Airport BillionAir - Airport management & strategy

Welcome, Pilot! Let’s get started on building your Airport empire today!

You’ve just completed your training at Pilot Academy and have been assigned your very first airport to oversee, which unfortunately isn’t in great shape. It’s practically one pothole away from legal trouble!

Your mission, along with your team, is to rejuvenate this airport and turn it into a highly profitable venture! You will undertake various tasks to upgrade your terminal by creating new businesses, expanding your fleet of aircraft, hiring staff, and generating revenue to improve other airports globally!

Are you prepared for departure? From here, you can rise to become an Airport BillionAir!

ASSEMBLE AIRCRAFT

Build your fleet, choosing from numerous options ranging from vintage Bi-Planes to massive Jumbo Jets!

BUILD BUSINESSES

Grow your airport by establishing new amenities like Vending Machines, Coffee Shops, or Souvenir Stores. It’s not only about tapping; be strategic to maximize profits and elevate your airport's status!

COLLECT CREW

Streamline operations at your airport by hiring fresh Staff members to boost cash flow. Recruit and enhance unique employees for your airport, including Pilots, Service Personnel, Flight Crew, and others!

YOUR AIRPORT ON AUTOPILOT

Passengers are flying around the clock, but don’t worry, your team is there to manage the airport and generate income while you’re not present!

MANAGE AN INTERNATIONAL HUB

Create exciting new airports in bustling locations through our special limited-time events that are on the way!

*** Become the wealthiest idle pilot worldwide with Airport BillionAir! ***

Familiarizing With The Interface

The top of the screen will show your guide’s avatar and your current level; tapping on the icon or the portrait will open the game menu. This part also displays your current resources: Cash, Passengers, and Review Stars.                        

Menu and Resources Overview

The game menu will show you Options which will give you a means to contact support, check Airport BillionAir’s compliance to EULA and privacy policies, a general guide, and set your preference about downloading game data.

Mail will have any communication from the devs to you, which will usually be about updates; you can also backtrack there when your first day in the game was. Vault will indicate the time buffer in which your cash inflow will continue even when you are offline. The Vault will be a service that would be unlockable in the early phase.

Cash – your main upgrade resource. Cash is earned by your amenities as you use them to serve passengers. Upgrading your amenities will cost cash. Reviving or unlocking amenities will usually require a lot of cash. In cases where your current cash is not enough to unlock something, the game will be nice enough to give  you a time estimate on how long you have to wait based on your cash flow.

Passengers – the number of passengers your airport have served. Like cash, this resource also grows over time, but will not be capped by a similar vault mechanism; this means they will continue to accumulate no matter how long you’ve been offline.

The number of flight routes dictates your passenger flow. Upgrading your amenities will require a certain passenger count; treat this requirement as a proof that there is a need to upgrade—if there have not been enough passengers yet, why would you even upgrade, right? The game will also gladly give you an estimate amount of time on how long you have to wait to serve a certain number of passengers if your current count is not sufficient for an upgrade.

Review Stars – the positive ratings your airport receives for its services and amenities. Passengers will periodically leave star ratings for your amenities. Amassing reviews will improve your airport’s overall reputation which will attract new employees—your airport staff and flight crew. Thus, Review Stars are used to recruit or promote your employees.

The bottom of the screen will have five tabs or panels which lets you to navigate through to key features. from left to right, you have Aircraft Routes, Staff Lounger, a switcher to Airport Map and Control Room views, New Airports, and the Duty Free.                                                                     

Aircraft Routes

As the main point of an airport is to accommodate aircraft, the Aircraft Routes section allows you to open your airport to more routes and you can open up to six routes in your first airport. Opening routes will mean that there will be more planes that will travel to your airport. Naturally, as there will be more traffic, there will be more passengers which will bring you more income.

Once you have unlocked a route, you can tap on the plane that represents it to check its efficiency output. On the image below is a preview of the Flython where we can see its passenger capacity and cycle time. The details suggest that it brings 15 passengers to your airport every 4 minutes. Routes can be upgraded to increase their efficiency. Some upgrades will decrease the “cycle time” or increase the number of passengers per cycle.

Promoting an Airport Staff can multiply the earnings of the amenity they are in charge of or increase the speed of each cycle; promoting Flight Crew can increase the number of passengers they can carry per flight or make them complete each cycle time faster. 

Each promotion will ask from you two requirements: 1) earn a certain number of Review Stars and 2) have enough cards of that particular employee. Unlike cash, passengers, and Review Stars, employee cards are technically just random drops whenever you open suitcases—and they are only available as task rewards (this is something we will discuss later).

If you are itching for an immediate promotion and do not wish to bank on luck, you can “buy” your way through it which will make you spend diamonds. Technically, diamonds are the most valuable and rare resource, they are earnable in the game and you can also purchase as much as you want using real currency. The number of requirements also increases as you progress your employees’ levels.

Airport Map and Control Room

Thetab where you can switch from the Airport Map and Control Room is probably meant to sit at the middle to mimic the nature of the home button on most mobile devices because it is essentially the function that will be used the most. In the said tab, you can open the Airport Map to give you a literal overview of your airport or access the Control Room where you can manage your amenities.

The Airport Map lets you pan up and down to observe your airport and appreciate your work—seeing the amenities you have already opened and see the cash popping out from them every now and then. More importantly, with this view up, you can see upgrade and development opportunities.

Upgrade opportunities will have an animated green arrowhead indicator on them. Once you have met the set conditions to revive certain amenities, you would know your airport is ready to reopen them as they will have a wrench indicator.

The Control Room is where you are very likely to spend most of your in-game time because it is where you can make your amenities work. Your amenities will all start as manually-operated and that means you have to tap the run button for each.

Each amenity will have varying output times relative to how convenient or complex they are to operate or manage in real life. Eventually, you’d be able to recruit Airport Staff to operate your amenities and we’d break these down in this Airport BillionAir beginner’s guide in better detail later.

True to its name, the Control Room basically offers most of the controls points in improving your overall resource earning potential—yes, not just the cash flow. The upper part will display up to three luggage/suitcases, each representing a task.

When you have completed a task, a luggage will be claimable (we’d leave it to you to discover how the game describes the angle about “claiming” suitcases. Clue: it is “not” stealing). If a luggage does not yet bear a claim button, you can tap on it to see what condition you need to meet first.

Opening suitcases gives you the same feeling you get when unwrapping presents — you don’t know what’s inside, but you simply feel glad and optimistic. For a free game, Airport BillionAir keeps the fun level up by keeping the tasks achievable and the flow of resources plentiful. As each luggage represents rewards for different tasks, they can bring all sorts of resource; you can get cash, Review Stars, diamonds, and staff cards.

Below the luggage line, you can find a little wheel of fortune icon. If you wish to maximize your farming potential in Airport BillionAir, do not miss to use this feature. It observes a 24-hour cooldown on your first lucky spin and you get 5 spins each day. The value of prizes scales up in relation to your game progress, which means cash prizes from it will be eventually by the millions if you progress quickly.

Once you have used your first free spin, you can use the 4 remaining spins by watching ads. The length of the ads varies from 15 seconds to 30 seconds before a closing prompt will be available. The potential prizes include cash, diamonds, and rare or epic rated staff cards so watching them is definitely a win-win situation.

Also, what’s good with this feature is that, each spin is a win; there would be no repeat prizes as it won’t stop on an already claimed prize making you always stand a chance to earn the more valuable loots AKA diamonds or rare/epic staff cards.

In the same line as the wheel of fortune you can see the name of the current airport you’re in (you start out with Regional) an upgrade multiplier toggle and a boost. Upgrade level toggle will give you the option to go for a x1, x10, next, and max upgrade.

The x1 simply gives a single upgrade instance on your amenities; the x10, of course does 10. The next and max options are normally useable for when you return to the game after being idle or offline for a while as you would likely have enough resource to perform upgrades—with the next option, upgrading an amenity will upgrade it up to a tier where a task can be met; if there is no task it will simply do a x5 upgrade.

Meanwhile, if the max option is selected, an upgrade will push your amenity to its maximum, possible upgraded state up until your resources allow. Upgrading amenities will make way for them to reach their next level.

The boost feature is yet another generous feature of the game, it lets you watch short ads in exchange of 2-4 hours income boosts–totally a fair trade for your time. You may want to capitalize on this if you wish your amenities to earn more.

New Airport

The fourth tab of the bottom panel will be for New Airports which is technically outside of a beginner’s guide scope. For the sake of giving you a preview, let’s just say it lets you join a periodic event where you should speed run and test your acquired airport management skills on new, barren airports.

We got to add that the devs wonderfully thought it out to only make it be unlockable once you have ranked up to level 12. It essentially closes your main airport (Regional) instance, thus setting you offline for it.

We say speed run because the event will only be open for 48 hours and it will give a set of requirements to meet within that time. The rewards will be in form of resources (diamonds, cash, staff cards, Review Stars) and it offers a lot—but you’d have a limited. If the normal, default mode does not challenge you, this shall.

Duty Free

Finally, the fifth tab is the Duty-Free shop. What good is an airport without a Duty-Free shop, right? In contrast to the real-world Duty Free where what you usually buy are for people outside of the airport, what’s purchasable in it will be the useful resources for airport improvements.

In it, you can purchase diamonds, staff cards, and boosts in the game which you can pay for real currency. The boost available in it is called Time Warp which essentially fast-forwards your in-game timer for the set period an item bears, essentially making you gain a huge bulk of passengers and cash in an instant.

The Duty Free will also let you take free staff cards and suitcases in exchange of watching short ads. The first free suitcase each day, however, will not require ad viewing. We encourage you to maximize this earning mechanism as well.

Note: An internet connection is necessary to play this game. Airport BillionAir is free to download and play, but optional in-game purchases are available.