Right now to buy planes for your companies you have to buy them either used or new. Some aircraft can only be bought new.
However, in reality airlines can lease aircraft from their manufactures, which gives them the ability to pay less upfront to gain a new aircraft. This should be reflected in the career mode as another way to gain more money vastly faster and fly more aircraft overall.
I’d like to suggestion how such a system could/should work:
- leased planes work identical to bought planes for your company with the following exceptions, which mostly align with how real-world leases work within the confines of how the game currently works:
- every leased plane has an upfront cost for signing the lease, this should be vastly less than the full cost. (maybe 10-20%?)
- every leased plane has a fixed lease length, that can be bought out ahead of time to buy the aircraft outright.
- you have a fixed cost for every flight hour, ontop of insurance. This should align with the lease length, and include extra interest. Gameplay wise this will cut into how much you make per flight, not as much as a employee, but still you’d want to buy planes outright sooner than later.
Unlike buying an aircraft though, you can’t sell a leased aircraft, only cut the lease off early (idk if having a fee to do this ahead of time makes sense). You can still buy the aircraft at the end of the lease with its cost being inline with the outright purchase cost and how much you already paid thru the fixed installments (interest is of course not included).
Finally, insurance would work the same as a purchased aircraft, and if you total a leased aircraft your lease is canceled outright.
The ultimate goal of such a system would be to allow freelance companies have more planes earlier in career, as a middle step to buying them outright, or moving onto newer planes and using leased planes only as a starting point. However, this would make early/mid game vastly shorter as it currently stands.
note this is very similar, and even mentioned in another suggestion: Loans in Career Mode, however this is about loans.