Last updated on January 19th, 2026 at 08:31 pm
Pocket Planes: Airline Tycoon – Simulation Game Review
Pocket Planes: Airline Tycoon is a Simulation/Family game from NimbleBit LLC, first launched in 14th June 2012.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 7,591+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Pocket Planes: Airline Tycoon Stand Out
Embark on an Airline Tycoon journey with Pocket Planes!
Dive deep into the skies, navigating the world of airplanes and airlines, ensuring each flight runs seamlessly.
Become the master Airline Manager, handling everything from tiny prop planes to majestic jumbos, making the sky your playground.
From the visionaries behind the treasured Tiny Tower, Pocket Planes is more than just another airplane simulator. It's a Business Manager game with a heart, capturing the thrill of flying and the meticulous planning of route management.
Game Highlights:
Airline Tycoon Delight: Immerse yourself in the art of airline management with Pocket Planes. Craft strategies, optimize routes, and watch your fleet of airplanes paint the sky, transporting eager passengers and precious cargo to over 250 cities dotting a vast world map.
Sky Management Odyssey: From the hustle and bustle of major airports to the serene charm of smaller ones, plan your routes meticulously. With every decision, the success of your airline business hangs in the balance. Carve out routes that make business sense and spark your imagination.
Idle Flight Fun: From the tiny prop planes, echoing the nostalgia of early flight days, to the magnificent jumbo jets, representing the zenith of aviation engineering, there's never a dull moment. Every plane unlocked promises a fresh visual treat and exciting business opportunities.
Customization at its peak: Every airline has a story. Tell yours through personalized plane designs, distinct paint jobs, and pilot uniforms that make a statement. Let your airline's brand be a testament to your vision and creativity as it stands out amidst the vastness of the sky.
Airborne Friendship: The skies are vast and great but better navigated with friends. Trade parts, strategize together, and compete in global events. Showcase your airline tycoon skills and propel your airline to international fame.
Come, embark on a journey filled with idle management challenges, simulator fun, and pocket-sized adventures. Transform into the ultimate Airline Manager and let your airline be the king of the skies!
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Pocket Planes: Airline Tycoon is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 2nd January 2026
Recent improvements include:
Regional Headquarters Update!
- Upgrade 1 city per region to an HQ that is class 3 and (150/300) layovers!
- New Special Planes: the Zipplin-P and Zipplin-C!
- New skins and the addition of special perks for certain skins!
Download & Availability
Pocket Planes: Airline Tycoon is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Pocket Planes: Airline Tycoon on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Im obsessed with this game. Please make a second version!!!! A galactic version of planes 2 would be super sick.
We love this game, but we spun the wheel and got a regular plane with a 0% chance is a regular plane just any plane ingame or a specific class? Also, why is the chance for a special plane higher than a regular.
This game is challenging but fun! Overall, the 8-bit design works well with the airline simulator concept. The user flow is relatively simple once you spend a couple hours with it. The deeper you dive into how the planes and airports interact (in a to-scale version of Earth) the more you understand how complex and challenging maintaining an efficient and global airline is. Our world is huge! Building the network of airplanes we, as humans, have made is a true feat and this game helps you understand the scale of that. As someone who enjoys simulator games, we can say that if you put the time into it, and want to, youll enjoy the **** out of this game. One of the things we found frustrating was that the flight path you set dont save when you back out of that page. A save feature could help new and seasoned users test flight paths more easily. Great game overall! We honestly believe theres very few changes that need to be made to make this one of the best mobile simulator apps Ive ever played! 9.4/10 – Thank you to the developer(s) that worked on this game! Keep up the great work.
Ive been playing pocket planes for what feels like 10 years at this point, we need new airports like Austin Texas, Nashville Tennessee, and more European cities. The plane selection is good but Id love to see new features like maybe an entertainment or airline food upgrade where your customers will grow unhappy if planes arent well accommodated. The new art work for airports is cool but its generic and reused for most big cities which is disappointing. Also way too many ads, we dont like the fact that youre almost being begged to watch ads so you can earn bucks. The game has lost its charm with these newer updates.
We love this game, its a great balance of simple to play but complex to master. Very easy and no need for in-app-purchases. Our suggestion is for the developer to create an Apple Widget with the flight list so we can see when our planes on our home page land without using notifications. For ourselves and many people, game notifications are an absolutely out of the question.
Simple, interesting and entertaining. Add us 35S4D.
We absolutely love this game and Im so addicted to it, the planes are nice, the graphics are cool, and the overall mechanics and gameplay is pretty awesome, but its missing a couple of quality of life updates, we feel like there should be a way to add names onto the plane, or custom designs. And possibly new animations for departing and arrival or when theres multiple planes at one location, and a couple of easier shortcuts or back butgons like being able to go back to passengers and cargo after clicking destinations on accident instead of completely exiting the plane menu, overall a beautiful game very fun and addictive.
We enjoy the game but can someone please explain why the VIP version is $20.
While playing, we noticed the stats graph was acting odd, as we believed that it wasnt processing progress, so we took a picture compared it to weeks later, and saw no change, we definitely did turn our phone off and on again, and Im not going to reset our progress, so an update is desperately in need. Good game though.
Hawaii needs a second airport please.
Its really fun, but once you start being able to send planes on longer routes, it often requires you to wait 4-5 hours. We dont have enough space on our phone to keep a game we can only play twice a day for five minutes, so we deleted it.
Its a good game we just dont like the airport structure. Once you start to grow the amount of airports available dwindles down very quickly. It would make more sense if there were more airports with class 2 and 3 certifications but right now its almost impossible in continents like africa and the oceania to actually operate an airline with class 2 or 3 planes.
Ive played this game off and on for at least 10 years. This game is great, but they added offerwall which is a way to get extra in-game currency. Turns out its an absolute scam. We did the offer for SiriusXM and gave them money for some bux and sure enough, our reward never came. We reached out to support for help and they literally said we didnt have sufficient proof despite having an order number and credit card statements and closed the ticket to the point we cant reach out to them. We really hope the DEVs just remove the feature all together.
Ive deleted & redownloaded this game 2 times so we know its not a glitch, they entice you to watch an ad for 20 in game dollars. But after youre done watching the infuriatingly long ad it only gives you 3.
Feels like theyre neglecting this app. Daily ad calendar and free coin are measly- less than 500 coins. Not even cost of a good flight. Lucky wheels special plane is not explained- Id won it and was wondering how we get our plane?? Gotta buy it in market – by the time we knew that it was gone. Flights are going everywhere, so some airports not worth opening without clogging everything up.
Love the game concept have been playing for a while and cant wait for more updates.
"Pocket Planes is an absolute gem of a game, offering a delightful blend of simplicity and depth that keeps us hooked for hours on end. What we adore most about it is its ease of play; navigating through the skies feels effortless and intuitive, making it accessible to players of all skill levels. The fun rewards sprinkled throughout the game are like little treats that keep us motivated to keep flying and expanding our airline empire. Moreover, the clear goals provide a sense of direction without feeling overly restrictive, allowing for a satisfying sense of progress. Unlike many games inundated with gimmicks, Pocket Planes stands out for its straightforward gameplay and genuine enjoyment factor. It's not an exaggeration to say that some of our fondest gaming memories have been made while soaring through the virtual skies in Pocket Planes. It's a testament to the game's timeless appeal and sheer joy it brings to players.".
We really like the game. Its just we think you should add some lights on the planes, and have them light up the skys when its dark. It would be just like the lights on the real planes.
We seriously play this game everyday and we recommend it to anyone who wants to have a casual business game. But we think a few changes could be made, starting with the airports, we got to the point where our airplanes were not the right class for the airport, so we got some popular airports that we know as some of the biggest, such as Denver (housing one of the biggest runways in all of the united states) and that is a class 1 airport. We dont get it. And then there is the transition between flying and landing, and we thing that there can be a little animation that plays to show them landing and pulling up to the airport. But even with a few imperfections, it is still a great game, good job.
Ive played a lot of pocket frogs, and downloaded this with high hopes, and we love it! We just hope they add Charlotte and Wilmington NC soon! Keep it up.
Ive loved this game since we played it on the iPhone 4 or 5, And played it over the years. We see that the devs recently started updating it again but theres no new content aside from new fixes and monetization tactics. The game just needs some new planes or new airport types, something to shake it up and we think more players would be willing to play.
Wait a whole day and theres no jobs. How am we supposed to run an airline when there is no passengers.
We love this game and its incredibly fun and well made, but how is Atlanta not a class three airport when its literally the busiest airport in the real world? Other than that its a five star game.
So this game we started playing years ago and then we had gotten a new phone and the game disappeared from the App Store you couldnt get it any more then we found away to download it from the developers website but lost interest because we love our character and progress but now Im getting back into and you can download again from the store thanks and please dont take it away again.
HIGHLY RECOMMEND! We loveeeee this game! We havent stopped playing since we downloaded it. Theres no popup ads, you watch ads if YOU want to, to earn coins or bux. Theres no competition just building your world of airports and getting the bitfolks and cargo to their destinations.
We really enjoy this game, but we wish that the map actually looped around the world. Alaska and Russia are practically touching irl, but in the game you have to circumnavigate the globe. Other than that, really enjoyable. We tend to like all their games, and this one is no exception.
We have played this game a few times but it isnt as immersive as Tiny Tower or Pocket Trains. The game overall just feels slow.
You might get more takers on the $40 VIP option if it included getting rid of ads. All that other stuff is hit or miss. This game makes it extremely difficult to find friends to send gifts to. You have to know them outside of the game, and then get their game ID. Not the easiest. The rest of the stuff is great, but not worth the money if you still have to watch those annoying ads. Otherwise, great game. Four stars, and its what we mentioned above away from being five.
Something we would like to see fixed though is, when you are selling a bunch of your plane parts, and say theyre at the bottom of the list, when you sell one of them it takes you back to the top of the list which is kind of annoying. One more thing is we wish there were better stats, but besides that its a wonderful game.
Driving us knits! Have everything for the space shuttle but no matter what we do we cant get the controls!!! Driving us nuts! Also the Concorde only have one part for that. How the heck do people get these jets? You should be able to buy these parts. Put a cash value for these to buy. Great game but would like that changed. We would be willing to buy bucks.
Redownloaded after 4 years of not playing and it still feels same as it was in 2015. Unlike other reviews want you to think, VIP is not needed to advance in the game Suggestions we have for future updates: – Daily Reward System Some rewards we can think of: 1) Free Bux 2) All cities advertised for 12 hours 3) All flights gain x2 profit and x2 speed for 6 hours 4) Free parts of special planes – Add more airports The USA, China, Europe, India, and Japan especially should get 10+ more airports in game if Australia has as much as they do – Make the number of unlocked airports and complimentary bux increase as your level increase Expansion is a breeze up until level 15 or so, but after that a major wall is hit and even going balls to the wall for a week results in minimal progress being made in leveling up. As for increasing rewards? Start – Level 5: 2 bux and 2 new airports Level 5 – Level 7 – 3 bux and 2 new airports Level 8 – Level 10 – 3 bux and 3 new airports Level 11 – Level 15 – 5 new bux and 3 new airports Level 15 – Level 20 – 6 new bux and 3 new airports Level 21 – Level 25 – 6 new bux and 4 new airports Level 26 – Level 30 – 7 new bux and 5 new airports Level 31+ – 10 new bux and 5 new airports.
The game is great but we would love to see greater ways where we can interact with friends. Like if we could combine our maps and we can use airports the other has but we dont at an additional fuel cost that goes to our friend until we buy it. And them maybe bonuses for airports we both own. Something like that to let airline cooperation like the real world that also adds competition. And maybe some other challenges late game.
Developers did well balancing game mechanics, end game strategy, and overall playability. All we would ask for improvements is to show predicted cash/bucks for a planes planned route and log information if thats possible? Its hard to tell how Im doing later in the game.
We could write a million great things about this game. In our opinion, this is the best game nimblebit has released from a gameplay perspective. That being said, we do have some quality of life suggestions that we think would allow the game to hold up in 2023 (and beyond!) as a top tier game. 1 – add lights to the aircraft. Even just one red beacon light would be fine and add more immersion. But, if you want to get realistic, you could add a flashing strobe, landing lights, nav lights that activate at night, and a steady white tail light. It would just make the whole experience more interesting and captivating 2 – cloud update!! We havent seen changes to the clouds in a long time. Maybe the aircraft passes a thunderstorm in the distance? Maybe it encounters weather mid flight. Also, clouds are currently only behind the aircraft. What if the aircraft passed through a few clouds, or if it entered a short fog that covered even the entire screen? (This would go well with the lights). It would add a little bit of depth that we think is missing from the game currently 3 – more airliners with engines underneath the wings. Most of the airliners on this game have T-tails and engines on the aft. This is a cool design, but Id like to see more T-tail aircraft for some variety These are very nit picky ideas, but they would add so much more depth to the game! Overall, though, the gameplay is very enjoyable and we still find ourselves grinding the game over a decade later. Theres something to be said about that.
We originally downloaded tiny tower and we loved it so much we wanted more games by the same creator and found pocket planes! Definitely our favorite game on our phone.
Played this game a lot about ten years ago so its nice to see thats its not only still up but theres newer stuff. Good stuff.
We have been occasionally playing (the only way to play) for a couple months now. This is a great little strategy game with airplanes – we love airplanes – Im an aerospace engineerso this is the perfect thing to do when not working. You can play without spending any money, so this should totally be a top free app. But its good to support the devs and enjoy the perks, so spend your coffee money sometimes. A couple suggestions: please make cities grow larger than 10m – proportional to their real populations ideally. Consider programming a way to automate some flights so their can be idle earning – it would be cool to have domestic fleets that automatically service continent interiors as well as international fleets that can be actively managedthe domestic fleets would have user-preprogrammed routes and would generate idle income, and then the international fleet would require inputs.. What do you think.
We love this game. It allows you to sit there and play for hours, even if your planes are up in the air. It is a very enjoyable game that we cannot get enough of. We wish there was a way to create multiple saves, which would be our only suggestion, but this game is really good and we love it.
Alaska has a low population but the Anchorage International Airport is worthy of at least a class 2 rating.
We like this game a lot been playing for a few years. Our one request is that there is a larger plane that is able to land in class 2 airports. Or the ability to upgrade the class of the airport. This is because there is only 3 class 3 airports in the USA and Id love to do more flights in the USA but its not feasible with the small number of big airports.
Overall great game and properly addicted, but why can we not see our friends fleet, airports, etc? Why can we not gift them coins or bux? Needs a lot more friend options / integration.
That's it! Amazing and addicting game.
So when we check how many flights we have its usually low because we are sleeping at night so can you please make an auto flight please and in the auto flight make the bux worth 500 to the A.we and please make it easier to get new planes we love this game please add the updates thanks.
We do indeed love this game but to get higher ranked planes is just an extremely long process and some of the plane models just feel shortened to much, like there version of the 747 and a380.
Playing the pocket trains game we noticed that planes lost and found cost $10 where trains costs $5 which makes no sense, also in trains you can gain more bux per level (you can get 10x more in trains) Also we feel like theres some potential for a combination of the two where trains and planes can work together to transport cargo including multi continents. We think a game like that would be a better app instead of switching between the two apps.
Wonderful game, play it all the time, but please please change the app cover it is terrible.
Had Pocket Planes and Tiny Tower installed for years collecting dust on our phone and stopped playing since they stopped updating their games but we're glad they're back. Keep the updates coming. Also, active community on reddit.
Theyve just resurrected this game, and at the perfect time but there is still no way for planes to travel the Pacific Ocean between East and West hemispheres. Its sad to have to take the long way to travel, say, Tokyo to LA.
Great mechanics and design for a very compelling, addictive simulation game. However, the latest version has some bugs that render the game unplayable, namely errors in state tracking of items in airports.
Youll be stuck on the same 3 small airports until you save up MILLIONS of coins or drop $60+ dollars for ONE pack to then convert to coins and buy ONE airport going save route? Prepare for months of playing to save as flights generate aroun$100. So need 4 million for one airport thats 40,000 flights you have to grind. Stopped playing after we did the math. Im okay dropping $$ on a game but at $60 for one airport only to have to grind pay for a second.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.14.0
- Size: 224.28 MB
- iOS: 15.0 or later
- Languages: CA, EN, FR, DE, JA, KO, ZH, ES
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence, Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence, Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
- Developer: NimbleBit LLC
Last updated: 2nd January 2026 | Genre: Simulation, Family | Developer: NimbleBit LLC