As your company grows — especially in Tycoon mode — hiring and managing employees becomes essential.
Pilots, flight attendants, and mechanics support your operations, expand your capabilities, and help your company run efficiently.
This guide covers:
- The different types of employees
- How to hire them
- How to manage them
- How to train them
- Their roles, skills, and certifications
¶ Types of Employees
¶ Pilots
Pilots can:
- Fly your aircraft automatically
- Act as co-pilots
- Operate flights when you’re offline
- Support complex operations such as work orders
Skills:
- Punctuality This skill dictates how reliably your pilot will stick to their schedule, having a low punctuality may lead to delays in departing or arriving at the destination whereas high punctuality pilots are unlikely to suffer noticable delays.
- Stress Resistance This is a measure of how likely the pilot is to make critical mistakes when challenging conditions, onboard issues or high workloads strike. Just as in the real world, a pilot who has poor ability to handle these situations is likely to make mistakes and these can end up leading to significant damage to the aircraft, perhaps even completely destroying an engine and being forced to make emergency landings.
- Aircraft Class Certifications A class certification is just a measure of which kind of aircraft a pilot has been trained to operate. Although in real life this is typically done on an aircraft by aircraft basis (though some aircraft may share a common rating, e.g. an Airbus A318, 319, 320 or 321 are all considered a common rating), in OnAir it has been simplified to general classifications of Aircraft; Gliders, Ultra-Lights, Jets and Heavy Jets, as well as both Single and Multi-Engine versions of Piston Prop and Turbo Prop planes, further split
¶ Flight Attendants
Flight attendants, sometimes also referred to as Cabin Crew, are those on board who are tasked with aiding passengers, providing services such as food and drinks, onboard shopping/duty-free sales and dealing with minor incidents in the cabin (such as a rowdy passenger causing a disturbance).
Required attendants by passenger count:
- 0–12 pax: 0 attendants
- 13–62 pax: 1 attendant
- 63–112 pax: 2 attendants
- Then +1 per 50 additional seats
Skill:
- Passenger Care This is a measure of how skilled the attendant is at providing care to any passengers in need, it is essentially a measure of how good their social skills are when dealing with passengers.
- Effectiveness Effectiveness dictates how efficiently an attendant will deal with onboard service or issues. Although a high care skill will benefit a singular passenger, if they take a long time to deal with those tasks, other passengers will become frustrated by the lack of service.
- Certification Much like pilots, Flight attendants need to be trained to handle the layout and scale of particular aircraft and cannot serve on an aircraft till they have the appropriate cert.
¶ Mechanics
Mechanics do all the maintenance and repair work for your aircraft (or others if you are selling workshop services at an FBO!). They reside at your FBOs and perform any scheduled work.
Several mechanics can be assigned to the same FBO for handling several aircraft at the same time and faster maintenance.
All details are available here: https://onaircompany.hostwiki.io/en/career-progression/expanding-with-fbos#aircraft-maintenance-mechanics
Skills:
- Precision Precision is all about how good of a job the mechanic does. The higher their precision, the more aircraft condition will be repaired while they perform maintenance and repairs.
- Effectiveness A mechanics effectiveness is a rating of how quickly they can complete maintenance tasks. A higher effectiveness will result in faster maintenance and aircraft seating reconfigurations.
- Class Certification Much like attendants and pilots, Mechanics also have a class certification dictating which types of aircraft they are trained to perform maintenance on. See the details on pilot certification for more information.
¶ Hiring Employees
There are two types of employment:
¶ Permanent Employee
- Lower hourly cost
- Weekly minimum salary
- Termination fee if fired
¶ Short-Term Freelance (1 to 3 days)
- Higher hourly cost
- Minimum daily charge
- Automatically leaves after contract
- No termination fee
¶ Hiring Limit (Challenging mode)
In Challenging mode (Stratus and Thunder only), your company can only hire a limited number of pilots.
Formula:
2 + (2 × Company Level × Company Reputation / 100)
¶ How to Hire
Menu:
World → Hire Employees
You will see the job market:
Use filters to find employees already certified for your aircraft.
¶ Evaluating a Candidate
Click Evaluate to open the detailed profile:
This screen shows:
- Skills
- Certifications
- Salary
- Minimum expected income
On the right side:
- Hire as permanent
- Hire as freelancer
Before confirming, enter the ICAO where the employee will start.
¶ Managing Employees
Go to My Company → My Employees and click on Manage
Available actions:
¶ Transport
Moves the employee to another airport via public transport.
They remain unavailable until arrival.
¶ Relocate
Changes the employee’s home base:
- Needs available FBO crew rooms, otherwise uses hotels (company expense)
- Does not physically move the employee (use Transport)
¶ Rest Now
Forces the 8-hour rest period.
Employees can work 14 hours before needing rest.
Exceeding this adds penalties.
¶ Training
Opens the training window (see next section).
¶ Fire
Ends the contract (fee for permanent hires).
Unavailable for freelancers.
¶ Employee Statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Working | Performing a task or flight |
| Awaiting Order | Inside 14h duty period but idle |
| Idling | Outside duty period |
| Resting | During the 8h rest |
Duty starts when an employee begins a task or flight.
¶ Training Employees
From the profile, click Training:
Two training types exist:
¶ Class Training
- Certifies employees for a new aircraft class
- Duration: 2 days
- Shortened with Better Instructors skill
- Cost varies
- Cannot be interrupted
The top section allows you to train them on operations of a new aircraft class, which always takes 2 days unless you have the better instructors skill. The financial cost for this training varies depending on the class but you will be able to see this when choosing a class from the ‘aircraft class’ drop down box. Simply select the new type of aircraft to train them for, which will enable the ‘Start Class training’ button. After clicking this button, they will enter their training phase which cannot be interrupted and your company will be charged the indicated fee.
¶ Skill Training
Improves both employee skills.
- Duration: 1 day
- Cost: ~1300 credits
- Skill gain depends on:
- Current skill level
- Your Training Facilities skill
Send the employee for a 1 day training to improve both of their core skills. The actual time may be reduced slightly depending on your ‘Better Instructors’ skill from the skill tree and the fee is a fixed amount, normally 1300 Credits.
Expected training gains:
How much their new skills will have increased by is a factor of how good their current skills are and your ‘Trainings Facilities’ skill in the skill tree. As an example of the base rates of training however:
An employee with a skill level of 0 out of 5 will gain approximately 1 full skill level in a single training session.
An employee with a skill level of 4.5 out of 5 will only gain approximately 0.15 of a skill level in a single training session.
Employees do not gain skills during their regular work, so this is the only method by which to increase their overall skill.
Some people may wish to hire employees that are already highly skilled, however such employees tend to charge appropriately to their advanced experience and skill. It can be more cost-effective in the long term to hire inexperienced and low skilled employees and train them up yourself.
Employees do not gain skills during normal work.
Training is the only way to improve them.
¶ Employee Role Summary
| Employee | Skills | Certification Required | Main Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot | Punctuality, Stress Resistance | Yes | Fly aircraft / co-pilot |
| Flight Attendant | Passenger Care, Effectiveness | Yes | Cabin operations |
| Mechanic | Precision, Effectiveness | Yes | Aircraft maintenance |
¶ Best Practices
- Hire low-skill employees and train them (cost-efficient)
- Filter by certification when recruiting
- Relocate employees to their work area
- Use Transport to move staff quickly
- Train pilots regularly to reduce risk of flight errors