First suggestion post (whoa!): I think about "AirwaySim" and other...

[geozero]

To me AIRBUCKS and AIRBUCKS 2was everything an airline sim should be. It allowed buying real aircraft, re-designing seat configurations (first class, coach, cargo, etc), ticket pricing, destinations, etc.

Every other sim that has followed has really screwed this up one way or another... either too monotonous and cartoony or simply way to complicated where it becomes looking like charts and graphs rather than a game.

Just my 2 cents...

Check out airwaysim if you're into that. (Although they're a little charty)

Aeromogul will probably have real aircraft buying (name changes of course), sea configurations, ticket prices, etc.

The one thing we will not have is time scheduling. Most likely we'll have "day and night" routes per plane. Of course this is not set in stone yet, so might be something ya'll would want to discuss.

Scheduling is always tricky and I am sure a coding mess... sometimes it can be done right though.

One area seldom considered or done right (perhaps too complex code wise) is connecting flights. I think it would be easier to look at it this way:

1) determine if this is a direct non-stop flight or how many stops along the way.
2) determine how many flights per day given the distances between stops roundtrip, etc. and how many flight hours in a day, adding for occasional breakdowns, maintenance, etc.
3) if the flight has one or more stops will that stop be a connecting flight for another flight.... ex: Flight 001 from Los Angeles to New York with a stop in Dallas. Flight 002 from Denver to New York with a stop in Dallas... will these two flights be connecting flights? the final flight (#003 could be the one from Dallas to New York allowing the first two flights to go back to L.A. and Denver respectively OR either flight 001 or 002 is the one that continues to New York.

Once you have your head wrapped around that then you can go deeper into time schedules, even in increments of 30 minutes for example.

One area that always fascinated me was re-doing the seat configurations... my neighbor is an American Airlines pilot and he had mentioned that they had changed seating configurations on 737 jets to allow "more leg room"... that was the public marketing campaign. What really happened according to him was that the airline was short on flight attendants and wanted to save money as well, so the FAA has a flight attendant per seat ratio that has to be met. By eliminating a certain number of seats they could get rid of 1 person per flight... preeeeeetty sneaky.

Anyway, another tidbit to consider if you go down that route...