2. Your first aircraft

This is part 2 of the walkthrough. Pennine Air has been founded at Manchester with $31.6 million and needs an aircraft.

Step 1: Open the aircraft market

Go to Get aircraft. Its tabs are New from manufacturers, Used for sale, For lease, Find through the broker, All aircraft and Lessors. The first lists every type on sale today:

Column	Shows
Type	Maker and model
Seats, Range, Runway	The most seats, range with a full load, and the runway it needs at full weight
From your home	Whether it can take off from your home airport
For your markets	Its size against the biggest markets from your home that nobody has the seats for: fits, small, large, too big, or how many it can reach
Fuel/seat-km and Price	Cruise fuel per seat and kilometre, and what one costs new
Backlog and Wait	Aircraft already ordered, and the months a new order waits
In this world	How many the world's airlines fly

Filter by maker, by passenger, freighter or combi, by size and by range. A new airline's first order from a manufacturer may be for any type on sale, and comes from stock within weeks.

Step 2: Compare types

Press + Compare on up to four types. The comparison lines them up: seats, payload and range, runway, fuel and crew, maintenance an hour in today's money, fuel and charges a seat on one of your markets, their size against your markets, price, wait and when production ends. The best figure in each row is marked.

Before choosing, ask:

• Range and runway: can it fly the routes you want from the airports you want?
• Size: will your markets fill it? Empty seats cost money and earn nothing.
• Cost: fuel, crew and maintenance an hour, and the price or rent.
• Family: this becomes your first pilot family. Every other family needs its own pilots.
• Age: older types cost less to acquire and more to keep flying, and stop being built sooner.

Pennine Air compares the ATR 42-300, Fokker F27 Mk500, Hawker Siddeley 748 and Boeing 737-200 Advanced. Its markets from Manchester are short and mostly thin, and the 50-seat ATR fits them; it burns least fuel a seat, is built until 1996 and grows into the ATR 72. The 737 costs nearly twice as much and is too big for most of them.

Step 3: Choose how to pay

Open a type to order it. The order sheet shows its figures, how many to order (with a suggestion), and three ways to pay, with what each costs now, at delivery and each month:

• Buy outright: deposits now, kept by the maker if you cancel, and the rest as each aircraft arrives.
• Buy with a loan: deposits now; the bank lends most of the price against each aircraft as it arrives, if your credit allows.
• Lease it: nothing now; a deposit and the first month's rent at delivery. The sheet says how many years of rent add up to the price.

Each lessor shows its rent, deposit, terms and the rating it asks. A lessor that asks for a rating a few notches above yours still leases, for a larger deposit; those that will not lease the type to you are listed apart, with why.

Pennine Air, rated BB, leases from Corvanne Aviation Capital for eight years: $47,265 a month, with a $94,531 deposit. Buying would have taken $1.87 million in deposits now and $4.37 million on delivery.

Step 4: Set up the fleet

• For: the lease term.
• First delivery: as soon as possible, or a date.
• Joins: the fleet it joins. A fleet is one type with one cabin at one base; routes are flown by fleets, and the game assigns each fleet's aircraft to its flights. Your first aircraft starts a new fleet: name it and keep your home as its base.
• Choose the cabin, or take the type's default.

What happens says what it costs and when. Press Lease. The order appears under Fleet → Orders, and its delivery under Coming up on the overview.

Step 5: Choose the cabin, if you want to

The cabin editor starts from the type's default layout. From there:

• Add classes of the era: first, business, premium economy.
• Choose each class's seat type: its pitch, seats across, comfort and cost. Comfier seats mean fewer of them.
• Set each class's seats; the editor shows rows and length, and stops at what the cabin and its certification allow.

The seat map shows the result. The cabin belongs to the fleet; catering and entertainment are set for the whole airline under Product & marketing.

Pennine Air keeps the default: 50 economy seats at 81 cm, four across.

Step 6: Receive the aircraft

On delivery the aircraft arrives at its base with a registration of your home country. Its page, under Fleet → Aircraft, shows:

• Registration, type, serial, when it was built and where it is; name it, store it, move it or send it for a check.
• Age, hours and cycles against its design life, condition and market value, and its next check.
• Every check and when it is due.
• Ownership: here the lease, with its rent, end, return airport and deposit.
• Its cabin, and its flights in the coming days.

The ATR arrives on 5 September 1986 as G-PAAB.

Next: Your first route.