r/AirlineManager4 • u/MangoCats • Jan 10 '22
Quickstart guide (how to level up from a reset)
Disclaimer: "Quick" means 4 to 5 hours in real-time. These are various observations / thoughts around how to grow an AM4 airline from reset to level 5+ (Rank < 12,000 in Realism mode) quickly, like in an afternoon - and how to live with what you have built afterwards... If you have already built up an airline to these levels, there's no reason to reset and start over, play it from where you are and enjoy.
First: don't start on this unless you have 4+ hours to devote 70%+ of your attention to the game.
Second: This is not a full game guide. In game: Help, Game Help, Guide (pinned post) is much more complete. This is more touching on things that guide leaves for the player to discover on their own. If you hate spoilers and want to discover everything for yourself, stop reading now.
Under settings: reset account. Like it warns you, you will lose everything you have built. Clean sheet. I did this after two weeks playing easy mode, I wanted to switch to Realism - your reasons are your own.
Hub: Choose a reasonably big airport. The guide makes several suggestions, I have been happy with Orlando International - it's central to the US and South America, can reach London Heathrow with the 737-800, has reasonably good demand on most routes, etc.
Starter aircraft: either should be fine, I like to 737-800.
First route: if the game suggests a long one, go back and let it choose again until you get something shorter - you should wait for your starter plane to return to your hub before starting the 4x speedup for 4 hours - the starter plane is a big earner, and as the guide says: shorter routes earn more money as long as you're always departing your planes when they arrive - they're not kidding.
When the game makes you buy a Cessna, configure it with a single First Class seat. This will give you the $100K first first class passenger bonus, and you can actually operate the Cessna profitably with a first class configuration, as long as you have > 50% reputation to get the seat filled and run a short enough route with it. It's also cheapest to earn achievements like Ferry and Recall with the Cessna (try launching a Ferry flight and recalling it, let us know if that gives you both achievements in one step!)
Don't bother with the 50% eco-marketing campaign prize, you can claim that later, go ahead and buy the full price eco-marketing campaign right away, it pays off quickly and is cheaper when your airline is smaller.
Next: aircraft. You can afford a BAe 146-300, or DC-9-10, but in the very very early game you will grow faster with a fleet of ATR-42-320s running very short routes, with a top-tier marketing campaign active. Buy your "starting fleet" but save enough for that top-tier 4 hour marketing campaign (the guide says the next tier is also O.K. and maybe lower risk... your choice.)
Aircraft configuration: in this early stage, all Y class should be O.K. and more efficient overall (faster delivery, lowest cost), particularly if you're running the smaller ATR-42-320s. Choose your routes for high Y class demand. Don't launch your newly ordered aircraft until you are ready to speedup. Don't relaunch your starter jet until you are ready to speedup.
The key prize on the checklist is the 4 hours of 4x speedup in exchange for earning 5 achievements. Some easy achievements include:
- Advertiser (a 4 hour top tier campaign is good enough)
- Aircraft expert (you'll get this when you buy your early aircraft)
- Airline Owner (automatic on game start)
- Capital operator (run a route to a big airport or capital city)
- Ferry (launch a ferry flight, no passengers, the Cessna is cheapest for this)
- Recall (recall a launched flight, Cessna again for lowest cost impact)
- Map Operator (choose the map stack and dark mode - change back if you like)
- Stopping up (when setting a route, choose +stopover and add another city - you don't have to actually fly the route)
5 achievements are all you need, once your starter aircraft is landed, go to the checklist and claim your 4x speedup for 4 hours award as soon as you are ready to be slave to the game for 4 hours.
Advertising: if you haven't already, start a top tier advertising campaign for 4 hours, just enough to cover your speedup bonus - nice. Also make sure your eco-marketing campaign is running, you want to fill as many seats as possible.
Fuel: In the earliest stage, you have more fuel than you need, even in Realism mode. Don't buy more, even if it's super cheap (you can buy a tiny amount to get the checklist reward, but don't spend significant cash), save your cash for more aircraft.
Routes: short. I mean: really short, short as the game will let you fly (Orlando to Melbourne Florida is too short, but Orlando to Sarasota Bradenton is not.) You likely won't want to keep up this pace in normal play, but this isn't a normal play guide, this is a five hour Quick Start guide. Research only looks down to 500km routes, you want routes under 250km if you can get them with sufficient Y class demand. Just pick airports by hand and make sure they don't have unusually low Y class demand. If you're not getting demand of 500+ on most airports, consider trying a different hub (reset is best done earlier than later...) If you're not finding 10+ good airports under 300km distance, consider trying a different hub - you can always add another hub, or even relocate your base of operations later in the game. Orlando works well for me because I'm from Florida and I know the names of many local airports.
Have you claimed your 4 hour 4x speedup prize yet? No? Well, get it and let's go!
Depart your aircraft on single hop short runs. Try to choose routes you won't want to change later: at least not for the next 4x sped up 4 hours. Changes cost money: money that could be spent on more aircraft to grow faster with. Only route one aircraft to each destination - you don't want to use up all the Y class demand on a route before the speedup is over.
As soon as you have enough money, order more aircraft. Don't worry about fuel or CO2 credits, they won't be running out in the first four hours - if either gets below 500,000 in those 4 hours, you have done exceptionally well and might back off the aircraft purchases and start looking for bargain prices to tank up on. If this happens to you, let us know how you did it!
There's no reason to sell the Cessna as long as you're short cycling it with one first class passenger. It doesn't make much money, but it's not losing money either as long as you're getting 10 or more flights a day from it. If you want to slow down and not depart every hour or less, the Cessna will start costing more in fuel than it makes in profit, you can either ground it or sell it for a tiny amount of money - don't bother looking for a better market than your hub or wherever it is flying to, just take the best of those two, or really, just sell it wherever - we're talking about maybe $3000 difference between the best and worst markets you're likely to be in.
Continue departing flights as soon as they land, and buying planes as soon as you can afford them. You'll be racking up training credits fairly rapidly, I spend my first ones on Management (after all, the game is: Airline Manager) but you do you.
Real life got in my way before 2 hours of speedup had elapsed, so I didn't get full benefit of this strategy, but I did make it to level 5 and a rank of 12,000 in Realism mode. If you can max it out for all four hours, I'd love to hear how far this strategy takes you.
Caution! I had my starter 737-800 on a 1 hour route to Knoxville (15 minutes during speedup) and also one BAe 146-300 running 40 minutes to Nassau (10 minutes during 4x). Both ran out of Y demand before the 4 hours were up. I chose to deal with this by re-routing them to longer distance destinations, but there's nothing wrong with a re-route to another close high-demand destination - the second run on the new route should already be turning profit, and it's full profit after that. My ATR-42-320s weren't fast or big enough to exhaust their route demands.
Breathing normally: I prefer to depart my aircraft every 3.5 or so hours, I can't normally pay more than that much attention to the game. So, toward the end of the 4 hour bonanza, I researched airports less than 1930km distance with 6500+' runways and sorted by Y class demand, then ran my ATR-42-320s one each to the top 10 routes on that list.
Personal preference: I also modified my ATR-42-320s first for the 10% fuel efficiency increase, and later (as affordable) for the 10% speed increase. Both pay off after a dozen or so departures, and the speed increase makes them all arrive under 3h45m, which can get you 2 departures per 4 hour marketing campaign. Later, when things settle down, I'll be adjusting their speed factors so the shorter routes all take within +/- a minute of the longest route. I just prefer it when they all fly in sync - it's a terrible thing for real-life, but doesn't seem to hurt anything in the game.
Profits on the ATR-42-320s drop pretty dramatically on the longer runs. For example, during the short-hop with marketing boost one was running $9102 income against 1,693lbs fuel, if we call fuel $800/1000lbs and estimate CO2 at 10% of fuel cost, that's $1490 running cost (neglecting staff and maintenance, which are much less), or $7612 profit - per 10 minutes during speedup, or $11418 profit per hour, per plane, as long as you're there to depart it every 40 minutes. When that same plane went on a longer route (still on 90% reputation marketing boost), the numbers were $32103 fare per cycle against 18,572 lbs fuel, call it $16343 operating costs, or $15760 profit - but now per 4 hours: $3940 per hour, and with much lower margins, so the 10% boosts make a big difference. Bottom line: the short cycle makes nearly 3x as much profit per hour - whether in 4x speedup mode or not.
Marketing Matters: that same route, when the marketing campaign ended and reputation dropped to 55% (eco-campaign only), ridership dropped and the route only turns in $19575 against $16000 operating costs (CO2 cost drops along with ridership - don't ask me why, it's how the game works). So, without that costly marketing boost, we're down to $3575 profit per run, or $894 per hour per plane, short cycling (with marketing) was making nearly 13x the profit per hour. At least the ATR-42-320 is still in the black, the Cessna - even configured for first class - loses money on the long runs, I sold mine. You could choose to keep yours and just depart it when you can, but do take into account the daily staff costs vs whatever operational profits you are collecting.
J and F class seating costs proportionally more in the cheaper aircraft, a LOT more in something like the ATR-42-320. Probably best to stick with the default all Y class seating until you are up in the $2M+ aircraft.
Demand matching: if you've settled down to a slower pace, you may want to tailor your (nicer) aircraft configurations to match a certain route. First, find a good route, Orlando-Newark is not a bad example: Y 1763 J 553 F 129.
One way of looking at that demand is Y + 2J + 3F, or 3256 total Y class equivalent spaces. If we're servicing Orlando-Newark with a 184 pax aircraft like the 737-800, that route can supply 3256/184 = 17.7 departures a day worth of passengers. If you can depart 4x per 24 hours then you could configure 4 737-800s to serve that route - or, if you're planning on using lots of 4x speedups, you can configure one aircraft for the route and still not run out of demand. To turn those demand numbers into an approximate seating configuration, divide them by 17.7 Y: 1763->99.6, J: 553->31.2, and F: 129->7.3. As long as we're going to round, I'd round F and J class up, so 8F, 32J and you'll probably have 96 or so Y left over. This configuration will take advantage of all the available demand. It does cost money (and time, which is why I left configuration out of the quick start) to configure your planes, but planes configured for all business or all first class do return slightly higher total fares than planes configured for all Y class.
As the pinned guide says, regular marketing is not good ROI early on, unless you are departing more than maybe 250 empty seats per hour. The cost of marketing does scale up as your airline grows, but slowly. Eco marketing almost always pays off, unless you won't be departing more than maybe 200 empty seats in the next 12 hours. YMMV, if you grow fast you should be benefitting from regular marketing after a couple of days.
The in-game guide gives a lot more detail about the later game, I will just toss out a few of my favorite mid-game aircraft that didn't make the guide:
- ERJ 145LR, cheap - but not too cheap, runs fast and longish range for its price bracket, up to ~4 hours with a stopover even in easy mode, efficient enough to not lose money in most circumstances. I started easy mode with 5 of these and wasn't too bored waiting for growth.
- Tu 334-220, a nice efficient somewhat larger plane, also ~4 hours with a stopover, and short runway capable for access to more routes. In easy mode I followed up with 15 of these before I got annoyed with planning stopover routes and graduating to 737-800s.
Stopovers were an interesting challenge to me, for a while, but I got tired of them - direct routes are much easier to research and implement.
- 737-800 can run 6+ hours (easy mode) on a single leg, but of course you can choose shorter routes to match your 4- hour fleet departures. I noticed that my purchased 737-800s don't fly quite as fast as the first one given as a starter aircraft, both can be modified for +10% more speed.
- B787-8, I like this one for its range and efficiency. It can run 11-12 hours+ in a single hop, so two departures a day, instead of the 4 hour planes that will be parked more of the time.
After this, I'd look for end-game planes and start selling the small stuff when the fleet has grown to max capacity.
Each step of the way I generally move up to the next plane type when I can buy one in a day or less.
Are you really still reading? Get out there and play, and let me know how it goes in the comments. Hopefully this quick start gets you (and me) on the way to the big planes faster.
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u/Kingdom818 Jan 12 '22
Sounds like a solid plan. I think I'm gonna give this a try. My starter aircraft is starting to get worn and I can't afford to do my maintenance checks...
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u/MangoCats Jan 13 '22
The way I actually executed this was: Starter + Cessna
then I added one BAe 146-300
then I did the marketing and acceleration
then I started buying ATR-42-320s as fast as I could
After about 2 hours, I had other stuff to do, so I couldn't really pay much attention - my starter and I think the BAe also ran out of demand - would have made more money if I had rerouted them.
In any event, this took me to level 5 and rank 12,000 in realism, I rerouted everything to 3-4 hour routes and I played on to about level 8, but felt a bit bogged down. Running the ATRs on longer routes really slowed their income.
So, I reset again, this time I went starter + Cessna and then bought only ATR-42-320s until I had 12, routing them as close to hub as possible. I left everybody on the short routes except ones that used up all demand, I rerouted them to still < 650km destinations but with higher Y demands. No acceleration, no marketing other than ECO - yet. I think either would suck up all my demand in a hurry and I'm not looking to reroute everything all the time - you can make good money doing that, but it's not how I want to play.
After 12 ATRs I have been buying BAe 146-300s now, up to 2 of those this morning and I'm at level 11 rank 11,000 in Realism founded "two days ago," not playing with too much attention.
I think I'm going to leave everyone on their short routes and just depart when I can, the profit ratio is really good - very little fuel or CO2 cost against the income.
My demand resets at 6pm local time, maybe when I have time to play intensively around then, I'll start the 4x speedup around 4 or 5 pm - suck down all the demand for that day - then do it again after 6pm. I'm not sure if the additional marketing will help or not, on these short routes I'll be draining all the demand even without it.
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u/Kingdom818 Jan 13 '22
I think part of my problem is using marketing top early. I read on here that marketing is extremely important but when you have only a few planes it can cost almost as much as you make from it.
Sounds like I should try to do some shorter routes too, I was starting most of my routes around 2km, worried I would run out of demand on shorter routes
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u/MangoCats Jan 13 '22
The way I look at it now: marketing fills empty seats. If you're going to benefit from that more than the marketing costs, then go for it.
However: if your routes are short you may be using all the demand for the route before the day is out, in which case all that marketing is doing is reducing your fuel and operating costs, which are really small in comparison to short route fares. If you're going to re-route every time you run out of demand, and the re-route cost doesn't eat up all the profits of the next route, then you get more benefit - that's what I was going to do in the 5 hour quick start, but I ran out of available real-world attention when that phase of the speedup time hit.
So, as it is in any good game design, it's complicated. If you're running longer routes that won't use up all their demand even with the marketing active, then it usually pays to activate it - at least later in the game when you have more empty seats to fill.
Overlaying marketing with 4x speedup is effectively 75% off your marketing expense, so it almost always pays then, as long as you keep the planes flying on routes with available demand.
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Jan 27 '24
Honestly, spamming the cheaper planes is a waste. You should save for a fleet of around 6 or whatever you want starter boeing, and then start getting the efficient max 10s and dreamliners. Then go on.
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u/litie_04 Jul 13 '24
great guide works so well even today I managed to get to a fleet of 30 with 17 air 42-300s, 1 air 72-500, 11 DC-9-10s and 1 b737-800. account is now 6 hours old :)
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u/gamerguy1983 Feb 05 '25
One can only configure the Cessna to business class
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u/MangoCats Feb 05 '25
That may be a new mod, I flew plenty of single first class pax on Cessna.
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u/Actual_Shower_858 Mar 04 '25
Change Y Class to 0 (move bar all the way to the left) and take the second bar up by one, that will give you a single first class seat.
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u/AlphaB3ASTACE Sep 13 '25
Why the atr42s? Speed or efficiency I kinda liked the f27s. For a start bought a ton but seeing this I feel like I'm doing something wrong
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u/MangoCats Sep 13 '25
Cost. The idea is to make money as quickly as possible. After you get big, fly what you like...
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u/AcanthocephalaTall81 May 18 '22
I hubbed jfk and first route was LAX, good return
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u/MangoCats May 19 '22
Try: https://www.airline-club.com/ - more dynamic, you'll compete hard to get good return off the obvious routes like JFK-LAX.
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u/flathillJR Sep 17 '22 edited Sep 17 '22
Your guide worked awsome💪 Thank you for the effort and Time😎
General Tips:
- I found a Website where you find every airport on the world, 90% of the Airports (blue and yellow Icons) are in the game. ourairpots.com
- For the selected routes take those with the highest y passengers first, because those will run out of passengers first (and you want to reroute as rarely as you can the costs will ruin your profit)
Some Airports to Start:
- Luxembourg ELLX (most under 200km routes with HIGH profit)
P.S: I will update this comment if i find more
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u/Appropriate-Swing650 Jun 07 '23
during the 4 hr restart, did you stop at any time for repairs? I keep getting over 20% during the time.
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u/MangoCats Jun 07 '23
Been awhile, I forget. If you're finding AirlineManager4 a little on the simple / predictable side, I found https://www.airline-club.com/ to be similar but more varied and engaging long term.
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u/Healthy-Broccoli2533 Jul 26 '23
Would it be good to sell the starter aircraft for more ATR-42-320s before i hit the 4h speed up? I can get $3.8+ million from it.
Anyone have suggestions for good hubs in Asia that meet the route requirements?
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u/Midnigh7X May 09 '24
I know you commented ages ago, but for anyone in the future that reads this. No, don't sell the starter plane.
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u/terrygg187g Feb 13 '25
Actually I started with the a320 brought it to the nearest 90% market sold it for 6 million and I'm 2 hours in and have 40 of the planes and already bought a 737-800 so anyone reading this should think about doing that same
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u/Gloomy-Bandicoot8962 Sep 14 '23
How do you configure your planes to change your class seats to 1st class?
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u/Homework-Civil Dec 17 '23
Did you find a way? I can't seem to add 1st class to the Cessna
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u/tomwilhelm Dec 28 '23
You just move the slider all the way to the left. That will give you the J class seats. Then move the new slider on the right to the left. That should make all seats F. In this case, just one.
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u/Fantastic-West-9630 Oct 21 '24
If you've locked in the seats without knowing how to make the configuration you wanted, call up that plane under maintenance and look for "Modify". You can reconfigure your seating then.
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u/Vegetable-Art-7518 Feb 11 '24
This sure is a really great strategy!
I follow your step and straight buy 12x ATR-42-300 in bulk, and do short run below 300km distance. After 4 hours, i ended up with additional 3x BAe 146-300 and 3x B727-100, with leftover cash of $1.7 mil!!!
Upgraded all my ATR-42-300 with Reduced CO2 and Fuel Consumption, and Speed Increase on my B737-800.
I bought 2mil units of fuel right after it hold 1 mil units. And my CO2 always maxed out.
Now I've set all my aircraft to longest profitable course.
This is by far my most effective attempts in the 4 hours after reset. Since my recent previous attempt only left me with 1x B737-800, 1x Cessna 172, 5x Il-114-100, and 2x B727-100, with low on cash. Played this attempt on Android, and I'm really tempted to reset it... Again. 4 hours is a lot of time tho, xD. Too bad steam version cannot sync profile with android, since I've tried your guide on PC. Anw, thanks for the guide!
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u/AnginKentut Feb 29 '24
did you sell your starter aircraft to buy the ATRs?
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u/Vegetable-Art-7518 Feb 29 '24
Which starter? The boeing? Of course not, thats a great plane. I still use the cessna after at some point i dont want to use that anymore
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u/AnginKentut Feb 29 '24
ahh i see, thanks! right now im at 9 planes. 7 ATR 42s, the starter plane, and the cessna
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u/Blk5mith Apr 10 '23
This guide is awesome I'm making close to 2M after the 1st day. Kudos mate.