I started a game in the year 1921 in the city of Cairo. I was given a pair of planes that could go no farther than 243 nm (so-called "Farman"
) and a little 500,000 chunk to spend. I quickly spent it. I looked at my balance sheets, and it looked like my airline would be unprofitable. I started to panic.
Then I looked at where my expenses were, and cut back. I returned gates at cities that I'd purchased by accident but would not be able to fly to because my craft were so short-haul. I returned all the extra gates out of Cairo. I tweaked the heck out of the routes of my two planes so that I hit all but the smallest city in range with a 1-per-day flight, with a 1.5-per-day flight to the largest city in range. It was, in a way, rather much like running a real airline... scrimping scrimping scrimping to rake in a profit...
At the end of it I had about 50,000 euro profit per hour and monthly gate fees of 750,000. If you do that math, you will see that 15 out of 24 hours are spent paying for the gates, but 8 or 9 hours made me a profit of 400,000 or so per day.
So what to do next? NOTHING! This is important in getting out of the hole. Once you are as profitable as you can make it, sit on your thumbs until you can order some better aircraft.
A few days days later, I ordered a couple better planes for 1.5 million. Now the airline is saved and so are my 30 tokens.
(Hope this helps...)