Contract board
Multi-leg jobs — freight or passengers. How to take one, fly it, and get paid.
Contract board
Menu → PRIVATE → Contracts.
A contract is a chain of two to six flights that starts and ends at your base. You are paid when the whole chain is done, not leg by leg. This is the main way to earn on this site.
Freight or passengers
Both. Which you see depends on what your airline actually flies.
Fly for KLM, Air France Virtual, SAS Virtual or Transavia and your board is passenger work: scheduled services, charters, tour groups, sports teams. Fly for FedEx, Martinair or ASL and it is freight. Challenge Air Cargo does both, and its board shows both in roughly the proportion its schedule does.
Nobody configured this. Each contract is built from real flights, and a flight already knows whether it carries people or pallets.
A chain never mixes the two. It is flown by one aircraft, and no aircraft carries passengers on one leg and pallets on the next.
Why bother
An ordinary flight pays a few hundred dollars. A contract pays several times that for the same hours in the air.
The catch is the word whole. Fly five legs of a six-leg chain and you have earned nothing.
Reading a card
Each card shows the chain as a diagram: airport codes with distance and load between them — tonnes for freight, passengers for people. Legs you have flown turn cyan.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Your pay | what lands in your balance |
| Freight value / Ticket revenue | what the customer pays the airline |
| Chain bonus | multiplier for finishing — grows with legs |
| Distance | the whole chain |
| Deadline | hours left before it expires |
| Reputation | what completing it is worth |
| Heaviest leg / Fullest leg | the biggest single load in the chain |
Your pay is not the revenue. The revenue is the airline's — out of it come fuel, handling, navigation and parking. Both numbers are shown because hiding one would be dishonest.
How your pay is worked out
You are paid for time, not for what is in the hold:
hours in the air × $337 × aircraft class × difficulty × chain bonus × your level
A wide-body pays 1.7× a narrow-body. Difficult loads — pharma, VIP — pay up to 1.25× ordinary ones. A six-leg chain pays 1.45× a two-leg one.
This replaced a share of the freight value in August 2026. Under the old rule a short pharma run paid twenty-six times more per hour than a long general-cargo one, which nobody had intended. Every multiplier above is deliberate, and the widest gap is now under three times.
Empty legs
A freight chain sometimes ends with a leg marked empty. That is not a fault: there is not always cargo going home, and it is an honest part of freight work.
Passenger chains never have empty legs. An airliner flying empty is a ferry flight, not a job.
The filters
Across the top: Type, Cargo, Legs, Max distance, Min payout, Sort.
Only what I can take is the most useful one. It hides contracts your reputation does not reach and contracts your fleet cannot lift. Without it you will see jobs you cannot accept.
Locked cards
Three different locks, and they mean different things.
Needs reputation N — you are not trusted with this load yet. Fly well and it opens. See Reputation.
Your fleet carries N t — no aircraft in your airline can lift the heaviest leg. Reputation will not fix this; a bigger aircraft will.
Your largest cabin seats N — the same thing for passenger work. The chain needs more seats than anything your airline operates.
A card can show more than one. Then you need all of them.
Taking one
Accept does two things: the contract becomes yours, and the first leg is booked for you automatically. You will see that booking in Active Bids.
One contract at a time. Deliberate — a deadline you can ignore by starting something else is not a deadline.
If Accept refuses, the message says why in plain words. The most common one is that you already have a flight booked.
Flying the chain
Fly the legs in order. As each report is accepted, the next leg is booked for you.
A leg counts when three things are true:
- The report has been accepted, not just filed.
- The route matches — same departure and same arrival.
- The aircraft can carry the load.
The flight number does not have to match. Fly a different service on the same route and it still counts — the cargo does not care which flight number moved it.
When a leg does not count
You will see a red block on My contracts and on the dashboard, saying exactly what went wrong:
Expected EBLG → EGSS, your flight was EBLG → EDDF.
B738F carries 23.0 t, this leg needs 24.5 t.
B777F has no passenger cabin — this contract carries 174 people.
The contract is still yours. Fly the leg properly before the deadline and it counts. Nothing is lost except time.
Deadlines
Set from the real flying time in the schedule, not from the number of legs. A 722 nm out-and-back gets about a day; a 7288 nm crossing gets over two.
The clock runs while a report waits for review. If reports on this site are reviewed by hand, allow for that.
Miss the deadline and the contract fails: no pay, and reputation drops.
Giving up
Drop contract on My contracts. It asks first, and the button tells you what it costs before you press it.
A dropped contract counts as failed and does not go back on the board. Otherwise you could take and drop all evening, cherry-picking the easy ones, and the deadline would mean nothing.
Dropping costs less than missing the deadline. That is on purpose: dropping is honest and lets the freight go to somebody else.
Where contracts come from
They are built from our real schedule — actual flights, with aircraft that actually serve those airports. Nothing is invented. That is why a contract is always flyable with the fleet you have.
The board refills every hour and holds around forty per airline.
You only see contracts from your own airline. That is what makes choosing an airline a choice.
