Before you do anything with your airport, you should focus on hiring administrators to get the research done. Always hire admins for only 5-6$ /h. Dismiss all the rest to get new applicants.
In order to get the admins to work, you will need a bus stop for them to get to the airport. No computer etc. is needed.
After you hired them, click on operations tab and the laptop symbol to get to the research tab.
At the end of the research you need 30 admins, so keep hiring them from time to time as the research items will need more and more admins.

My tip for the first research order:
1. program (group one)
2. project group 2 (now you can research two projects at same time)
3. program (group two)
4. project group 3 (now you can research three projects at same time)
5. commercial license (you need this to research cafe and shops, which is very important in hard mode!)
6. franchise cafe
7. franchise shops
...

due to the little money we can only focus on general aviation first to get a constant income. so here is the build order:
1. build a small grass runway. my advice is to head it to north and build it in the bottom right or left corner. That way you can enlarge the runway to the north later, but the entrance (starting of plane) will be always in the same position.
2. build the cheapest entrance and exit to the runway. my advice is to split entrance and exit - so build entrance at the start of the runway (bottom if you head it to north) and build the exit 16 tiles away from the end of the runway. this is the perfect exit length for small airplanes, they dont need more time on the runway than they need for landing. click on the entry and exit and to the operational mode.
3. build a small atc tower.
4. build a grass service road checkpoint next to your small stands and connect with normal street as this is the lowest cost.
5. build as many small stands as possible with the money left and connect them to entrance and exit of the runway. one tile of grass taxiway is sufficient. the maximum you can afford is 5 small stands.

your airport should now look like this:

In order to get airplanes to your airport we need to hire builders and employes.

1. go to the offered contracts and accept one. if you have more than one offered just left click and choose the one with the cheapest hourly worker fee.


2. deploy contractors. it is not necessary to hire all of them, because the wont finish in the daily opening hours of the first day. that means you have 1 day and 1 night to build everything, so 20-30 contractor should be really enough.


3. go to your staff appliciants interface and filter them by executives. we need staff for every executive role (coo, cfo, cio, strategy director, hr director, procurement director). if you have more thean one appliciant for each job reject all those with higher salary claims. dont focus on stats, only look for the most cheapest. do this every time you get new applicants until the buildings are finished.

4. watch them build and repeat step 3 every now and then.

5. hire those 6 executives, which should be quite cheap after this sorting method. with this tip you can half the salary of the executives. of course you could min/max. this strategy more and just hire them directly when you need them, but i think it is unnecessary since they are not that expensive and you have more options and research options.

1. after you build everything watch if the taxiway path is set up correctly (in the bottom menu you can toggle the taxiway nodes). your airport should look like this:



2. before you open the airport take advantage of your cfo and set the airport fees. increase the landing and parking fee to the highest orange price and reduce the fuel cost to zero as we dont have fuel service yet to keep a high general aviation staisfaction rating.


3. set every stand to accept general aviation and open the stand.

4. open the airport and be sure to allow general aviation.


now planes should arrive at your airport and give you little money. but this was only the first step to get a good income for a bigger expansion and passenger flights.

Shops and restaurants will make the difference and make you a lot of money (i think also in reality those rental incomes are the most and best income source). At first we need min. 2 shops and 2 restaurants.

1. in order to get reaturants and shops you need to procure them. both cost 50000$ so at first you need to take a loan.


2. directly after you get the money start the procurement of both as it takes 6h.


3. to get the best franchise partners you need 250 sqare meter room size, which equals 4x4 in the terminal foundation. so you need at least 8x8 foundation to be build. i would advice to use this later as your people arrival hall to make a lot of profit. so have this in mind when you place the foundations.

4. After 6h you can now place the 2 shops and 2 restaurants and fill them with around 20 fridge displays/shelves. dont foregt to build a cashier/counter.


5. sign contracts and earn money! you dont need to wait until it is being build.

6. since everything has been build now you can dismiss the contractors. i dismissed everyone exept two since you sometimes want to build or delete something.

7. expand until you have 4 restaurants, 4 shops and 7 small general aviation stands.

your airport should now look like this:

you will now make a good income to both pay your depth off and in parallel expand your airport furthermore.

i would recommend to expand your general aviation to 7 stands before you focus on passenger flights.

but as soon as you have passenger flights enabled you get the opportunity to rent 4 and even 5 starts shops and restaurant which will give you 1500-2000$ per hour!

i always build 7 small general aviation stands and 4 small passenger stands in a disconnected area. it look like this:


afterwards i build the large airport foundation for medium stands connected to the shops/restaurant area.

please tell me if you liked this guide. if i get positive responce i will expand this guide.
hope you enjoyed it. thanks for your feedback!

here is my final outcome of this:


after done this build i would next time swap general aviation and begin on the left side, because you cant expand to the left side. this is what stops me from expanding this build. also i would now always connect the foundations (at least with a small track for passenger and empoyees to move, because i see a lot traveling outside, which functions quite well, but i think it is very unrealistic.

cheers guys
seturo