Turnaround
The low-cost airline simulation
“Every profitable customer above the bottom of the market will pay you more only if you break the operating system that makes you cheap.”
You are the chief executive of Meridian Air, a young low-cost airline with twenty aircraft, one base, and launch debt. Over five years you choose cities, airports, fares, aircraft, crews, and product.
Taught in Financial Accounting, Business Statistics and Analytics, Strategic Management, ready to teach on Pedagogix Course Designer.
See what Turnaround feels like
Transcript of the Turnaround intro video Captions are part of the video
You are the chief executive of Meridian Air, a young low-cost airline with twenty aircraft, one base, and launch debt. Over five years you choose cities, airports, fares, aircraft, crews, and product. The customers who would pay more all ask for things that slow your aircraft down, and slow aircraft make a cheap airline expensive.
The experienceMeridian Air is based in Calder and serves five cities, one of them a stranded route in the next state. Two established carriers hold the national network, and a low-cost rival is expanding. Every half year you decide which of twelve cities to serve, whether to fly into the main airport or the cheaper secondary field, how to price against the incumbent, when to order aircraft that may arrive late, how many pilots to hire, how much slack to build into the schedule, and how far to move your product upmarket.
Your cost advantage comes from keeping aircraft in the air. A choice that adds minutes to each turnaround raises the cost of every seat on every route. Cash is the hidden danger. Passengers pay before they fly, so a growing airline looks rich in cash while it loses money, and the cash drains quickly when growth stops. That is why real airlines fail suddenly.
Fuel prices, winter storms, fleet groundings, and a rival that floods your busiest route all arrive on their own schedule. A briefing each period tells you what is likely and how reliable the forecast is. Decisions reach you as short memos from your CFO, your COO, and your CCO, and the three of them want different things.
- A cost advantage belongs to the whole system. Airports, fleet, schedule, and product have to fit together.
- An aircraft earns money only in the air, so minutes on the ground are the most expensive minutes in the business.
- The airport you choose decides which customers you can win.
- Spare crews and schedule slack cost money every day until the storm in which they save the airline.
- In a business that is paid in advance, growth pays the bills until the day growth stops.
- The game trains systems thinking. A change to airports, fleet, schedule, or product moves the cost of every route, so the student has to hold the whole business model in view.
- Which revenue should a company refuse? Every attractive customer segment asks for something that weakens the cost advantage, and the student has to answer that question many times.
- Slack costs money every day and pays back only in a disruption. Students form a view of how much resilience an efficient operation should buy.
- A growing company can be closer to failure than its accounts suggest. Students learn to read cash separately from profit in a business that is paid in advance.
- Company and role
- Chief executive of Meridian Air, a privately held low-cost carrier three years past launch. The board judges you on five published numbers
- Discipline
- Competitive strategy
- Also fits courses in
- Operations, marketing, corporate finance
- Format
- Solo. Each game draws one of 24 markets, and the results screen shows the market number so that players who drew the same market can compare. Games save and resume
- Time
- Ten half-year periods, which is five years of company life. Plan a 75-minute session: 40 minutes of play and 35 of debrief
- Advisers and AI
- Three advisers (CFO, COO, CCO) speak from rules tied to the state of your airline and never repeat a line
- How you are scored
- A board scorecard: unit margin 25%, cash generated 25%, growth 20%, aircraft hours 15%, on-time performance 15%, adjusted for risk. Your grade is your score as a share of the best result found for your market, in seven grades from S to F. An insolvent airline earns an F
- Teaching materials
- In-game briefing and a results screen, The Airline You Became, that maps your five years across seven named strategies
- Audience
- MBA electives and executive education. This is an advanced title
Turnaround beside Capstone
Capstone, from Capsim, is the simulation most programs already know here. Where ours differs: One student, one 75-minute session, and one industry whose economics the student must master.
| What is compared | Capstone | Turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| Who plays | Teams of three to seven | One student |
| Time | Up to eight rounds of 60 to 150 minutes each | One 75-minute session: 40 minutes of play, 35 of debrief |
Formats and times come from each publisher's own product page, September 2026.
Turnaround comes ready to run in class
In-game briefing
Results screen, The Airline You Became
Seven named strategies mapped from your five years
Board scorecard on five published numbers
24 seeded markets, comparable across a class
Instructor dashboard
Automatic grading, S to F
Games save and resume
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