Roadmap.
Where SkylineSim is, what's coming next, and what's deliberately out of scope.
Last updated: May 25, 2026 · Refreshed as the work shifts
SkylineSim is a single-player airline simulator built on real aviation data. Drop into any year from the 1950s through 2026 and run a carrier from founding to wherever you can take it. Steam early access drops Q1 2027; private playtest rings run in the months before.
Below: what's in the game today, what's coming next, and what's deliberately not in 1.0.
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Where the game is today
A working airline simulator with twelve production screens. You can drop into any year from the early 1950s through 2026, found a carrier, build a network across multiple hubs, run the operation day by day, and live with the long-arc consequences of your fleet, crew, and capital decisions.
What's in the game right now
- Operations
- Multi-hub network with secondary-base ramp-up. Per-day rotation generation. Cancellation cascades, curfews, slot binding, weather. Auto-scheduler that turns frequency changes into concrete flights. Tails are pinned to their home base, so where you build crew determines what routes you can fly.
- Fleet
- Seventy-plus aircraft types with real specs (range, MTOW, runway, seat layouts). Cabin configurator with first / business / premium / economy mix and class buy-up. New, used, and lease markets, each with their own counterparties. A, C, and D maintenance checks with real cash impact when they fire. Dispatch reliability degrades as airframes age. Stochastic AOG events.
- Commercial
- Passenger demand split into segments (business, leisure, VFR, connecting), each with its own timing patterns through the year and week. Market share decided by a nested choice model: travelers pick direct or connecting, then pick a carrier, with frequency dominance, schedule fit, and connection penalties all in the mix. Per-route fare-elasticity curve showing the revenue-optimal and profit-optimal price points before you commit.
- Ancillaries
- Per-archetype ancillary stack. ULCCs charge for bags, carry-on, seats, priority, food. Legacies run lounges and loyalty programs. Lounge network ROI per outstation. Loyalty tier ladder with financial summary. Brand fee constellation comparing your pricing posture against the carriers you actually compete with.
- People
- Pilot and cabin headcount per hub. Type ratings, currency tracking, recurrent simulator. FAR-117-style duty caps with eight-hour minimum rest. Union contracts with pay multipliers, grievance and strike pressure, and auto-escalation when you ignore them. Per-crew morale that drives attrition when pay falls below the market. Monthly payroll actually debits cash. Country-specific pay scales (a US captain costs different money than an EU captain).
- Money
- Real per-airport landing fees and ground handling for sixty-five major airports, with size-class fallback for the long tail. Eurocontrol per-country navigation charges, US ARTCC, and oceanic fallback. Fuel cost from BADA-style burn against historical Jet-A prices. FX exposure across currencies, with forward-contract hedging. A fourteen-line cost stack covering fuel, crew, maintenance, landing, navigation, handling, catering, distribution, insurance, capital, depreciation, overhead, taxes, and marketing. Capital structure from founder equity through IPO. Cap table, debt obligations, governance events, investor pressure.
- Competition
- Sixty-five-plus catalogued European carriers plus the major US and world airlines, all running under the same simulation rules you do. They open and close routes based on profitability, defend their hubs, react to fuel shocks, and go bankrupt when they overextend. Your moves draw responses.
- World
- Macro time series from 1950 through 2026: fuel, FX rates, GDP, interest rates. Two hundred-plus airports with coordination levels and slot capacity. Period-realistic regulation, so the 737 MAX directive grounds your MAX tails in March 2019 until it lifts, and the GTF engine recalls in 2023 sit your A320neo utilization down on a sliding scale. Per-route event modifiers for tournaments and shocks (Euro 2024 lifts Munich demand, the 2018 fuel spike hits everyone). When a currency crisis hits, the political and trade-flow cascades that follow ripple through demand, route rights, and competitor behavior, not just FX rates.
- The console
- Twelve production screens: Finance, Orders, Schedule, Fleet, RoutePlanner, Relationships, Intelligence, Route Authority, Certification, Hedging, Crew, Operational Slot Market. World map built on Mapbox with ambient AI carriers and your network drawn over the top. Six-step founding wizard from founder archetype through filing. Industrial design language, near-black with cyan accents, dense and restrained.
What you can't do yet
- Codeshare and interlining. Every carrier in the game operates as a standalone today.
- Cargo as its own business. Belly revenue scales with capacity but doesn't compete with passenger demand.
- Reserve crew on standby. You can't keep a buffer crew ready for disruption today.
- Four-pilot augmented crews for ultra-long-haul. Long-haul double crewing is collapsed to two or three pilots today.
- Forward visibility on heavy maintenance. The D-check fires and you find out then; there's no upcoming-checks strip on the Fleet screen.
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Now
Three threads in flight: surfacing engine work that's already correct to the screens you'll actually use, adding forward visibility into things you currently only learn about after they fire, and landing the connecting-passenger model that makes hub-and-spoke quantifiably different from point-to-point.
- Connecting bank dashboard
- The connecting-traffic engine has been live for a while: it scores your hub on bank quality, awards a demand uplift when your wave structure is tight, and adjusts dynamically as you change frequencies. The dashboard that surfaces that to you is the next screen to ship.
- World events timeline
- Regulatory alerts already surface in the right rail, but a dedicated screen showing every active world event (regulation, macro shocks, demand modifiers) would make the world's volatility legible at a glance instead of as a ticker.
- Lounges on the world map
- You can build a lounge network today. You can see its ROI per outstation in the Lounges panel. What you can't see is the geographic shape of it on the map. That overlay is short work and changes how the lounge investment reads.
- Forward maintenance visibility
- An upcoming-checks strip on the Fleet screen so you can plan around the D-check that's coming, not react when it lands. Today you find out heavy maintenance is firing the day it grounds the tail; that's about to stop.
- AOG and dispatch inspection
- When a tail goes AOG, the engine knows why. You currently only see the outcome chip on the Schedule. The next surface exposes what the dispatcher sees: which tail, which check or component, ETA back in service, what it cascades into.
- Connecting passenger flows
- The current connecting boost is a hub-quality multiplier on demand. The deeper version is a proper nested logit over origin-via-hub-to-destination itineraries, with S-curve frequency dominance baked in at the segment level. This is what makes hub-and-spoke quantifiably different from point-to-point, and it's the next piece of demand-side depth landing in the build.
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After that, before early access
Bigger pieces that don't block a playable build but deepen what you can do once you're in it.
- Cargo operations
- Belly cargo exists as revenue today; combined and dedicated freight as a fleet strategy, with its own demand, its own market, and its own competitive dynamics, is a bigger lift that lives here.
- Crew depth
- Reserve duty, four-pilot augmented crews for ULH, real cross-hub positioning instead of "everyone goes home overnight," and per-jurisdiction union differences instead of one global shape. Type-rating prerequisites (must be Captain to train widebody).
- Codeshare and partner operations
- A real partnership system between carriers, so the major alliances and bilateral codeshare agreements you see in the world today translate into actual shared-revenue, shared-frequency play. A partial gate already exists; what's coming is the full apply / validate / route-into-choice-set wiring.
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Private playtest rings
Three internal playtest rings run between now and launch. Invite-only, no public dates. The first ring lands in Q3 2026 with about 100 testers focused on the core loop: found a carrier, build a network, run it for a few years, see whether the long-arc decisions land the way they should.
Invitations go to people who joined the Discord early and engaged substantively, people in the engine-feedback program with aviation or revenue-management domain expertise, and active community contributors. Subsequent rings (about 200 testers, then about 500 to 1,000) widen the bench as the build stabilizes. Sign-ups happen in the Discord when each ring opens.
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Early access on Steam
Public Steam early access launch in Q1 2027. The Steam wishlist campaign opens six to nine months ahead, with a trailer.
The bar for the public launch is a game that's calibrated, balanced, and stable enough that someone buying it for the first time gets the experience the roadmap promises. The private playtest rings before it exist specifically to make that bar real.
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What we're deliberately not building
Clear no's to prevent scope creep. Each could be reconsidered for a 1.x update. None of them block early access.
- Multiplayer
- Not in 1.0, probably not ever. The point of SkylineSim is to be the best single-player airline simulator. Multiplayer is what AirlineSim already does well.
- Real airline names and liveries in the base game
- Base game ships with fictional carriers. Real-world names and liveries will be supported through mods. Deliberate licensing decision.
- Full modding and scenario editor
- Mod hooks for liveries and names, yes. A full scenario editor is 1.x material.
- Within-day yield management
- Time-of-day routing and per-flight yield optimization. The day-level model already captures most of what matters; the flight-by-flight depth is deferred.
- Working capital and accrual accounting
- Beyond the current cash ledger. Receivables timing, payables aging, full T&E modeling are out of scope for EA.
- No-show and overbooking dynamics
- Real depth that's deferred. The current model assumes the seats you sell are the seats that fly.
- Hedging products beyond fuel forwards
- FX options, collars, basis swaps. Fuel forwards are in; the rest is post-launch.
- MRO subsidiary management
- You run an airline, not a maintenance subsidiary.
- Aircraft manufacturer mode
- You're the airline, not Boeing or Airbus.
- 3D cockpit or flight-sim integration
- Different game.
- Real-time weather APIs
- Climatology-based weather, not METAR/TAF feeds.