Week #1
Day 1: Creating the account, starting up R&D

Make sure you have at least 10h ahead of you before midnight UTC.
You wont have to play 10h nonestop, perhaps 10 batches of 15min.
Put a timer on your phone to not waste time. That is only for day 1 :-)

Start on https://www.airlines-manager.com/ or via the mobile app.
Sign-up on professional mode
Put your email and password
Name your CEO, your secretary, and, most importantly, your airline.
Note that you can change these later [LINK TO BASIC]

You should be prompted to follow a tutorial (full or short).
Proceed with the SHORT version (or skip of possible).
The tutorial force you to do specific action that would slow you down.

Choose your initial hub.
Pick: Africa -> Mozambique -> "MPM - Maputo".
If you prefer alternate options: KAN, ABV, LOS, or ISB.
[Further reading: The basics: Initial Hub, Strategy: Africa]

Get the Card Holder, pick your free Economic wallet [Repeat every day for the next 8 weeks]

Spin the wheel [https://www.airlines-manager.com/home/wheeltcgame]

Go to the slot machine, spin all your tickts.
If on Mobile app, play the ads and play all your tickets of the day.

Get to the workshop, pick everything that is free
You should have about 5000 TC to spend (more if you were lucky with the wheel).
Avoid cash and planes, take Cola (~3000TC for +3.5 for 5 days), and R&D$ (~2000TC for 10M R&D).

Go to R&D section
Set your R&D Budget to the max (1M/day)

In the General #1 Section:
Unlock the R&D "Rudimentary laboratory" Level 1 (cost 1.5M) - 45min (come back in 45min)
Unlock the R&D "Rudimentary laboratory" Level 2 (cost 1.5M) - 45min (come back in 45min)
Unlock the R&D "Rudimentary laboratory" Level 3 (cost 1.5M) - 45min (come back in 45min)
Unlock the R&D "Rudimentary laboratory" Level 4 (cost 1.5M) - 45min (come back in 45min)
Unlock the Marketing "Rudimentary offices" Level 1 (cost 200k) - 30min
Unlock the Marketing "Rudimentary offices" Level 2 (cost 200k) - 30min
This should have unlocked you the "General #2 section"


Note: The "Rudimentary office" are not really needed now; but these two were "needed" to open up the general #2 section"
They were the cheapest ones to research to unlock the next section

In the General #2 Section:
Unlock the R&D "Basic laboratory" Level 1 (cost 2.0M) - 1h30 (come back in 1h30)
Unlock the R&D "Basic laboratory" Level 2 (cost 2.0M) - 1h30 (come back in 1h30)
Unlock the R&D "Basic laboratory" Level 3 (cost 2.0M) - 1h30 (come back in 1h30)
Unlock the R&D "Basic laboratory" Level 4 (cost 2.0M) - 1h30 (come back in 1h30)

Set your R&D Budget to the max (5M/day)

This may all sounds counter intuitive, but the first 2-3 days are NOT about buying/scheduling flights.
The sort goal is rather to maximize your R&D, which allows you to unlock banks and the right plane (IL-963).

Depending how lucky you were with the workshop, you should have about 4-5x conversion.
This will convert $3.5M into 20M ~ 25M of R&D - per day for 5 days.

To really start your airline, you will need about 50M of R&D

Target:
- 5M for MINI Bank
- 2 x 12M for Vaulture Bank
- IL963 Plane research level #2 (2x3M), Plus required research #1 (2x1M) = 8M

Go to Agenda:
see if you have unlocked any items (2 planes?)

Moving to plane:
All the plane you may have received ("free"), sell them (except if they were IL-963).
Normally the workshop would give you a free A330-300, if lucky you may have got another aircraft too.
This will be good money to continue the R&D.
Again, YMMV. Depending on your luck (workshop, slot machine, cardwallet), you should have now around $500M in cash.

Routes:
This will be used in about 3 days; but nothing prevent to plan the first circuits.

A few options:
PEK-PVG-TPE or PEK-PVG-CGO makes a good ~84h circuit
This can be extended later to a full 168h circuit.

In this guide, I picked a full circuit: PEK-PVG-TPE-LIM-HGH-NKG

Perform external audit and purchasing these 6 routes.
Always purchase routes from the cheapest (first) to the most expensive (last)
(China) PEK: 16.1M (3441/120/9)
(China) PVG: 19.2M (was 16.2 before PEK was purchased) - 3354/117/9
(Taiwan) TPE: 22.8M (was 16.4) - 2662/126/9
TOTAL: ~58M + $98,194,913

To understand route pricing, check this link [LINK ROUTE DISCOUNTS]

Go to Agenda:
You should have unlocked the item "owning 2 routes"

Summary of Day #1

- Make sure your R&D research is set to max (should be ~5M/day)
- You should have unlocked one (routes) or two (routes+planes) items from the agenda
- You have a your first circuit (168h) purchased
- You should have ~450M in bank