Airport CEO: Game Quirks and Achievement Tips

Airport CEO is a great game, but there are some quirks here and there about how the game runs that can add a little fun to your game or seriously break it. This guide will explain game-breaking quirks first, then cosmetic ones, and finally some tips about harder achievements.

This is fairly elementary but it’s very important for the following parts of this guide, so I’m mentioning it here: secure zoning and walls cannot exist in the same cell. This is a bit deceptive since the game will allow you to drag secure zones over walls, and you’re allowed to include walls in employee zones and any kind of room. Because you can’t have walls and secure zone in the same cells, when you place walls inside a secure zone it deletes the secure zoning in the cells where the walls are. Note that the zoning is undone immediately when you place the walls, not when your construction guys actually get around to building them. If you place walls inside a secure zone and then delete them, you’ll need to re-zone those cells for security. Since international zoning is a subtype of secure zoning, the same rules apply for that; you’ll need to re-zone for security and then re-zone for international.

You may have noticed that when you build a new medium or large stand next to an existing building it punches two small holes in the wall for people to come and go, like this.
As mentioned before, even if you previously included the wall in your secure zone dragging, those two spots are zoned not secure because there used to be walls there, and you’ll need to re-zone them.

This is true for jetways too, and it’s totally invisible to the player. When you build a jetway it punches two holes in the wall just like at ground-level, but it’s masked by the jetway image. If you build and then demolish a jetway you can see it.

Here is a jetway for a medium stand:

And here you can see where it punched two holes in the wall:

These holes are the point where arriving passengers spawn and departing passengers despawn, so if they are not zoned secure (and international for large stands) then your arrivals will be stuck there and your departures will not be able to board.

For whatever reason, I found that once I had a busy enough airport my passenger service agents simply refused to show up to my boarding desks. I’m not sure why this was, but it almost cost me my run. As soon as you’re able to you should use automated boarding desks so that your passengers are not dependent on your staff being there in order to board on-time. These desks are also very compact, so you can put a bunch of them on a single gate, allowing more than one passenger to board at a time. I found for large planes 6 or 8 works well, 4 for mediums, and 2 for smalls and helicopters.

Self-service passport control is very important for the same reason.

Your employees have to go through security too! Except for construction workers, your staff cannot reach secure areas without properly passing through security like your passengers. You may need to build a separate checkpoint for them, but fortunately a small one will do just fine. Make sure you click on the checkpoint and set it to employees-only or else your passengers will go through it and immediately get lost when they can’t find their gate in that particular secure zone.

As mentioned before, walls and secure zones can’t occupy the same space. The game also will not allow you to designate a “room” (shop, bathroom, etc) that includes secure and non-secure space. Because of this, you can’t designate a room in a secure zone that also includes walls. For example, this is against the rules:

However, as you can see I’ve made it work for these bathrooms. The way to do this is start with an empty shell like this:

Next add the bathroom designation:

Then add the interior walls:

This principle can be applied to any room type, including restaurants.

If you’re working on the tutorials, when you start building a baggage system it becomes obvious that you can build service roads inside your terminal building foundations. This can be super useful in many cases, like this one where I don’t want my service vehicles to have to go all the way around a long terminal.

But just as quickly you’ll realize that you cannot build public roads inside your terminals. You also cannot build terminal foundation above open space; you can only build upper floors directly on top of lower floors. This should make building sky bridges (walkways above roads) impossible – but here again there is a workaround.

First, build your lower floor in the shape you want your sky bridge. Then build the upper floor. After you’ve laid out the upper floor, you can demolish the lower floor (using the foundation demolish tool, not the furniture demolish tool) and you can freely build roads or other infrastructure underneath.

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Building underground is super important, but there are a few things that you can put down there that aren’t obvious. For example, you can put your parking lots underground.

The game doesn’t have parking garages, but with this you can achieve the same effect building downwards instead of upwards. You can also build fuel depots underground, which is great because at full capacity they take up a lot of space.

First, it’s important that (on easy) the maximum fine for failing an emergency is $25,000. Once you’re up to medium planes that amount basically doesn’t matter so you can ignore them. Even when I was pushing for the Airport of the Year award I ignored them and it had basically no effect.

However, if you really care about completing them properly then you’ll want to have a “standby” stand of each size. By “standby” I mean a stand that’s fully set up for commercial flights but with the auto-scheduler turned off (in the flight planner, click the gear next to the stand’s name and turn off the computer icon). When emergencies come in you can immediately drop the flight on that stand. Note that this is a good place to use remote stands (with the shuttle buses) so you’re not taking up valuable space up against your terminal.

This isn’t obvious and I discovered it by accident, but you can right-click on road segments to set access limitations for certain vehicles. There is a separate construction tool for setting roads as one-way. For taxiways you can do both things (limit access and set one-way) by right-clicking on a taxi node. This is very helpful for enforcing a one-way aircraft traffic flow through your complex of stands, especially if you have separate arrival and departure runways – which I highly recommend.

WIth the decorative asphalt or concrete underlay in the aircraft infrastructure build menu you can really make your airfield look big and uniform. Many things you can place right on top of it like fuel depots, control towers, radar and roads. It doesn’t play nice with everything though; for example you can’t build taxiway, pedestrian walkway, or road tunnels on it. You can also put it underneath some existing pieces like fuel depots and parking lots. You can’t build it underneath of existing fence but you can build fence on top of it.

If you have aircraft of more than one size landing on a single runway, build more than one exit ramp! In this example I have a medium runway serving arrivals of medium and small aircraft going from right to left. Medium use the whole runway to stop, while small only use a little more than half. Having extra off-ramps along the runway allows the small craft to get off the runway sooner so that the next plane can land.

If your departure runways use different starting points per aircraft size then you’ll want multiple on-ramps for the same reason, though I typically recommend using the option where all aircraft depart from the same spot.

I won’t address every achievement because most of them are fairly straightforward. These are some things that weren’t really clear to me even after extensive web searching.

To “manually scan” a bag means to run it through a level-3 scanner, the one with the security guy standing there watching the bag go through. It does not refer to security checkpoints or the level 1 or level 2 scanners.

Per this discussion[forum.apoglabs.com] (includes screenshot), the best way to do this is to run your bags through a lot of scanners in a row. You can also crank up the passenger count in the gameplay settings so you get more bags per flight.

If you fill a large map with decent operations of every size then you’ll probably end up somewhere around $50M in value. To get the rest of your value, wait until you’ve hit the AOTY award and then spam the golden statue until the achievement pops. Here I used a 25×25 foundation and I intended to fill it with statues, but the achievement popped before it was even half-full. I also went broke doing this, but you can easily demolish everything once you’re done.

As the wiki suggests, the way to do this is with great patience or with AutoHotKey. I couldn’t find one online so I wrote a script myself that will do this for you and you can find it here[pastebin.com]. Note that the script assumes you have a resolution of 1366 x 768, since that was the size of my viewport when I created it. This guide will not address how to install or use AHK – that’s the easy part and you can find tutorials for that elsewhere.

This one wasn’t straightforward either. The wiki says you simply have to “have 50 delayed flights”, but that isn’t actually enough.

In the flight monitor (the gears at the bottom-left) delayed flights show up with a red indicator on the right edge. In this screenshot I have one:

Trying to get this achievement, in my full-size international airport I suddenly dismissed most of my staff and sold all but one of each vehicle. I quickly got this monitor to show more than 50 delayed flights but the achievement didn’t pop.

It turns out that you need to manually delay the flights. This means setting the flight planner to “prompt” instead of “always delay” so that each delayed flight generates a notification asking you whether to delay or refuse a flight. Then for each notification you click the “delay” option. After 50 of these you’ll get it. Suddenly dismissing all the staff and vehicles is still a great way to set up for this, it just won’t happen automatically. This will obviously do bad things to your airport and rating, so make sure you save before you do it.

This will trash your airport, so make sure you save before you do it. Fire your entire staff and replace them with only low-experience employees (in the red). You should also only hire about 110. Mark all bathrooms as passenger-only and delete your staff rooms. You do not need to remove staff-only zones, the furniture in the staff rooms, or even the employee desks; you just need to un-designate the staff rooms. Let the game run at full speed for a while and it’ll eventually pop. For me it took about 4 hours at full speed.

You’ll need a pen and paper (or a spreadsheet) for this one. Refer to the list of aircraft in the game[airportceo.fandom.com] but ignore the A330-200 which isn’t offered by any base-game airline and isn’t counted for the achievement. Check all the flights already in your planner and mark off the planes you’ve already gotten (the model is in the bottom-left corner of the flight information popup). Let the day end (so you actually hit the flights on the right edge of your schedule) and drop all your airline contracts. This will require temporarily closing all your stands, but not for long.

Once you’ve made a list of the planes you already have and cleared your planner, look through the available contracts and accept only those that offer a model you’re missing. Let the game run a bit and you’re all set.

Note that you’ll need to have GA service enabled in order to achieve this, since several small planes only exist in GA. If you’ve offered GA for any significant amount of time (you have to in order to get the AOTY award) then you can safely ignore those. Keep in mind that you need commercial and GA helicopters to do this, as well as all the DLC.

“Fully pay back a loan” means to click the “repay” button in the loan interface. Simply paying it back over time as usual is not enough. Just pause the game, take out a loan, and immediately click the repay button and this will pop.

Please let me know if any parts of this guide need correction or updating. If there is anything that should be in this guide but isn’t, please let me know!