airport, held and used by local hour of the week. Slots used in less than 80% of a scheduling season's weeks are lost unless next season's timetable needs them. Release unused slots, or offer them to another airline; where an airport has no free slots at those hours, yours can fetch a price.

Hubs and terminals

Declare a hub where your routes meet: flights from it pay less for handling, and you may build a terminal there. The sheet compares the monthly fee with what it saves; each extra hub costs more than the last.

Build a terminal at a hub gives you your own gates, with no rent once it opens. It is paid in stages and opens after one to three years, depending on its size, and counts toward final value. The sheet says how long its cost takes to pay back at today's rent; at most airports leasing gates costs far less.

PsiAirways flies 220 departures a week from Tokyo Haneda. Its hub there costs $51,879 a month and saves about $399,184 on handling. A nine-gate terminal would cost $214 million in six stages, open in March 1988, and take some 210 years to pay back in rent saved.

City markets

Nearby airports share a city's demand: Heathrow, Gatwick and London's other airports all draw on London. A secondary airport can be cheaper and still reach the same travellers, though some prefer the main one.

Where you may fly

In worlds with historical rights, traffic rights decide which airports you may connect. See Worlds & seasons.