Trips & Multi-Leg Flying

Single charters are the bread and butter — accept, fly, get paid, repeat. But the real charter world runs on trips: multi-leg journeys where one client books a sequence of flights tied together by a single agenda. JetCard models these alongside the single-charter board.

What’s a Trip?

A trip is a sequence of two or more legs flown for the same client (or a related set of clients) on the same itinerary. Common shapes:

• Round trip — outbound today, return tomorrow. Same client, both directions.
• Multi-city — client flies City A → City B → City C → home, all on one contract.
• Hub-based — turboprop short-hop rotation where the aircraft returns to its hub between client legs.
• Split-client — a deadhead between two client engagements; the client on the second engagement is a different party than the first.
• Sports/event trips — see Sports & Events for the franchise-driven trip system.

Every leg of a trip is a charter in its own right — same dispatch flow, same flight tracker, same rules — but they’re linked in a parent Trip record so you can see the whole arc together.

Generating a Trip

Trip generation is available to Operator Owners and Chief Pilots. From the Company → Trips tab, click Generate Trip and pick:

• Aircraft — the jet that will fly the whole trip. Trips don’t switch airframes mid-itinerary.
• Origin — where the trip starts.
• Leg count — anywhere from 2 to 6 legs.
• Return option — three choices, see below.

Return Options

Where the trip ends matters as much as where it starts. Three options:

Return options are hard gates — the generator will retry the trip up to 10 times to honor your return choice rather than silently fall back to a different ending.

If you don’t pick a return option, the trip may end at the last client city instead of routing home.

Patterns

Inside each leg count, the generator selects a pattern weighted by realism. You don’t pick the pattern directly — JetCard rolls one based on the leg count, the aircraft category, and your return preference. Patterns include:

• Multi-city — every leg is a client leg, same client, contiguous itinerary
• Through-route — client legs followed by an empty repositioning leg back to a useful point
• Hub-based — origin → client → origin → client, etc. Turboprop-only (King Air, PC-12 short-hop ops). Filtered out for jets, and filtered out entirely when you ask for “Return to Base”
• Split-clients — a client engagement, then a deadhead, then a different client. The deadhead is the cue that the second client is a separate party

Click Regenerate to roll a different pattern if you don’t like what came up. Each regenerate is a fresh dice roll within the rules you set.

Trip Confirmation & Aircraft Reservation

When you click Confirm Trip, all legs write to your active flights at once — atomic write, no half-confirmed trips. The aircraft is reserved at the moment of confirmation:

The shorter 7-day window on operator-pool aircraft exists so other pilots in your operator can rotate through the same tail rather than seeing it locked up for a month.

After confirmation, the first leg becomes available immediately. Later legs sit pending until the prior leg is completed.

Trip Dossier

Every confirmed trip ships with a Trip Dossier — a written narrative covering the full journey from the perspective of an account manager briefing the crew. Accessible from the Trips tab and from the Briefing tab during any active leg.

The dossier covers:

• The client’s backstory — who they are, what their company does, why this trip matters
• The agenda at each destination — what meetings, deals, events, or activities are happening
• Why the cities are in this order — context that explains the routing
• What the trip achieves when it’s done

Split-client trips bridge the storyline across the deadhead — the dossier explains why the aircraft is moving between two different engagements, so it doesn’t read as two unrelated halves.

Multi-leg trips feel completely different from a string of unrelated charters because the dossier ties everything together. The same client and storyline run through every leg (except in split-client patterns, where the storyline crosses).

Flying a Trip

Each leg flies exactly like a single charter — open Dispatch, generate the OFP, request ground services, fly. The only difference is the leg progression:

• Leg 1 is available immediately on confirmation.
• Leg 2+ sit pending until the prior leg is completed.
• After completing leg N, leg N+1 automatically flips to available and shows up on your charter board.

You don’t have to fly legs back-to-back. Take a break, fly something else, come back to the trip the next day — the trip stays in your active record until every leg is flown.

Trip Payouts

Each leg pays based on its own charter value, governed by your pilot status the same way single charters are. Client legs carry a small trip premium (15-25%) baked into the value — clients pay a slight premium for booking the whole journey through one operator.

Long-haul widebody trip types (leisure vacation, group corporate incentive, family office travel, etc.) apply a rate adjustment that keeps the trip total closer to real-world charter quotes. The same trip type ordered as a single charter doesn’t get this adjustment.

Trip totals show in the Trips tab so you can see expected revenue at a glance.

Voiding a Trip

If you confirm a trip and then can’t fly it, you can void the remaining legs from the Trips tab. Voiding:

• Releases all pending and available legs
• Releases the assigned aircraft back to the operator pool
• Costs -1.0 reputation
• Leaves already-completed legs paid and on your record

Voiding is the right move if you genuinely can’t fly the rest. If you just need a longer pause, leave the trip alone — there’s no time pressure on individual legs.

Releasing a Sports or Scheduled Trip

Sports and event-driven trips have a separate Release action that returns the trip to the global pool so another pilot can claim it. Release costs -3.0 reputation — heavier than a void because the system was counting on you to fulfill a real fixture. Use Release only when you genuinely can’t make the event and someone else should get the chance.

Trip vs Charter — When to Use Each

• Single charters — opportunistic flying, day-of decisions, mixing aircraft and routes freely. The Charter Board is your friend.
• Trips — when you want a coherent storyline across multiple flights, full client context, and a tied-together payout arc. Generate from your operator’s Trips tab.

Both are valid styles. Many operators run a mix — a few generated trips for rhythm and storyline, plus opportunistic single charters from the board to keep the schedule full.