Yes in theory. The way AI “pilots” work is pretty odd and could use some quality of life improvements, but it also seems to be broken for the time being. I’ve yet to see someone confirm they’ve received passive income.
Fundamentally, how it’s said to work is that once you buy your second aircraft (requires you own at least two!) you’ll get a little tutorial about Crew. You can set “Crew” to On in the Manage Aircraft screen for one or both aircraft. When you fly an aircraft (specifically in missions, and not special missions, just regular ones), your unused aircraft will generate passive income that is paid out at the end of the IRL day, according to a dev. But I’ve never seen it work when I had two aircraft. I’ve since reset my career and am hoping it’ll do something this time. If it works, the way you would know is that you’d see a notification about earning passive income at some point, and you’d see it in your company financial history. The way it’s explained to work means that there aren’t really AI pilots you hire, they don’t really fly the planes from the sound if it (meaning they likely don’t move between locations, but I could be wrong), it’s more of a simple “When any unused aircraft has crew enabled and the player is flying a mission in another aircraft, generate passive income and pay it out at the end of the day.”
Curious if anyone can confirm they’ve seen passive income work. In my case, I had 2 companies, 1 plane in each. One theory I had is that I needed to have 2 planes in 1 company for it to work, but I doubt that’s the case.
In this era of AI, I’m really surprised this isn’t implemented better. Using AI, so much would be possible with always-unique passenger/dispatch script generation (no more repetitive typo and grammar-filled scripts), AI generated pilots for hire with personalities and traits who you could interact with potentially, the sky is really the limit and Asobo went with a very, very rudimentary implementation instead. With everything being streamed anyway, streaming the dialog from a curated large language model server is just a baffling thing to not do, but there’s still time to improve. If nothing else, it keeps the devs of BeyondATC and SayIntentions paid and happy! 