The aircraft manufacturer names are now dynamic, and follow historical changes.
There have been various mergers of aircraft manufacturers throughout the history and this new small feature aims to model these changes. The update is part of the fleet commonality v.2.0 update, and with this change we can make the fleet commonality bonuses work even more accurately than before.
Example #1: Dornier and Fairchild-Dornier were previously separate manufacturers in the database, but have now been merged, with a name change from Dornier to Fairchild Dornier in 1996 following the buyout. This allows you to benefit from fleet commonality manufacturer bonuses if you fly Dornier 328 and Fairchild-Dornier 528/728/928.
Example #2: In 1997 Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merge, thus all McD
aircraft are being manufactured by Boeing after that date. However since
there is no actual manufacturer commonality involved, since both
companies retained their own production lines and systems, there is no
manufacturer bonus in fleet commonality for opearating B737 and MD-80
series after the merger, but you do get a bonus for operating B717 and MD-80/90 ( = situation remains the same as before the
merger).
Example #3: Bombardier sold the Cseries development to Airbus in 2018, thus creating the Airbus A220. The manufacturer name changes only for this aircraft series, and not for other Bombardier aircraft models.
The update does not affect the aircraft model names, so even though Boeing buys McDonnell Douglas, the aircraft model names remain as McDonnell Douglas MD-82 etc.
The
British aircraft manufacturer name changes are not yet modelled since
all what happened there in 1950s to 1970s is rather complicated. There
might be also some other omissions in the data, but please let us know
and we'll update.
Added exception to fleet commonality calculations: If the fleet group has more than 1 aircraft in total, AND all of them are for sale, except for one-two aircraft (which are not for sale), AND those particular planes are in maintenance AND have zero routes, then they do NOT count for fleet commonality. This (rare) case happens when you are selling your entire fleet in the used market, but need to keep the C/D checks valid. Previously the single plane in maintenance of the otherwise inactive entire fleet would have created commonality costs even though the fleet was not in operation, and change is made to not create unnecessary costs of a fleet that you do not actually operate.
Bankruptcy and airline closure news listings improved. The Airline News feed at Dashboard shows a bit more information of each closed airline, such as the CEO's username, airline HQ airport (among other bases), and number of aircraft per each base, base's opening date (incl. airline founding date for HQ), and the possible alliance membership of the airline, and also the fleet listing of the airline (fleets in operation, for sale, or long-term storage; not those that were leased out). [change applies only to pages of v.2.0 code, thus manual airline closure via Office->Bankruptcy doesn't yet post this type of expanded news]
The new salary calculation rules will be also in effect in Airline Generations and The Age of Flight game worlds, refer to changelog dated 31st Jul 2025 ("Game Balance Updates").
Fixes
Base airport selector did not show correct airports when opening a new base for airline based in the French "departments".
Filtering by individual aircraft model in Manage Routes -> Destination View did not work.
Airline bankruptcy news did not always show up at the Dashboard's Airline News feed.
Game clock (time of day) calculation in one internal backend function could have exceeded 23:59, putting some game news into the wrong game date.
For extremely large airlines, the staff management interface at Office -> Personnel page was limiting the amount of staff you could hire manually (UI limit).
Aircraft Information listing page showed the "age" of aircraft that were already scrapped.
Tuned the game world's initial airport slot growth mechanism to make sure the standard slot amount is reached after two full game years (steady growth at random dates during this period).
The e-mail template at the main website is updated to be more mobile-compatible, and better formatted across different devices and e-mail clients.
The main website e-mail templates are now dark-mode compatible (depending a bit on your e-mail client).
Updated the layout of the in-game billing notification/warning emails to show the relevant information more clearly.
AirwaySim newsletter is updated with a new more mobile-compatible layout with dark-mode support (similar to other site e-mails).
Account activation and password reminder processes at the main website improved with additional security layers and technical improvements.
User account inactivity checks re-activated. The system will send a reminder mail to keep the user account alive if it has been inactive (no logins) for more than 180 days. A second reminder is sent at 270 days, and the account closure happens automatically after 360 days of inactivity. The email includes a direct one-click link to retain the account activity status. (n.b. unactivated or otherwise "pending" accounts are removed faster without separate reminder e-mail)
Some other technical improvements and changes to the login handling at the main website. The login session timeouts after 60 minutes of inactivity (no clicks) if the
"Always stay logged in"
checkbox was not checked.
Improved the handling of our anti-spam ban list (provided by 3rd party) to avoid false-positives.
Fixes
Fleet Commonality page grouped data incorrectly for fleet groups with multiple different manufacturer names (e.g. data for McDonnell Douglas MD-81 and Boeing 717 were shown twice); did not affect cost calculation, UI display issue only.
Newsletter subscription button did not work at My Account page.
Automatic login timeout handler did not always work properly, and could have booted the user out even he was active at the site.
Dornier 328JET separated to its own fleet group (with significant partial commonality benefits with the prop-D328 group). This update is only effective for any games starting from August 2025.
Salary calculation rules updated. The salaries are now based on the cost/salary levels of each base country instead of the HQ country. This update is only effective for any games starting from August 2025 (update may be added to other running games later; not decided yet).
Cost calculation of route-specific marketing campaigns updated. The cost is now based on the cost/salary levels of the base airport the campaign relates to instead of the airline-wide cost/salary levels.
Adjusted the opening dates of following airports to be 1950-01-01 instead of their actual opening date of 1951-1952 to be in line with the custom setups of all recent ultra-long game worlds (unrealistic change, but done for playability): Johannesburg, Helsinki - Vantaa, Moscow - Sheremetyevo.
Slightly adjusted partial fleet commonality bonuses for several fleet groups (within Airbus, Boeing, Fokker, Ilyushin, Piper and Saab).
Various code structure changes to keep up with our coding standards.
Updated several 3rd party backend systems and libraries.
Content Security Policy (CSP) configuration updated to the site.
Improved cleanup of some old data in the backend processes.
Fixes
Nagoya airport was not properly configured to relocate to the new airport.
Corrected some missing fuel supplier companies in the long games.
Added "Idle Fleet Types" rule to Fleet Commonality.
A fleet type is considered idle (and exempt from commonality costs) if both of the following conditions are met: a) No aircraft of the fleet type are assigned to any active routes AND b) The oldest aircraft in the fleet type was delivered no more than 45 game days ago.
This grace period ensures flexibility for airlines adding or returning fleet types (e.g. from leases from other players) without incurring immediate costs.
This change is now "live" in all games apart from "Airline Generations" and "History and the Future". The change will apply to these two games next week - please check your idle fleets before that.
THE NEW COMMONALITY FEATURES ARE BEING
IMPLEMENTED TO ALL RUNNING GAME WORLDS, APART FROM THE CURRENT MODERN
TIMES GAME, GRADUALLY OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS.
New features
Partial Commonality feature ("Fleet Similarity Bonuses") added. Similar models, such as A320 and A330 can now benefit from cost savings based on similarity between fleets.
Fleet Commonality Calculator feature added. This feature allows you to simulate how adding or removing aircraft types would affect your airline’s monthly fixed costs.
NOTE: THIS FEATURE IS CURRENTLY ONLY AVAILABLE IN THE NEW AGE OF FLIGHT SCENARIO.
The whole code for calculating the commonality costs has been fully rewritten (AirwaySim v.2.0).
The biggest change is that once you add a new fleet, the costs of the other fleets stay as they are already - there are no sudden and hidden jumps and the whole system is more predictable. However, there is a new "Fleet Count Bloat Factor" that starts to increase all commonality costs company-wide mildly and logically from the third fleet type onwards. In other words we still have the disadvantage-factor of operating too many fleets, but it now behaves and scales totally differently than before for better realism.
The overall commonality related training and maintenance costs are thus lower than in the past version.
The costs are calculated on a "base cost per fleet type" + "per-aircraft cost in fleet" manner, so operating one single aircraft is relatively more expensive than operating for example 10 aircraft of the same fleet.
Another notable change for realism is that all your aircraft in operational state ( = even the ones with no routes) count towards the commonality costs (since the costs for having the ability to operate the aircraft naturally start when the aircraft is in your possession). Aircraft in long-term storage are still free of all commonality related costs.
The training costs are now calculated in a more realistic manner based on the actual crew numbers needed by the fleet. (This includes also a rather significant bugfix where flight crew numbers were not correctly taken into account by the old commonality model, and thus you will see lower training costs in v.2.0 fleet commonality.)
Aircraft size scales now the costs properly, and is based on the fleet's Size Class (1-4) and the fleet's average size (MTOW).
Training and Maintenance costs have a new internal "Efficiency Factor" that gives you benefits of scale, i.e. large fleet brings the overall costs per aircraft down, in a similar way the Admin costs have already been in the old version.
Aircraft's fleet-specific "Maintenance Cost Factor" is also taken into account, basically giving cost advantages to more modern fleet types.
There is a new "Base Bloat Factor" that increases costs if your fleet is spread to different base airports since they each need their separate support facilities. Naturally if you operate a single fleet at a single base only, no such bloat exists for that fleet's costs.
Costs for small airlines are made a bit lower overall (up to airlines with a fleet of 10 planes or less) to help with the start-up phase.
A new "partial commonality bonus" will be introduced in the next update round of this feature.
The User Interface is also new and v.2.0 mobile-compatible. This will be fine-tuned with more improvements soon, with for example a "commonality calculator" feature.
Other New features
Website's main news system is upgraded to a new publishing system (no visual changes to user interface at this stage).
Improvements
Adjusted a bit the cargo-conversion rates by AI Used Aircraft Brokers (less frequent now).
Minor usability improvements to text editor in airline/alliance description & notepad.
Improved the in-game single-page loader (SPA) where the backend notifications won't load if the page is left open/idle for a long time.
Core website now includes a better detection of temporary and disposable e-mail addresses, also additional anti-spam services added to registration and forum posting.
System now purges unused user accounts more effectively and earlier.
Made some re-organization to some backend files and assets for better management.
Updated Credits store's backend libraries due to security policy changes.
Alliance invitation menu now makes sure the airline is not listed as a possible invitee if it shares HQ/base with any other existing alliance member. (n.b. this does not apply to alliance application from the applying airlines' side since this still within the old UI)
Fixes
Low Credits balance e-mails were being sent out too often.
Notifications of in-game messages did not always pop to the main navigation's notification balloon.
Scheduling page's search data became sometimes corrupted preventing the page load.
Alliance icon of an alliance still in founding state ( = not yet offically formed) showed up in route planning's airline schedule listing.
If an aircraft was in long-term storage and a model conversion (e.g. to freighter) was performed, and the plane was taken out of the long-term storage while the conversion maintenance was still ongoing, the D check included in the conversion was not being performed. Fixed by disabling the long-term storage removal while conversion maintenance is ongoing.
Airline Description, Alliance Description and Airline Notepad have a new text editor, allowing you to style the text with basic styling such as bolding, underlining, centering and lists.
Improvements
Improved a few error messages in the core website.
Technical improvements to the handling of modal dialog windows in the new UI.
Updated again some backend libraries.
Fixes
Oversupply warning did not reset if route was "cargo only".
Route Editor did not show correct payload limitation in the very rare case of route having an additional technical stopover airport where route payload limitation was caused by runway performance at the second leg departure airport and where the aircraft in question had an internal engine/weight fuel usage performance multiplier other than "1.0".
Game Time to Real Time tooltip info conversion was not correct at New Aircraft ordering page.
