Most airline sims hand you a dropdown. Pick A350, click Buy, it shows up in your fleet next month.
That’s not how it actually works. Boeing and Airbus build a handful of widebodies a quarter, slots get booked years out, and airlines fight each other for delivery positions. Prices swing by tens of millions per airframe depending on who you are and what kind of mood the salesperson is in. Cabin configurations lock in stages. Financing is its own animal, and the choice you make up front shows up in your P&L for the next decade.
We wanted Skyline to put you inside that process instead of abstracting around it. Here’s what we built.
Production slots are a market
Manufacturers have real capacity. The A350 line we model for the 2018 scenario builds about 15 aircraft a quarter. The A320 family does 60. ATR 72s come off the line at 6.
That capacity isn’t sitting there waiting for you. When a scenario opens, the order book is already partially full of historical orders. Delta, Lufthansa, Singapore, Emirates bought what they actually bought, with firm orders and options layered onto the right years. So when you browse the catalog, you’re looking at what’s left.
We aggregate the view by year first because that’s how fleet planners actually think. 2018 shows 15 of 15 A359 slots open at $359M each. 2019 has 50 of 60 left at $342M. 2020 has dropped to 25 of 60 at $349M because the AI competitors have been busy.
Drill into a year and you see quarter-by-quarter. Drill again and you see individual slots. Q3 2020 has 10 of them, each delivering on August 15 at $349M with 19 months of lead time.
The filters do what you’d expect: manufacturer, generation, size class, production status. “Next-gen widebodies that are still in production” narrows the catalog to the aircraft you can actually buy today.
You’re not the only buyer
Every January, the AI airlines run their own fleet planning pass. They look at their network growth, demand forecasts, and cash position, and they claim slots from the same order book you’re working from.
We cap their claims at 60% per (manufacturer, type, year) so the player always has room. The AI tends to bid on far-future slots two to five years out, which leaves decent near-term inventory if you move quickly. Players who option early and convert later tend to do well. Players who drag their feet open the catalog one January and find every 2018 A359 already gone.
Scarcity matters here. A 2018 A359 is still $359M with 15 of 15 open at scenario start, but wait a year and you might be looking at a higher price, a later delivery, or a compromise aircraft.
Negotiation is a real conversation
Once you’ve locked a slot, you negotiate price.
It’s not a slider. It’s a turn-based back-and-forth, and where you land depends on the manufacturer’s attitude toward you, how many orders you’ve placed before, where the market is, and how many airframes you’re buying.
Manufacturers fall into one of four moods: Strategic, Cooperative, Aggressive, Dismissive. A first-time customer at Airbus is a different conversation from an airline with 15 orders under its belt. Boom markets give the manufacturer less reason to flex. Recessions open them up.
The screenshot above is from a player with 15 prior deals. Airbus is in Strategic mode toward them and has flagged the relationship as Trusted Partner. The predicted range says they should land somewhere between $260M and $292M, saving $25M to $57M. Those numbers come straight out of the engine: relationship trust running through current market conditions and the personality of the salesperson on the other side.
A live negotiation runs in rounds. The manufacturer opens at $273M, 14% off list, generous because of the relationship history. You see what they’re offering, where you sit on their walkaway/counter/accept curve, and a form with five things you can push on: price, deposit, free options, delivery flex, cancellation fee.
If you want to move fast, there are quick-counter buttons at -5%, -10%, and -15%. Each round costs the manufacturer some patience. How much patience they have to start with depends on their type. Strategic partners stay at the table. Dismissive ones walk if you push hard.
You can skip negotiation entirely and pay list. We won’t stop you. But a 10% discount on a $317M aircraft is real money, and players who skip on every order leave hundreds of millions behind across a long save.
Financing options
Once the price is locked, you decide how to pay.
In the real world, financing isn’t a checkout step. It’s arguably the most important strategic decision after the order itself. More than half the global commercial fleet is on operating lease. Delta and United run sophisticated capital structures across cash, debt, and leases. Capital efficiency tends to matter more than absolute cost.
We tried to make that real. The four paths on the screen each map to a different philosophy:
Cash is for the airlines that can afford to act like Emirates. Pay $273M up front, own the aircraft, no monthly commitments, no counterparty to worry about. The cost is what you can’t do with that $273M afterward: new routes, hub investment, growth.
Finance Lease is the slow build. $2.2M a month for 144 months, with $3M down and $324M total over the term. At the end, the aircraft is yours. You’re trading a 12-year cash commitment for ownership equity, and you’re carrying that commitment through whatever downturn shows up.
Operating Lease is what most modern airlines actually run. Same monthly cost, but at the end you hand the aircraft back. You’re paying for flexibility. When the market shifts, you’re not stuck with residual value risk. Ryanair and Wizz Air run lease-heavy fleets for exactly this reason.
Sale-Leaseback is a capital trick. You buy the aircraft, immediately sell it to a lessor at near book value, and lease it back. Net cash impact is roughly zero, but the asset is off your balance sheet. Airlines use this when cash gets tight or leverage needs to be restructured.
Behind those four paths sits the lessor market. In reality, about five major players own most of the world’s commercial aircraft. We mirrored that with five archetypes:
- Aviation Capital Group (Major, conservative): big book, careful underwriting, less willing to budge
- AerCap (Major, aggressive): the biggest real-world lessor, willing to deal for volume
- SMBC Aviation Capital (Premium-backed): bank-backed, premium pricing, solid terms
- Boutique Lease Co. (Boutique): small player, willing to compete on price for portfolio diversity
- Bohai Leasing (Emerging-market growth): emerging-market backing, geopolitically flexible
Same aircraft, different rates. AerCap might quote $2.3M a month, SMBC $2.5M, on identical airframes and identical 12-year terms. That spread compounds. An airline running 30 leased aircraft with the wrong lessor can be burning $70M+ a year extra for no real reason.
You can take a lessor’s quoted terms, or open a negotiation against them. Same turn-by-turn system, just with the lessor on the other side. Successful deals build trust. Burning a lessor in a negotiation costs you on the next quote.
Where it really gets interesting is lease return. Every operating lease has a return condition floor, usually “good.” When the term ends, we check the aircraft’s actual state against that floor. Hours flown, cycle count, maintenance history, physical condition. Come in under and you eat redelivery costs, roughly 4% of list price per condition step below floor. Return early and the lessor remembers.
This is where the choices you made while operating the aircraft start mattering financially. Fly the lease hard, defer maintenance, push utilization past design parameters, and the redelivery bill at term end is going to hurt. Maintain it carefully and you get most of your security deposit back. The financing decision you made up front only looked cheap if the operational decisions downstream actually supported it.
There are two more financing paths sitting in the engine that we haven’t shipped to the UI yet. Enhanced Equipment Trust Certificates, the dominant capital-markets instrument for US carriers, basically tranched secured debt backed by aircraft. And Export-Credit, government-backed financing from the manufacturer’s home country, used heavily by international carriers buying Boeing or Airbus. Both will land in a later update with their own counterparties.
Configuring the cabin like a real airline
This is the part where Skyline goes somewhere most sims don’t.
Step 3.1 puts your A359 on a real fuselage. 221 inches wide. The premium-heavy four-class config in the screenshot lays out 336 seats: 4 First at 78-inch pitch, 36 Business at 60 inches, 35 Premium Economy at 38 inches, and 261 Economy at 31 inches. The Tallies panel reports this is 21 more seats than a typical A359 config (+7%), with a yield multiplier of ×1.17 and no fuel burn penalty over the baseline engine option.
The seat map shows what matters operationally:
- Doors at the right fuselage positions (1L/1R, 2L/2R, 3L/3R, 4L/4R)
- Galleys at the front and rear of the cabin
- The wing box as a structural constraint mid-cabin where seats can’t go
- Class boundaries computed from your mix and pitch (First takes row 1, Business 2-10, Premium Economy 11-15, Economy 16-46)
- Abreast variation per class: 4-abreast in First and Business, 7-abreast in Premium Economy, 9-abreast in Economy
Change the class counts and the seat map redraws. Push pitch up or down and rows expand or contract. The Tallies panel shows the impact in real time: total seats, deviation from typical configuration, yield multiplier, fuel burn delta.
If you don’t want to do this yourself, hit Skip Configuration and we apply defaults based on your brand archetype. We’re not going to make you build seat maps if you don’t want to. But if you want a high-density LCC layout or a premium-heavy long-haul, the tools are here.
The next sub-steps (3.2 through 3.4) cover engine variant selection (each with its own fuel burn and maintenance modifiers), ETOPS certification, and crew rest provisions for long-haul.
What it adds up to
You place the order. Cash leaves your account. The aircraft enters your delivery pipeline. Eighteen months later, or however far out the slot was, the airframe shows up at your hub ready to fly its first rotation.
Now do that 20 to 100 times across a 10-year campaign. The decisions compound:
- The manufacturers you build relationships with shape every future negotiation
- The financing mix you pick shows up in your cash flow and balance sheet
- The configurations you choose determine yield and route eligibility
- The timing of your orders decides whether you fight for slots or have your pick
Real fleet planners agonize over this stuff. We wanted players to have the same surface to push on, because the choices are interesting in a way most sims don’t let them be.
Skyline is in development. We’re aiming for early access in 2027.
If this is your kind of sim, the Discord is where the build gets shared first: discord.gg/HsqucsgsGd
You can also sign up for the newsletter at skylinesim.app.
the skyline team