Company & Operations

Form a charter operator, hire pilots, manage a fleet, and build a business. The Company page is your operations center. Your company runs on its own operator reputation — a separate score from your personal pilot reputation, moving on a slower track.

Forming an Operator

To create a company, you need:

• $500,000 formation fee
• A unique company name (35 character max, moderated by AI for appropriateness)
• A unique 3-letter designator (e.g. JAS) — major commercial codes (DAL, AAL, UAL, etc.) are blocked
• A telephony callsign (15 character max)
• A home base airport (validated ICAO code — must be a real airport in our database)

Your pilot status changes to OWNER on formation. You become responsible for fuel, FBO, JetCard Care, and any pilot pay owed when employees fly — see Payout Structure for the full formula.

Company Tabs

The Company page is organized into seven tabs:

Overview

Company stats, base locations on a map, recent Operations Desk messages, transaction log of operator financial activity, and the fleet map showing aircraft positions. Owner-flown charters are de-duplicated in the transaction log so you don’t see the same flight twice.

Trips

Multi-leg trips your pilots are running. Each row shows the trip’s status, value, leg count, and pilot. Click into a trip for the full leg breakdown. See Multi-Leg Trips for how trips work.

Fleet

Your aircraft inventory with condition, location, assigned pilot, JetCard Care status, and operational status (Available / Reserved). Aircraft reserved to you specifically appear in green with a (You) tag. Click an aircraft for the detail page with maintenance, assignment, and sale options.

Roster

Sortable table of all pilots in your company — the owner plus any employed crew. Click a pilot to see their stats and the release option. The Roster drawer also includes the real-time company chat.

Bases

Your operating bases — the home base from formation plus any additional bases you’ve purchased. Each base shows assigned pilots, aircraft stationed there, and the option to close (or be closed via the Admin tab). See Bases below.

Analytics

Operational analytics: top airports, busiest routes, pilot activity breakdown, aircraft utilization (available vs reserved per tail), and the Network Activity map. Bypasses Row-Level Security so you see your own data even on aggregated views.

Admin

Company settings and management:

• Hiring toggle — open or close applications
• Default pay rate — percentage of charter value offered to new hires
• Pay rate raises — bulk raise across all current employees (see Pay Rate Mechanics)
• Undercut permission — allow/deny employed pilots from undercutting charter values
• AI ferry permission — allow/deny employed pilots from using AI ferry
• Website & logo — URL and image upload (both moderated by AI)
• Pending applications — accept or reject pilot applicants
• Dissolve operator — permanent voluntary shutdown (see Dissolution)

Pilot Roles

JetCard pilots move through four states. Roles affect what you can do inside an operator — pay is a separate axis (see Pay Rate Mechanics).

Important: Chief Pilot is a promotion in authority, not in pay. Both EMPLOYED and Chief Pilot pilots earn the same negotiated rate — the role exists to delegate operational tasks the owner doesn’t want to do personally, not to be a tier above. See Payout Structure.

Promotion is bidirectional from the Roster drawer: an owner can promote EMPLOYED → Chief Pilot or demote Chief Pilot → EMPLOYED at any time.

Hiring Pilots

1. Enable hiring in the Admin tab
2. Pilots browse your company on the Job Board and submit applications
3. Review applications in Admin — see each pilot’s name, current reputation (overall and 30-day), hours, and flights completed
4. Accept to hire at your default pay rate, or reject

Hired pilots become EMPLOYED at your operator’s default pay rate. They fly your fleet aircraft and earn that percentage of charter value on every flight. The remainder, less fuel / FBO / JetCard Care, accrues to your owner balance.

Pay Rate Mechanics

Your default pay rate is the percentage you offer new hires — set in Admin. The cap is 50% of charter value; typical operators land somewhere between 20% and 50% depending on how competitive their other terms are. The Job Board is the price-discovery layer.

Pay rate raises are unidirectional. From Admin, you can issue a bulk raise — every employee currently earning less than the new rate jumps to the new rate. Anyone already above stays put. You cannot lower a pilot’s pay this way. The mechanic exists so an operator who wants to be more competitive can do it in one click, not so an operator can squeeze existing employees.

Fired vs resigned — rate preservation. When you release a pilot, they keep their negotiated rate and a reference to your operator (last_employer_operator_id). If they later re-apply to the same operator, the rehire offer is MAX(their preserved rate, your current default) — you can’t use the release-rehire trick to undercut a previously negotiated rate.

When a pilot resigns voluntarily, the same rate preservation applies. Either way, the pilot reverts to FREELANCE on departure.

Bases

Bases are physical airports your operator considers home. Pilots and aircraft are assigned to bases — because they are at the heart of your operation you will see more trip traffic generated through bases.

Home base is set during formation and is free. Additional bases cost $300,000 each, purchased from the Admin tab or via the Bases tab.

Each base shows:

• Assigned pilots (with the option to reassign)
• Aircraft stationed there
• Recent activity from this location

Closing a base is gated — you can’t close a base that still has pilots or aircraft assigned to it. Reassign everything out first, then the close button enables.

Reassign-base moves pilots or aircraft between bases. Owners and Chief Pilots can do this. Use it when you’ve opened a new base and want to redistribute your operation.

Aircraft Reservations

When a pilot (you or an employee) generates a multi-leg trip using an operator-pool aircraft, the trip system holds the aircraft to prevent another pilot from booking the same tail mid-trip:

• 30-day hold if the aircraft is assigned to that specific pilot — they have priority on their assigned tail and a long window to fly it
• 7-day hold if the aircraft is unassigned (operator-pool) — short window so other pilots in the operator can still rotate through it
• 403 reject if the aircraft is assigned to a different pilot — you cannot pull another pilot’s assigned tail into your trip

Operator Cash Flow

This is load-bearing — read it before forming an operator. Your operator’s finances run on two parallel ledgers that look the same but aren’t:

1. Your owner balance (your pilot.balance) — the real spendable wallet for everything operator-related. All charter revenue, lease/loan payments, ferry costs, fuel/FBO/JetCard Care for owner-flown charters, formation fees, base purchases — all land here.
2. operators.cash_balance — a parallel statistics ledger, mirrored from the same writes for analytics. It powers the Company Financials tab and admin Operator Financials views.

The two will legitimately diverge over time as you do personal things (formation fees, base purchases, personal freelance flights). Don’t try to keep them perfectly in sync — they were never meant to.

Practical implication: when you check “how much money does my operator have,” you’re looking at your owner balance. The operator cash_balance number is for P&L reporting, not for deciding whether you can afford to buy another aircraft.

EMPLOYED and Chief Pilot pilots never pay operating expenses out of their own balance. They receive their negotiated pay rate, period. The owner absorbs fuel, FBO, JCC, and the rest. That’s why owner payouts can go negative on bad routes — see Payout Structure.

Operator Reputation

Your operator has its own reputation score, separate from your personal pilot rep. It climbs on charter completions (+0.5 base) and soft landings, drops on hard landings and pilot abandons. Roughly half the pace of pilot reputation by design — a perfect-100 operator should stay meaningful, and a 50-flight company should still look materially different from a 5-flight one.

Operator rep matters because:

• It’s visible on the Job Board — pilots evaluate you when applying
• At rep 0, the operator enters forced dissolution
• Long-term, it drives the leaderboard ranking for operators

If you employ pilots who consistently floatover/balloon onto runways at 900+ fpm, your operator rep will reflect it even when your personal pilot rep is fine — see the full table at Operator Reputation.

Releasing Pilots

Release a pilot from your roster via the Roster drawer or the Admin tab. The pilot:

• Reverts to FREELANCE
• Has any assigned aircraft unassigned (back to operator pool)
• Keeps their negotiated pay rate for rehire-MAX purposes
• Triggers an Operations Desk message in your feed
• Costs your operator -2.0 reputation — terminations are read by the market as a workforce stability signal

If the pilot is mid-flight, the charter completes normally and they revert on landing. If the pilot has an active multi-leg trip, the trip cascade-voids with no rep penalty to the pilot and a dispatch message explaining the termination.

Releasing Aircraft

The Fleet drawer’s Release button lets you (or a Chief Pilot) pull a reserved aircraft back to operator-pool status. Two paths:

• No active trip — clean release, aircraft becomes available
• Active trip held by another pilot — release cascade-voids the trip with no rep penalty to that pilot and posts an Operations Desk message explaining the release. Use when an operator-pool aircraft has been held too long and you need it back.

Hard refuse (409): if any leg of the trip is mid-flight (status booked), release is blocked. You cannot pull an aircraft out from under a pilot who’s airborne in it.

Resigning

Employed pilots can resign from their company via the Company tab bar. Resignation unassigns the pilot’s aircraft, reverts them to FREELANCE, posts an Operations Desk message, and preserves their pay rate for any future rehire-MAX calculation.

Dissolution

Voluntary Dissolution

Clean wind-down from the Admin danger zone. What happens:

• All fleet aircraft return to the NPC market
• All employed pilots are released to FREELANCE
• Your pilot status reverts to FREELANCE
• No personal debt penalty — outstanding lease/loan obligations remain on your owner balance to manage independently

Use voluntary dissolution when you’re closing on your terms and want to walk away clean.

Forced Dissolution

If your operator reputation hits 0, the company enters forced dissolution with a 48-hour grace period. During the grace window the owner can still fly clean charters — soft landings, successful completions — and push operator rep back above 0 to save the company. The warning posts to your Operations Desk feed every time the daily cron checks.

If the timer expires with rep still at 0, the operator is dissolved automatically. Cascade:

• Aircraft — flipped to NPC market, all pilot assignments cleared, JetCard Care turned off
• Employed pilots — released to FREELANCE, employer reference cleared
• You — reverted to FREELANCE, balance debited by forced dissolution debt transfer
• Debt transfer — 20% of outstanding operator obligations move to your personal balance, capped at $500,000
• Leases — deleted
• Applications — purged
• Bases — removed
• Messages and Operations Desk history — cleared
• Operator record — permanently deleted

The 20%/cap design lets a collapsed operator hurt without instantly bankrupting the owner. You’ll feel it, but you can recover. After forced dissolution you can re-form a new operator immediately if you have the $500k formation fee.

Reputation Impact Summary

Operator-side rep moves driven by company actions. Pilot-side rep lives on the Reputation page.