To operate a successful airline in AE, just follow this guide, and your airline should be fine.
First tips
1. To get an idea of how to operate well, take a look at some good airlines in your country.Easyjet and Thomson are a couple of many good examples. However, please note that around 95% of passengers decude based on price in AE, not the quality of the airline, although this does have an effect on your pricing,
First step.
Go into the IFS bar. Just note that the headers when you enter are clickable.
a good ifs.docx 173.5KB 59 downloads
2. Create an IFS similar to the one shown above. It is your choice whether you wan't average quality free snacks or paid high quality snacks, but the free option will be slightly detrimental to profitability.
3. Create a route through the route research. Look at the picture below.
spam ifs.docx 186.71KB 34 downloads
Later on, when your airline has the money(you start with $7 million), you may wan't to order additional aircraft, or look on the used market. The used market has older aircraft, but at this stage, you don't have the capital for owned 787-10 aircraft.
Make sure every route has enough demand to feed the aircraft you are using. The route above, for instance, isn't going to feed an A380. But make sure the aircraft can take off from BOTH airports. If you stick to this, your airline will become successful very quickly. However, you may wan't to cut the payroll and reduce reserves at the start, as payroll is one of the things many startup carriers struggle to cover, my recommendation is to reduce all reserves to 10% and to reduce pay rates to just below industry average.
4. Select the right aircraft. While spelunking the used market, don't buy every aircraft you see, click on the type link(the model), to see some statistics of the aircraft. To figure out whether an aircraft is efficient enough, use the formula fuel flow divided by passengers, then divide the speed of the aircraft by the result. A result of above 6 suggests a highly efficient aircraft if the aircraft is a jet, however, turboprops are usually much more efficient than this.