This is the second post in Road to playtest, our short series on the systems we are hardening before founding members get the release/1.0.0-playtest build on 17 July. Post #1 covered Brand. This one is about Crew.
Most airline sims reduce crew to a number you have to keep above zero. In Skyline, crew is an operating screen with four tabs, individual people with careers and certifications, collective agreements you negotiate, and a hiring market that reacts to wage pressure. If you cannot staff a fleet, those flights do not dispatch. The screenshots below are from a live save at the Frankfurt am Main Crew Center (FRA hub). Same UI that ships in the playtest branch.
Four tabs, one crew center
The Crew screen is organized per hub and splits into four tabs:
| Tab | What you do there |
|---|---|
| OVERVIEW | Read coverage, readiness by fleet, recovery forecast, and operational impact |
| PEOPLE | Inspect individual crew: careers, certifications, performance, upgrade readiness |
| CONTRACTS | Manage collective agreements, labor health, and union sentiment |
| RECRUIT | Hire from the live market, by batch or candidate by candidate |
Crew is hub-scoped. Frankfurt has its own crew center, its own coverage, its own contracts. A surplus at one base does not automatically paper over a shortage at another.
OVERVIEW · coverage and readiness
The Overview answers one question first: can you fly your schedule? Frankfurt sits at 100% coverage, 1033 of 1030 qualified crew, with 1092 / 1092 flights supported and no operational constraints.
Coverage is not a single pool. Crew readiness breaks down by qualification, because an A320 captain cannot crew an A350:
| Cohort | Qualified |
|---|---|
| A320 pilots | 285 / 284 |
| A350 pilots | 80 / 80 |
| Narrowbody cabin | 426 / 426 |
| Widebody cabin | 242 / 240 |
The recovery forecast projects coverage six months out (NOV through APR here, all 100%) so a shortfall shows up before it grounds a flight, not after. The recruitment pipeline tracks applicants, training, and qualified crew in flight, plus 1034 available in the market. Crew morale sits at 50% with salary as the lever you can pull.
The point of this tab is early warning. Green here means Dispatch never trips over a staffing gap. Red here means flights start falling off the board.
PEOPLE · careers, certs, and upgrades
Every crew member is an individual, not a fungible unit. The roster sorts by rank and fleet; pick anyone to open a full dossier.
Here is Diego Ruiz, Senior Captain on the A320 family at Frankfurt Hub:
- Career timeline: joined 2019 as Senior Captain, A320 rating same year
- Certifications: A320 ✓, A350 ✗, Instrument ✓, Recurrent Sim pending, Captain Upgrade ✓, Instructor ✓
- Last 90 days: 14 flights operated, 62 block hours, 2,000 passengers, 99.7% reliability
- Current assignment: Frankfurt Hub, A320 Fleet, Available
- Upgrade readiness: top of ladder, 3,000 / 3,000 hours, leadership 73, training completed
Certifications are what make a crew member countable toward a fleet’s readiness. The A350 ✗ on Diego’s card is why he shows up against A320 coverage and not A350. Enroll Type Rating is right there on the dossier: invest in the rating and you widen who can crew your widebodies, at the cost of training time and pipeline capacity.
Upgrade readiness turns your roster into a promotion pipeline. The hub rail tracks promotion candidates so you grow your own captains instead of buying every seat on the open market.
CONTRACTS · the labor relationship
Crew are not just a cost line, they are a counterparty. Each group (Pilots, Cabin Crew) runs under a collective agreement with its own term and health.
The Pilot agreement is STABLE, 48 months remaining, paying 1.12× the market rate. The detail breaks down into things you can actually move:
- Labor health: satisfaction 59, driven by Pay (+12), Schedule (+6), Training (+0), Fatigue (+0)
- Contract pressure: LOW, market rate 100%, your rate 112%, next renegotiation Nov 2023
- Union sentiment: 96% crew support, no current labor risks
- Contract timeline: signed 2017, fleet expansion 2019, expiration 2023
The right rail keeps market conditions in view: pilot market at 118%, cabin at 113%, inflation 4.2%, training demand low. Pay 112% in a 118% market and you are below market, which is exactly the kind of slow squeeze that turns a stable agreement into a grievance spike by the time renegotiation comes due in 2023, four years out.
This is the tension we want founding members to feel: underpay and satisfaction erodes, sentiment drops, and eventually contract pressure forces a costly renegotiation. Overpay and you are burning margin Finance needs elsewhere.
RECRUIT · a live hiring market
When your own pipeline cannot keep up, you hire. Recruit has two modes: Batch Hire for filling readiness gaps fast, and Hiring Market for picking specific people.
Filters cut the market by category (Pilots / Cabin), rank (First Officer / Cabin / Lead), and rating (A320, A330, A350, 737, E-Jets, narrowbody). Twenty candidates are available in this snapshot, each with a base, a pay ask relative to your contract, and availability.
The candidate dossier for Louise Morel shows what you are actually buying:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Rank | First Officer |
| Age | 24 |
| Flight hours | 851 |
| Salary demand | ~€12k/mo (+5% above contract) |
| Signing bonus | €6k |
| Background | Seeking growth |
| Prior employer | Volotea · NCE |
Each candidate carries a pay premium over your standing contract (here +2% to +15%). Hiring above your collective rate is the fast way to fill a gap, but it feeds straight back into labor health on the Contracts tab: pay newcomers more than your incumbents and satisfaction notices. Hire → FRA drops the candidate into the Frankfurt crew center and updates coverage immediately.
How it all connects
Crew is not a standalone screen. It is wired into the rest of the sim:
- Dispatch can only fly what Crew can staff. Readiness gaps become unflown flights.
- Finance carries wages, signing bonuses, and training cost. Contracts set the run rate.
- Brand reads crew morale and operational consistency into the Service component of reputation.
- Fleet decisions create crew demand: order A350s and you need A350-rated pilots before they earn.
What is still rough
Honest scope for playtest:
- Crew morale modeling is functional but coarse; the inputs that move it are still being tuned for readability.
- Batch Hire works but the optimizer that picks the cheapest valid set to close a gap is still being refined.
- Fatigue is tracked on contracts but its feedback into reliability and recovery is conservative for now.
- Crew does not yet have a dedicated video slot in the playtest walkthrough. This post is screenshots until we film the upgrade and renegotiation flows.
We want founding members to stress-test the squeeze: underpay into a renegotiation, let a fleet outgrow its crew, hire a wave of premium captains and watch the labor health react. That feedback shapes what we polish between playtest and Christmas 2026 early access.
What’s next in this series
Road to playtest #3 will cover another system on the July build shortlist. Founding members: register for your Steam key before 17 July.