sc79 wrote:Its a balancing factor. Even having to manually replace them, they're massively overpowered compared to other transport types. Money isn't a drawback (until the economy is rebalanced anyway), and a blocked runway can be a bit of a pain, but requires no user intervention (and when the new airport specs are done, new airport designs will probably reduce this further by using dual-purpose runways).
They are overpowered. But still, crashes happen way to often. Most of the big airlines in the world (American, Lufthansa, Air France, British, KLM, Delta etc.) have far more than 200 planes and as far as I know they have all had only very few crashes in their entire history where the whole plane exploded and all passengers were dead...
So whatever changes are made to the whole aircraft system, don't forget to lower the probability of plane "explosions". Maybe by adding alternatives like a non-functional landing gear that only costs maybe 1/4 of the original cost and the plane can be reused afterwards. Or maybe a non-functional engine which would only in some cases cause the whole plane to immediately crash. And so on.