New Game now asks how you want to play. Sandbox is the game as it was — everything unlocked from the first minute. Career starts you small: turboprops only, economy cabins, domestic routes, outsourced ground handling, and a $150M credit ceiling. Everything else is earned.
38 certifications across five branches, on a new Certs tab. They unlock jets and widebodies, premium cabins, international, ETOPS and polar authority, hubs and lounges, and better financing.
Certifications are gated on cash and operating evidence — block hours by aircraft class, passengers carried, sectors flown, and your live on-time record. You cannot buy your way up the tree without an airline that has actually flown. Programmes take real time and you can only run one at a time.
Nothing in the tree buffs your airline. A certification opens access to something Sandbox already has, or removes a Career handicap — it never hands you extra demand.
Eleven counters that persist across every save and every airline you ever start — flights operated, block hours, passengers carried, international sectors, weeks simulated, certifications earned, plus personal records for largest fleet and most cash held.
- En-route navigation charges retuned. They were running around 11% of revenue on a long-haul sector against 2-4% in reality, which is what made thin ultra-long-haul routes structurally unprofitable.
- Ownership and leasing rebalanced. Leasing cost 2.8x ownership, so buying strictly dominated and the choice collapsed. Both are now live options.
- Annual costs corrected — several were charged against a mismatched year length, billing 92% of the rate shown.
- Events are now regional. A downturn or health scare fades out from a centre and hits a part of the world, not the whole map. The seasonal floor no longer cancels them out entirely in winter.
- Slot congestion has teeth. Over-filling an hour at an airport now costs you on-time performance, licence compliance and reputation.
- Alliance feed pays on passengers actually carried, not seats offered. An empty aircraft no longer earns what a full one does.
- The airport popup could sell you route licences — international, ETOPS, polar, short-field, high-altitude — that your airline held no certification for. Route authority now fails closed.
- On-time performance persists across save loads. It used to reset and read 0% for a simulated week every time you loaded, which quietly blocked any certification gated on it.
- Career launches from a country with only one qualifying airport are blocked at setup. They were an unwinnable soft-lock: domestic-only start, no licensable route, therefore no route to international authority, ever.
- Certification programmes count down in days rather than weeks, and the catalogue quotes durations in days too.
- Route dashboards and the simulation now agree on cabin mix. The panels were estimating against a leisure-heavy default instead of the route's real mix.
- Reported operations status now takes the worse of the delay and cancellation bands. A calm origin with a storm-bound destination could read "minor" at a 53% cancellation probability.
- Autosave was re-serialising the entire save around 60 times a second — roughly 8ms per frame at 150 aircraft. Now at most once per second.
- The main menu shows the build version and an Early Access notice.
- Music re-encoded — the download is 40MB rather than 76MB, same 35 minutes of audio.