davedave

If I remember rightly, lease costs are directly proportional to depreciation, so the balance between depreciation and leasing is always the same. It's still most cost-effective to lease planes until the cost-to-purchase hits zero. (And it's a lot of effort for very little extra money, with a proper spamline). Depreciation rates only change the time that takes to happen. 

It's also on one of the aircraft info pages. Not the one that shows profit/loss, seat changes, etc. The other one.

Base maintenance isn't really a problem unless you're running a very marginal airline. One or two planes in a family should cover it fairly easily, three or four and it becomes unimportant.

Very early on when starting an airline, it's just about worth thinking about - but only to the extent of e.g. deferring the first deliveries for a couple of weeks to get a couple of planes together, or to get them at the start of a month instead of the end.

With the discount for a big order, and only paying 50% deposit, you're looking at about $3-4bn laid out up front. That's not even a lot for non-spamlines that have been running a while. Anyone up near the top of the leaderboards is sitting on $100's of billions in cash at a minimum. Top spots are usually over $1 trillion, and often several times that - certainly, my biggest airline has had> $1bn DOP, enough to pay for that in a day or two.

The main restriction at LCY in real life is the steep glide-slope required to land there. Which I believe is tied in with the tight noise controls - planes spend less time low over residential parts of London, that way.

In practice, if you actually could land and take-off with a 747D there, you could fill every seat on cross-channel hops. So at least that side of things is OK in game