Research & Development

General
Research & Development (also known as R&D), is a research site where you can unlock aircraft, services and features. It uses Research dollars (aka R$) to research and takes time to complete. You get R$ from the Agenda, converting, daily gifts, store and slots.

Bank
The first level of this research will allow you to gain access to a new bank.

Laboratory
Each level of the laboratory enables you to increase the daily budget allocated to research.

Marketing teams
Each level of this research enables you to hire biggest marketing teams and to reduce the cost of all the audits. This impacts both external audits (during a route purchase) and internal audits (to know the ideal price of a route).

Marketing offices
Each level of this research enables you to build and extend your marketing offices to reduce the cost of your price simulations.

Staff
Each level of this research enables you to facilitate hiring processes, to increase the minimal education level required to join your airline, to offer luxury offices to your employees, or a MBA to your senior managers, etc.

Services
For more in-depth info on the services, head to Airline Characteristics (Service Bonuses) to see more

Services affect the stats of your airline, which determines how your airline progresses. Different services grant different bonuses, and these bonuses can increase your airline’s demand in certain categories. The service bonuses are below

Entertainment:
Increases Demand on Long Haul Flights

Price Attractiveness:
Increases demand on Short to Medium Haul Flights.

Safety:
Increases demand of First and Business Class Passengers.

Punctuality:
Increases demand of economy class passengers.

Comfort:
Allows airlines to increase the prices of their tickets and lose less demand, but it will also increase flight costs.

Ancillary Revenue:
Represents additional earnings to those earned from ticket sales. Researching this service will increase additional earnings and decrease the flight costs.

Aircraft
Not to be confused with the Aircrafts page (lists of aircraft)

Aircraft R&D serves for unlocking different planes for purchase. In addition, upon unlocking the planes in your personal R&D, it will allow you to provide a discount in alliance group purchases.

The Aircraft Research category also has research to aid with maintenance. This includes research that decreases aircraft wearing or ageing speed, ones that decrease prices of breakdowns, ones that decrease prices of A and D checks, and lastly ones that make incidents start occurring at a higher wear percentage (For example, incidents start occurring at 10% wear, but it can start at 20% with the researches.)

Cargo
If you are a cargo airline, you need to research specific cargo planes that can be researched in this category. In addition, you can research cargo services in this section. Note that this is only unlocked after you research the “Cargo” research in general

Staff
Staff researches aid in reducing training costs, reducing training time and adding extra bonuses to the services, so less staff can provide more service bonuses.