Is Plane Parade free to play?

Yes. The first three airports, 24 shifts in all, are free with the full mechanics unlocked. The rest of the career is covered by two optional one-time purchases: a Career Pack for airports four through seven and a Polar Finale for the last airport and its Overtime mode.

Does Plane Parade have ads or energy timers?

No. There are no adverts, no ad SDKs, no energy or lives system, no daily wait, no loot boxes and no consumable currency. Nothing in the game asks you to pay to keep playing a shift you already started.

Do I need an internet connection to play?

No. The whole career ships inside the app and plays offline. The game will quietly check for updated level tuning when it can reach the network, but a failed check changes nothing about your game.

Which devices does Plane Parade run on?

iPhone and iPad running iOS or iPadOS 16.0 or later. The game is landscape only, and the board is laid out for the larger canvas on iPad.

A shift is a single self-contained level with its own clock and its own batch of planes, from four aircraft in the tutorial shifts up to thirty at Aurora Polar International. Most shifts are a few minutes, which makes it an easy game to pick up for one round.

Is Plane Parade a real air traffic control simulator?

No, and that is on purpose. It is a friendly arcade time-management game in the spirit of the classic airport dash games, not a study-level ATC simulator. You will not be reading approach plates, you will be keeping cheerful cartoon planes and their passengers happy.

Land · Load · LaunchYou’ve got the tower, Controller.

Plane Parade is a warm-hearted air-traffic time-management game for iPhone and iPad. Tap a circling plane, pick its runway, park it at a gate, send it off again — then keep that up for a whole parade of planes at once.

84 shifts
8 airports
24 shifts free
No ads
No energy timers

Coming to the App Store See how it plays

For iPhone and iPad, iOS 16 or later. Landscape, one thumb, no account to create.

A busy Plane Parade airport at dusk: four runways, six gates with planes at the jetways, a fuel station and a hangar along the bottom row.

A whole airport, run with one thumb

Planes arrive whether you are ready or not. They circle, they wait, and their passengers slowly lose patience. Your job is the beautiful, escalating puzzle of getting every one of them down, turned around and back in the air before the shift clock runs out.

Two taps, no menus

Tap the plane. Tap where you want it. That is the entire control scheme, from your very first prop plane to a four-runway international hub with thirty aircraft in play.

Difficulty that creeps up on you

Shift 1-1 gives you four planes, one runway and a tutorial. Shift 8-14 gives you thirty planes, four runways, snow, sea fog and a supersonic jet whose passengers wait for nobody. The 84 shifts in between are hand-tuned, not generated.

An airport you actually built

Every gate, runway, hold over space, plow, paint shop and fuel truck is bought in the shop with money you earned on the job. Your score is your budget, banked one for one.

How a shift works

Four moves, over and over, faster and faster. Learning them takes about thirty seconds. Getting good at them takes the whole career.

A Plane Parade board with one runway, a single gate marked A, the shift clock and score in the top bar, and two planes taxiing below. — **Tap to land, tap to launch.** Green arrows show a runway is yours; the badge on a gate tells you which colour of plane it wants.

Land it

Tap a circling plane, then tap an open runway. It lines up and touches down. Two planes can never share a strip, so the real skill is deciding which runway, and in which order.

Park it

Send it to a gate to unload its passengers and load the next lot. Send it to a matching-colour gate and you bank a bonus. Out of gates? Tuck it into a hold over space, where passengers keep their patience far longer than they would idling out on the apron.

Service it

Some aircraft roll in thirsty or needing maintenance. Route them to the fuel pumps or the hangar, or buy the Fuel Truck so a bowser tops them off at the gate while they unload and never leaves the stand at all.

Launch it

Loaded and ready, it wants back in the sky. Tap it, tap a runway, and it rolls. Get it away quickly and the departure is rated Early and pays the full bonus — dawdle and it slides to On Time, then Late.

Why it gets its hooks in you

The loop is simple. The pressure is what makes it a game.

Combo chains reward nerve

Land a plane on a strip and its arrows start counting down for about fifteen seconds. Bring the next arrival onto that same strip before the timer lapses and the bonus stacks, up to a four-times multiplier. Departures chain separately. Splitting arrivals onto one runway and departures onto another to keep both chains alive is the single most satisfying thing in the game.

Colour matching pays

From the second airport onward, gates ask for a specific livery. Six carriers fly into your airport, and putting the right colour at the right gate turns a routine turnaround into combo cash. Buy the Paint Shop and you can repaint a plane on the spot to make the match.

Every plane is a person

Patience drains visibly: a green bar, then yellow, then red, then a plane that gives up and leaves. One lost aircraft costs you a Silver Wing. It is a quietly brutal little pressure valve dressed up in cartoon smiles.

You can always see the next problem

Buy the Arrivals Board and the split-flap display in the tower shows the liveries of your next two inbounds. Upgrade to Tower Link and it grows to five slots plus each aircraft’s class and whether it needs fuel or repair. Reading the board turns panic into planning.

A COMBO x2 badge glows over two runways in Plane Parade while a cash bonus floats above the gates. — **×2 and climbing.** Chained landings on the same strip stack the bonus, and the cash goes straight into your shop budget.

A Plane Parade board with several planes at gates and on the apron, each showing a patience bar and a status bubble. — **Everyone is waiting on you.** Patience bars run green, then yellow, then red. Let one empty and that plane is gone.

What is in the game

Everything below is in the shipping build. No roadmap promises, no “coming later” asterisks.

84 shifts, 8 airports

A career that starts at sleepy Stevens Point Municipal with four planes and ends at Aurora Polar International with thirty. Each airport is a fresh assignment with its own checklist, its own shop and its own promotion. See all eight airports.

Eight classes of aircraft

Little props and turboprops, impatient business jets, regional and narrow-body airliners, heavy wide-bodies, helicopters that need almost no runway, and a supersonic dart with an enormous fare and passengers who wait for no one.

Weather that actually closes runways

Snow buries a strip and shuts it until it melts off. Sea fog rolls in and closes another. Both always clear on their own, so a shift is never unwinnable — but a Snow Plow that rolls out automatically, or Fog Fans you tap to blow the bank away, turn a disaster into an inconvenience.

Night shifts

At Metro Grand International the sun goes down across the assignment. Runway edge lights come up, taxiway lamps glow, aircraft navigation lights blink, and one continuous afternoon slides into true darkness over consecutive shifts.

Thirteen upgrades to buy

Gates, runways and hold over spaces. Faster gate service. Snow Plow, Fog Fans, Arrivals Board, Tower Link, Paint Shop and a bigger paint locker, a VIP stand that tips on departure, a Fuel Truck, and a charter contract that adds nimble Dragonfly rotorcraft to your traffic.

Wings, stamps and a certificate

Bronze for clearing a shift, Silver for clearing it without losing a plane, Gold for that and hitting the Chief score. Eleven commendation stamps for feats like a ×4 chain or a spotless storm shift. Gold every shift at an airport and the Board issues a printable promotion certificate.

Game Center

An optional career-score leaderboard and achievements for your first shift, your first Gold Wings, your first completed assignment and ten shifts served. Sign in or do not; the game plays the same either way.

Plays on a plane

Fitting, really. The entire career is bundled in the app, so it runs with the radio off, in a tunnel, at 35,000 feet. No login, no server round trip to start a shift.

Made for both screens

Landscape on iPhone and iPad, with the board laid out for the canvas it is on. Hand-drawn sprites, split-flap boards, chunky rounded type and a soundtrack of real recorded engines.

Six carriers, one very busy apron

Match the livery to the gate that wants it and the money follows.

The days you will remember

Weather and darkness are not reskins. They take a runway away from you and dare you to keep the parade moving anyway.

Snowline Alpine Airport in Plane Parade: a snow-covered airfield with three runways, snowy pines along the skyline and planes on approach. — **Snowline Alpine Airport.** Snow settles on a strip and closes it until it melts off. Keep a plow on the payroll and it rolls out the moment a runway goes under.

A Plane Parade board after dark: runway edge lights and gate lamps glowing, aircraft navigation lights blinking, four lit strips down the middle of the field. — **After dark.** Runway edge lights, gate lamps and blinking nav lights turn the whole board into something you read by its lights.

Spend your shift money like a real airport director

Between shifts you get the shop, and the shop is where the strategy lives. Assignment funds do not carry between airports, so at every new posting you decide again: a fourth gate, or the plow you know Shift 4-7 is going to need?

The Plane Parade shop screen showing the Faster Gate Service upgrade, its description, cost and the player's available assignment funds. — **Every upgrade explains itself** — what it does, what it costs, and which shift it becomes active on. Sell something back and you recover most of what you paid.

Things worth saving for

New Gate — service more planes in parallel, up to four gates.
New Runway — split arrivals and departures so both combo chains live.
Hold Over Space — park a waiting plane where its passengers stay calm.
Faster Gate Service — turnarounds 25% quicker at the jetway.
Snow Plow / Fog Fans — take the weather’s best punch away.
Arrivals Board → Tower Link — see two inbounds, then five with their class and service needs.
Paint Shop — recolour a plane to manufacture a gate match.
VIP Hold Over Stand — patience barely drains, and the crew tips on departure.
Fuel Truck — refuel at the gate instead of taxiing to the pumps.
Charter Contract — add quick little Dragonfly rotorcraft to your traffic.

Clear the checklist. Get promoted. Do it again, harder.

Each airport is an assignment with a clipboard, and each shift on it is a tick box with three wings waiting to be filled in.

The Plane Parade shift checklist for Assignment 1, Stevens Point Municipal Airport, showing seven shifts and three wing icons each. — **Seven shifts at your first posting** — and fourteen at your last. Wings fill in as you earn them.

The Plane Parade end-of-shift report: planes served, planes lost, Early, On Time and Late tallies for arrivals and departures, and the shift score. — **The end-of-shift report** counts every plane served and lost and rates each arrival and departure Early, On Time or Late. Three gold wings means you did it clean and beat the Chief score.

Tour all eight airports →

Premium, not pushy

Plane Parade is built the way a paid game used to be built. You are the player, not the product.

What you will never find in it

No adverts, and no advertising or tracking SDKs in the app at all
No energy, lives, hearts or daily wait to play
No consumable currency, gacha or loot boxes
No subscription
No account to create, no email to hand over
No pay-to-win: money is earned in shifts, never bought

What you get

Three airports and 24 shifts, free, with every mechanic switched on
Two optional one-time purchases open the remaining five airports and 60 shifts
Purchases restore on your other devices with the usual App Store restore
Progress is stored on your device, not on our servers
Anonymous gameplay statistics only, never your name, contacts or location — see the privacy notes

Clear every plane before time runs out

Plane Parade is finished and in beta testing for iPhone and iPad, with the App Store release coming shortly. Start with 24 free shifts and see how far you get before the parade gets away from you.

Ask to be told when it lands

iPhone and iPad · iOS 16 or later · landscape · English

Questions people ask

Is Plane Parade free?

The first three airports — 24 shifts at Stevens Point Municipal, Pinecrest Regional and Lakeside Municipal — are free, with every mechanic unlocked. Two optional one-time purchases cover the rest: a Career Pack for the four middle airports (46 shifts) and a Polar Finale for Aurora Polar International, its 14 shifts and its Overtime mode. No subscription, and nothing is consumable.

Are there ads or energy timers?

None. There is no ad SDK in the build, no rewarded video, no lives system and no daily cooldown. If you want to play eleven shifts in a row on a Sunday afternoon, nothing in the game will stop you.

Does it need the internet?

No. The entire level catalogue ships inside the app, so the game plays offline. When it can reach the network it quietly checks whether the level tuning has been updated, and if the check fails it is ignored completely.

What devices does it need?

iPhone or iPad on iOS or iPadOS 16.0 or later. Landscape only, in both cases, with the board scaled for the screen it is on.

How long does a shift take?

Each shift is one self-contained level with its own clock, from four aircraft in the opening tutorials to thirty at the final airport. That makes it a good game for a short sitting, and a dangerous one for a long evening.

Is this a serious air traffic control simulator?

No, happily. Plane Parade is an arcade time-management game in the tradition of the classic airport dash games: cartoon planes, cheerful faces, patience meters and combo bonuses. If you want vectors and approach plates, this is the wrong airport.

Can I lose?

Yes. Passengers run out of patience, planes give up and leave, and a shift you do not clear does not tick its box. Weather never makes a shift impossible — snow and fog always clear on their own — but your own scheduling absolutely can.

What is Overtime?

An endless-pressure mode that sits outside the 84-shift career, unlocked with the Polar Finale, for when the checklist is finished and you still want the tower.