Run a global airline. Grow your fleet, lay routes, and keep every aircraft flying through storms, groundings and surprise repair bills. Choose Easy, Medium or Hard.
Be first to $9,000,000 in cash, or hold a connected network of 10+ hub-to-hub routes across 3+ continents.
How to play: rules, scenarios and tips
Starting a new game will erase your saved progress.
3D globe by globe.gl & three.js (MIT) · Credits & licenses · Terms · Privacy · Refunds
How this is calculated: each airline's current routes and aircraft are flown forward 1,000 times using the game's real spinner odds, fees, repair costs, hub feed and hub competition. The dashed line is the typical (median) result; "fast" and "slow" are the 25th and 75th percentile outcomes. It assumes no new routes or aircraft are bought, rivals' networks stay as they are today, and problems are fixed as they appear. Real games will differ because players keep expanding — treat it as a guide, not a guarantee.
Mayday Control isn't just a game — it's meant to put you in the seat of the people who actually run an airline. Every decision mirrors one made for real, every single day, across the industry: the CEO weighing expansion against risk, the COO keeping a fleet reliable without bleeding cash, maintenance engineers and dispatchers managing MELs and Airworthiness Directives under pressure, revenue managers watching what rivals are doing at a shared hub, and network planners deciding where a new route actually makes sense.
If you're thinking about a career in aviation, we hope this sparks real curiosity about the industry's complexity and the problem-solving it demands. If you already work in aviation, we hope it's a fun, honest reflection of just how many moving parts — literal and figurative — go into keeping an airline in the air.
2–4 players (human or AI) each run a competing airline on a shared global route map. Buy routes, grow your fleet, keep it flying, and out-compete the others to win.
New to Mayday Control? Read The basics first, then the tab for the level you want to play. Each level has its wheel odds, worked scenarios and tips. You can open this guide at any time during a game with the ? button at the top.
The 3D globe is built with globe.gl by Vasco Asturiano, three-globe and three.js, all open source under the MIT License. Earth imagery: Blue Marble, courtesy of NASA. Full notices are in LICENSES.txt.
Run an airline better than your rivals. You win by reaching $9,000,000 in cash first, by Dominance (a connected network of 10+ hub-to-hub routes across 3+ continents, 3+ aircraft, the whole fleet airworthy, held for 3 turns in a row), or by being the last airline standing.
| Short route up to 1,500 km | Medium route up to 4,100 km | Long route | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buy the route | $15,000 | $50,000 | $100,000 |
| Most it can pay per flight | $20,000 | $80,000 | $200,000 |
An extra aircraft costs $400,000 and a spare part $50,000. A grounded aircraft costs $50,000 every turn. Repairing at an MRO station instead of using a part costs $30,000.
Every airline begins with $1,000,000 and a single widebody jet. On your first turn, click any city on the globe to set it as your home base.
A single aircraft can only earn so much. Buy additional aircraft, assign each one a route, and use "Fly all assigned aircraft" to send your whole fleet out in one click each turn rather than flying planes one at a time.
There's no fixed set of routes — you design your airline's network. The map has about 46 major hubs (shown in capital letters on the globe and marked ★ in the city lists). Any two hubs can be linked, as long as they're within an aircraft's range of roughly 14,000 km. Every other city is a regional city: it can only be linked to a hub within about 1,500 km (or, for the most remote cities, to the nearest hub).
Distance sets a route's class — short (up to 1,500 km), medium (up to 4,100 km) or long — and with it the price to buy it and the most it can earn per flight. When you pick a destination, the list shows each option's distance and cost.
Real airlines work the same way, a model called hub-and-spoke: short regional flights carry passengers into a hub, where they connect onto long-haul flights. A long flight between two hubs is only as full as the passengers feeding it. A hub-to-hub flight earns 50% of its normal revenue if you have no regional routes at the hub it departs from, rising to 100% once you own 4 of them. Each direction is measured at its own departure hub, so a route needs feeders at both ends to be full both ways. The routes that count are short links from the hub to nearby regional cities, and they cost far less than the long flights they fill. Regional routes themselves aren't affected. The game points out an under-fed hub the first time it costs you money, shows each route's feed percentage when you assign an aircraft, and the lightbulb tip suggests the cheapest route to fix it.
Routes themselves stay exclusive — only one airline can own a given city pair. But if a rival operates any route touching one of your endpoints, your revenue there is diluted, compounding with each additional rival present. Buying into a city a leader depends on is a real way to slow them down, not just grow your own network.
A shared bank of 40 spare parts serves every airline in the game. Clear an open MEL for free with a part from your own inventory, or pay a cash fee at an MRO station instead. MRO stations are marked on the map and also where Airworthiness Directives force a diversion to.
Trade routes, aircraft, or spare parts directly with another player for an agreed cash price — useful for untangling a network or helping (or striking a deal with) a rival.
If your cash goes negative and you have no routes, aircraft, or parts left to sell off to cover it, your airline is eliminated.
Tap the lightbulb icon any time for a contextual strategy tip based on your current situation. Click a route name (such as BOG-GRU) in the fleet table to see what share of that route's maximum revenue it is earning, why it falls short, and what to buy to earn more. The chart icon next to the gauges opens a window showing every airline's cash over time and where each is headed if its network stays as it is. Major events — lead changes, hot streaks, hub competition, Dominance progress — get an on-screen announcement with spoken audio, while AD diversions and under-fed hubs open a pop-up that waits for you, and the full event/flight log on the right tracks everything that's happened in the game.
The simple version: no STAR auctions and no fuel prices. Problems are rare and the AI airlines play cautiously, so you can concentrate on building a hub-and-spoke network. A built-out 4-aircraft network typically reaches the target in about 13 turns.
A steady mix of repair bills, groundings and surprises, plus STAR deals. A built-out 4-aircraft network typically needs about 31 turns. No fuel prices.
From round 3, an announcement may appear between rounds: a sponsorship or supplier contract. Every airline places a sealed bid (minimum $5,000, or pass). The highest bid wins, pays its bid and everyone sees the winning amount. A deal can be held up to 2 at a time.
Constant groundings, repair bills and storms, STAR auctions (the same ones as Medium, described below), and fuel prices. A built-out 4-aircraft network typically needs about 76 turns, and bankruptcies are common.
From round 3, an announcement may appear between rounds: a sponsorship or supplier contract. Every airline places a sealed bid (minimum $5,000, or pass). The highest bid wins, pays its bid and everyone sees the winning amount. A deal can be held up to 2 at a time.
| Fuel index | Fuel cost | Fuel recovery in fare | Net from fuel |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.70 (crash) | $19,500 | $42,600 | +$23,100 |
| 1.00 (normal) | $27,900 | $42,600 | +$14,700 |
| 1.40 (spike) | $39,000 | $42,600 | +$3,600 |
A half-revenue MEL flight earns only half the recovery but burns the same fuel, so those flights can lose money on fuel; that balances out with the clean flights over time. If you own a contract at $5,150 a unit, every unit costs $5,150 whatever the market does: you win when fuel spikes and lose a little when it crashes.