Money
Your balance is at the top of the dashboard. Everything that touches it is written down in the journal, with a reason.
How you earn
Ordinary flights
Rate per hour, set by your rank, multiplied by block time. A six-hour flight is worth a few hundred dollars.
Better ranks pay better rates, and some aircraft types pay more than others. Menu → Company → Ranks shows the ladder.
Contracts
A contract pays you for your time, not for what is in the hold.
This distinction matters and the board shows both numbers:
| On the card | What it is |
|---|---|
| Freight value / Ticket revenue | what the customer pays the airline |
| Your pay | what lands in your balance |
Out of the revenue the airline pays for fuel, ground handling, navigation charges and parking. None of that is yours, and none of it is taken from you.
Your pay is worked out like this:
hours in the air × $337 × aircraft class × difficulty × chain bonus × your level
| Multiplier | Range | Why |
|---|---|---|
| aircraft class | 0.7 – 1.7 | a wide-body is more aeroplane |
| difficulty | 1.0 – 1.25 | pharma and VIP are not ordinary loads |
| chain bonus | 1.05 – 1.45 | six legs is more commitment than two |
| your level | 1.0 – 1.15 | loyalty to one airline |
A typical contract works out around $4,400 — several times an ordinary flight of the same length.
This changed in August 2026. Before, you got 6% of the freight value. That sounded fair and was not: freight value grows with cargo and distance, and the fixed part of the rate was spread over the few hours of a short leg. On the live board it meant anything from $112 to $2,953 an hour, a gap of twenty-six times that nobody had designed. Paying for hours makes distance and cargo irrelevant to your wage, which is how real crews are paid.
Your level adds up to 15% — see Reputation.
What it adds up to
At two or three contracts a week, a million takes around a year and a half of steady flying.
That is intended. Money you cannot help accumulating stops being worth anything; money that takes a year means something when you have it.
Where it goes
Type ratings
You cannot fly what you are not rated on. A rating is a course in the Academy and it costs real money — from $20,000 for a turboprop to $150,000 for a 747.
Whether you pay or the company pays depends on your reputation. At 40 it covers half, at 70 all of it, and in return you fly some hours for us. The course page shows the exact figures before you enrol.
Induction and theory courses are free.
Recurrent training
A rating does not last forever. Every 180 days it needs renewing, at about a fifth of the original cost.
This is the running cost of being a pilot here. The more types you hold, the more you pay to keep them. Someone rated on three aircraft spends roughly $8,500 a month just staying current.
If you stop paying, the rating lapses and you stop flying that type until you renew it.
JumpSeat
Moving yourself to another airport without flying there costs money. Check Price before you press Travel.
Pilot Shop
Menu → Company → Pilot Shop. Optional items. Nothing here affects your flying.
Reading the journal
Menu → Pilot Center → My Reports, or the finance section, shows every line with a memo attached.
Contract lines are worded so they explain themselves:
Contract pay: 10.2 h at $337/h, wide x1.70, pharma x1.25, chain x1.12
— CTR-CYYT-CYYT-OVE-... (loyalty x1.03)
If a line ever looks wrong, that memo is what you quote when you ask.
If a contract did not pay
It happens, and it is designed to be recoverable rather than silent. Payment is deliberately separate from counting the legs, so that a failure in one cannot undo the other. The worst case is "legs counted, not paid" — annoying, but fixable in one step by an administrator.
Tell them the contract reference. They have a button for it.
