SU4 Career Mode Economy Changes (and what you need to know and do)

[iN8InItYz]

SU4 Beta has introduced a wide variety of price changes and new aircraft for career mode which changes the best planes for your passive income fleet. All you need to know is in the data I have displayed here and the explanations I have provided below.

Lets review the information here

Highest earning aircraft per hour:

1. 737 MAX (718,432 per hour)
2. Viking Air CL-415 (370,164 per hour)
3. Erickson Incorporated S-64 (258,065 per hour)

Bear in mind these aircraft are also the most expensive in the game and are not necessarily the most efficient.

Lowest payback time aircraft:

1. Cessna C400 Corvalis TT (46 hours)
2. Patey Aviation Draco X (46 hours)
3. Cessna 172 Skyhawk (46 hours)

These aircraft are able to earn what they cost to buy the most quickly and are a good choice for the early stages of career mode. Bear in mind that there is no formal feature for streamlined maintenance yet so it would be unrealistic to stack up 100’s of these aircraft even though they are the most efficient since aircraft stop producing passive income after wear becomes too much.

Aircraft that seem good at face value but are actually bad on further inspection:

1. 737 Max (biggest earner per hour but also lowest payback time aircraft)
2. Zillin Aviation Savage Cub (looks cheap and earns decently but is less efficient than more expensive aircraft)
3. Cessna 208B Grand Caravan (looks like a plane that is a balance of both worlds - income per hour and efficiency - but underperforms compared to other expensive aircraft)

Aircraft that seem bad but are actually quite good

1. Daher TBM 390 (Expensive but payback time is very low and is good since you will have less aircraft to maintain manually)
2. Diamond DA62 (More expensive for only a slight increase in payback time)
3. Textron Aviation Cessna Citation CJ4 (A personal pick but a jet aircraft with a still high but not very high payback time, combined with the fact you will be maintaining aircraft manually this is a good pick for someone who wants to be making 100 million + per day in passive income, this aircraft used to cost 4 times more in SU3 so it has become a more viable aircraft)

Personal view on how to build a worldwide fleet:

Step 1: Buy a company, for example a flightseeing or light cargo would be a good choice.

Step 2: Grind your own missions (using lowest payback time aircraft) in combination with earning passive income.

Step 3: Gradually build your fleet and purchase a VIP transport company where you can purchase a fleet of aircraft, I would suggest a quite expensive fleet, sacrificing efficiency for manageability of maintenance in the long run, for example the CJ4 or Diamond DA62.

Step 4: Once you are earning more than 200+ million per day purchase a passenger transport and switch your strategy to purchasing 737’s for a worldwide fleet (if that’s what you want) and gradually build your fleet keeping non 737’s to cover maintenance.

Until MSFS adds a streamlined maintenance feature for the game (especially on Xbox where you can’t get mods) this is in my view the best way to realistically grow your worldwide empire of aircraft.

This data may change since this is still a “Beta” version

[Pilotfirst9999]

Glad to see the CJ4 is back to its normal price. Can you have a look for me please what the price is of the Longitude, NAMC YS-11 and the Transall in cargo .

Another question about Career, have they reduced any of the maintenance fees - for eg the engines on the 737 max?

[iN8InItYz]

I will research that since I used brand new aircraft for my experiment. I will have to do some further tests to see maintenance costs. In SU3 737 engines maintenance costs can range from 5 to 11 million so I hope it will be down

[Pilotfirst9999]

Thanks for that, I appreciate your efforts to advise us

[Pilotfirst9999]

Also, just to say that I have come to many of the same conclusions you did about profitability and changed a load of my purchase choices to the G36, TBM, DA 62, C208, DHC-2, PC-12 (yeah a long time to payback) PC-24. I have only 1 737 that I fly because 1 engine is 8,000,000Cr. Sold my CJ4’s when the price went up so scored a little

[ElSkiel]

Just before SU4 came out, I bought the Cessna Longitude (I think it was for over 30 million), and in SU4, the last time I checked, it only cost 6 or 7 million. I think I’ll sell it before the final version comes out so I don’t lose so many millions.

[Pilotfirst9999]

Yes but do this first - pay the cheapest repairs (even if they dont need much repairing) like lights for eg, you will see your resale value jump. No point doing landing gear but tyres might be a good one for pressures. Note how much you pay and how much the value goes up by then you should score a little extra.

[iN8InItYz]

You will have to revert back to SU3 to sell since betas are just tests and reset when you revert back to the public version

[ElSkiel]

I know it

[arghroy7840]

The purchase prices look like welcome changes, but I’m not sure the earn rate has changed greatly (the inverse of the payback time, if it takes 137 hours to pay back the 737, that means it pays 0.7% of the new purchase price every hour run).

As chance would happen I started trying to build out a model for this very purpose based on SU3 last night - ultimately I want to model something like ‘given 6 months of time, and an upper bound of N aircraft, what is the most profitable path’.

These earn rates look really similar like for like - there is a sliding scale from circa 2.2% (cheapest) to 0.7% (most expensive) mainly predicted by the purchase price.

• C208 Cargo 4,794,000 new in my data earned 34,850 for 28m passive, which prorates to 74678 for an hour, or ~1.56% purchase rate to passive income earned. In your numbers C208 Medevac 5,126,000 new paid 77380 passive, which is ~1.51% of the purchase price returned. This is pretty close.
• In my numbers C172 Cargo 550,800 paid 12,021.43 per hour in SU3 (2.18%), C172 above 540000 paid 11,587, that’s about 2.1% and both line up.
• PC12NGX medevac earned about the same SU3 vs SU4 too.
• The CJ4 looks mostly improving but really what is happening is the earn-rate comes in line with the planes circa $8m cost (about 1.2-1.3%)

The differences in our numbers are likely to be rounding.

The fundamental issue I’ve seen stated still remains, the perception is that hundreds of small planes will beat one big plane every time (nearly 3 to 1 on $$ earned per hour). If I spent 99 000 000 on Cessna C400s as an example I would get 165 of them, earning 2,137,740 per passive hour run.

What is missing from the model that I am going to try to decode is

• Modelling checkup and service costs to a per hour run estimate (which will give profit per hour per plane not just revenue)
• Optimisation for how many someone can actually maintain in the current game and allow for time to actually fly something (otherwise no passive income is earned!), will give an upper bound for the aircraft owned. i.e trying to find the implied cost of the maintenance in that it takes away from people’s time to fly.

Rob S

[iN8InItYz]

Especially in the xbox version right now there is no way of maintaining a big fleet without spending ages doing repetitive clicks so thats why my model suggests comprimising profit for managibility, in an earlier topic post I also suggested proportional passive income eg plane 1 costs 100000 and generates 1000 per hour than plane 2 which costs 1000000 should make 10000 per hour

[Kulch]

I have over 500mio now and the bulk of that came from 4 x 737s

It’s easier and quicker to maintain 4 planes, than it is to maintain 50+ cessnas. You spend more time flying and earning passive. A 6hr flight in the 737 will get you $20mio, do that 5 times you have paid off the plane.

It’s just with the 737s you need to stay on top of maintenance (you need to checkup after every flight) to avoid the dreaded 40mio engine repair bill on crewed planes, which can ambush you if you decide to take the sims 24hr checkup advice window

[iN8InItYz]

Im making 85 mil a day from passive income but i’m taking a break from career until SU4 comes out which I hope will include streamlined maintenance or something to that effect

[SquadUKnowHa]

I’m making about around 2.3 Billion in passive income every 25 hour period. I have 116 737’s and 1 of every other plane in the game. If I don’t skip flight I barely break even. Sometimes I get lucky on maintenance.

[ElSkiel]

I’m back on SU3. I bought the Citation Longitude for 34,500,000cr, and I just sold it for 26,763,630cr. I lost almost 10 million. I’ll buy it again at SU4 for the 6-7 million it’s worth now.

[iN8InItYz]

How do you maintain all of that, I gave up on passive income after I realised that even though I had billions there was no way maintaining all the aircraft would be realistic, do you have the pc mod? I’m on Xbox so can’t do that

[Pilotfirst9999]

Just to make you all aware, the Transall is going to bankrupt us all. Look at the price to repair one aileron connection

[SquadUKnowHa]

Used to own 900 something planes and downsized to make my life easier. I use a mouse on PC so it makes it faster in my opinion. Kinda wish someone would post passive and maintenance of the 747.

[iN8InItYz]

I don’t have the patience for this laggy game to load each plane in need of maintence lol

[iN8InItYz]

737 engine repair 10 mil and now this