Economy & Trading
Missions are not the only way to make money. The Economy is where you trade contraband yourself: buy goods cheap in one place and sell them dear in another. It is a second income on top of flying jobs, and it grows into a serious earner once you understand price zones.
What unlocks, and when
Trading opens up in stages as you rank up:
| Level | What you get |
|---|---|
| Level 6 | Market Intel: sell prices show up at airports you have visited, on the airport panel on the Map. |
| Level 10 | The Economy tab opens. You can see buy and sell prices and start trading. |
| Level 15 | Full economy: hot markets appear and the price-zone game is fully in play. |
| Level 20 | Crew trading: buy and sell remotely through idle crew. |
The core idea: buy low, sell high
Every airport sits in a price zone, and the zone sets how expensive goods are there. The same zone multiplier applies to both buying and selling, so the trick is simple: buy where prices are low and carry the goods to where prices are high.
| Zone | Price level |
|---|---|
| Colombia | 0.6x (cheapest, best place to buy) |
| South America | 0.8x |
| Central America | 1.0x |
| Caribbean | 1.2x |
| United States | 1.4x |
| US Border (Mexico and the southern US) | 1.8x (priciest, best place to sell) |
| Everywhere else | 1.0x |
How prices behave
- They refresh once a day. Each airport's prices are set for the day and the same for everyone, then roll over.
- They wobble by commodity. Different goods swing more or less day to day, so it pays to check.
- You only see prices where you have been. Visiting an airport adds it to your Market Intel, so the more you fly, the more of the map you can read.
Buying
You buy at the airport you are currently at, and the goods load into one of your planes parked there (so you need an aircraft on the ground to trade). To stop you draining one cheap airport dry, each airport has a daily limit on how much it will sell you, by tier:
| Tier | Daily buy limit per airport |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 80 units |
| Tier 2 | 60 units |
| Tier 3 | 45 units |
| Tier 4 | 30 units |
| Tier 5 | 20 units |
The limit is shared with any crew buying there, and it resets each day along with the prices.
Selling
To sell, you dispatch the loaded goods to a discovered airport that buys them. You pick the destination, then either fly it yourself or send a smuggler, exactly like a cargo run. The sale lands when the plane arrives. The dispatch screen shows the revenue and your profit per destination before you commit, so you can pick the best buyer. See the Cargo guide for the loading and dispatch flow, and the Crew & Smugglers guide for the smuggler option.
Hot markets
From Level 15, a few airports run hot each day and pay 1.5x on sells. They are marked with a HOT tag in the Economy tab and on the Map's airport panel. Only a couple are hot at any time and they rotate daily, so a hot market is the best place to dump a load while it lasts.
Trading through your crew
At Level 20, you can buy and sell remotely at airports where you have an idle crew member with a plane, without flying there yourself. There is a per-run carry cap by rank (15, 35 and 60 units) and a 10 percent commission on crew trades. The full details are in the Crew & Smugglers guide.