Online Manual

For the Windows edition. Last updated: 7 September 2026.

This is the manual for Ground Ops: Turnaround. It tells you what the job is, how a turnaround runs, what the machines do, and which key does what. The game teaches the same things as you play — this page is here for when you want the whole picture in one place, or want to look one thing up.

1. The job

You are the ground crew at Northstar International, a mountain airfield with weather that has opinions. A flight is inbound and it has your stand number on it. Between her arriving and her leaving, everything that has to happen to her is your job — and you do it yourself, on foot and behind the wheel, rather than ordering it from a menu.

Two clocks run. The slot clock is the departure you are working towards; miss it and she goes late. The holdover clock only appears in winter, and it is the one that decides whether the de-icing you just did still counts.

Three things are always true:

• Order matters. Some jobs are physically impossible before others; some are merely wrong, and those cost you a safety violation rather than blocking you.
• The stand has to be clear. A machine standing in the marked restraint area will stop an aircraft coming onto the stand at all.
• Connections are real. Once the ground power, the stairs or the tug are on her, driving that machine away breaks the connection — the job comes undone, it does not stay done on paper.

2. The turnaround, step by step

A full turnaround is twenty-two jobs. The checklist on screen always shows what is available now and what is still blocked, so you never have to memorise this — but this is the shape of it.

Arrival

1. Activate the docking guidance. The inbound aircraft holds short on the lead-in line and waits. Walk to the docking display at the head of the stand and press interact. It checks the equipment restraint area first and refuses while a machine is standing in it — it names the machine, so go and move that one. Once it is happy the display reads CLEAR TO DOCK, counts her in, then STOP, then OK.
2. Chock the nose gear. Walk to the nose wheel and press interact. Chocks first, always.
3. Set the safety cones. The marker is at the wingtip.
4. Walk around her. Three points, in order: the nose gear, then down the starboard side to the wing and gear, then under the tail. The walkaround is a walk — you cannot press all three from one spot, and baggage and fuel are waiting on the last of them.
5. Get the door open. Either fetch the passenger stairs from the yard and dock them at the forward door, or — at a stand with a jetbridge — trigger the docking from the bridge's rotunda console and let the bridge drive itself onto the door.
6. Deboard. Press interact at the cabin door and let the passengers off.
7. Connect ground power at the starboard side of the nose, or everything on board goes dark.

Servicing

8. Unload the baggage — see section 4; the carts have to be at the aircraft, not parked where you found them.
9. Load the outbound baggage.
10. Refuel — bring the bowser in under the wing and let the pump run.
11. Water — the water truck, starboard side, aft.
12. Waste — the lavatory truck, behind it.
13. Catering — port side, aft. Last of the trucks.
14. Board. Call boarding at the cabin door. Boarding before she is fuelled is allowed, and it is a violation — the game will tell you which corner you cut.
15. De-ice, if the weather says so — section 5.

Departure

16. Take the stairs off her and leave the door clear. At a bridge stand the bridge retracts itself once boarding is finished.
17. Disconnect ground power.
18. Connect the tug. Back the pushback tug up to the nose gear and connect.
19. Pull the cones and the chocks so she can move. This is the point of no return.
20. Push her back from the nose point. She will not go if the jetbridge is still on the door.
21. Disconnect the tug once she is on the taxi line, and stand well clear.

Not every shift runs the full board. A regional turn may be bags off, bags on and away. An arrival-only shift chocks her, powers her and empties her, with no departure at all. Your first tutorial shift is a crew change: every ritual of a turnaround, none of the service trucks.

3. Driving and the yard

The equipment does not come to you. Steps, belt loaders, bowsers and tractors live in their marked bays in the equipment yard. Walk over, press interact at the machine to take the seat, and drive it out.

• The parking brake is a latch. It stays set until you press it again, and asking for throttle against it warns you rather than releasing it. It sets itself whenever you leave a seat, and there is a lamp on the dashboard whenever you are aboard.
• The foot brake works whatever the parking brake is doing.
• The camera key walks a cycle: chase, close, cab, top-down. In any outside view the mouse orbits the camera and recentres itself once you drive on; in the cab it looks around the cab. The boom shortens automatically when something solid gets between the camera and the machine, and swings to the front when you reverse.
• Stuck? The recover key returns the machine you are in to the depot.
• Clear up after yourself. Machines left on a stand are a hazard, and they will hold up the next arrival.

4. Baggage

Bags are real objects, and a hold can only be worked when carts are actually standing beside the aircraft. So the baggage run has three parts:

1. Take the baggage tractor, reverse onto a cart, and couple. A tractor can pull a train.
2. Bring the train to the hold, inside reach of the aircraft.
3. Fetch the belt loader from the yard, position it at the hold door, and work the belt. The belt runs up and down on its own keys; press the same key again to stop it. You can pick a bag up, take one from a cart, and throw one.

Where you park the belt loader is scored: a good position earns a bonus on each baggage job.

5. De-icing and the holdover clock

When there is frost or falling snow, the aircraft needs treating before she can go.

The machine

The boom de-icer is driven from the cabin on the end of the boom, not from the truck cab — climb in and that is where you start. The camera key drops you to an outside view if you want to see what you are doing on the ground.

• Boom up / boom down raise and lower the arm; it telescopes out as it rises.
• Spray is a hold. Fluid only lands on the aircraft once the arm is actually up — spraying properly from a raised boom is far faster than parking a truck nearby and pressing the button.
• Steering left and right turns the basket instead, once the parking brake is set: 180 degrees in all, which aims both the gun and you. The cabin self-levels, so it stays upright however high the arm goes.
• The fluid selector switches between the two fluids, and there is a key to reset the dispensed-litre counters.

The two fluids

• Type I (orange) is the hot pass that strips what is already on her. It runs off.
• Type IV (green) is the anti-ice film. It is meant to stay on the wing, and it is what is still protecting her when the holdover clock matters.

The holdover clock

Finish a treatment and the clock starts. It counts how long that treatment protects her in the weather you are actually in, and it restarts every time you treat her again. Finishing on Type IV holds three times as long — that is the whole reason the selector exists, and the reason a slower, clingier anti-ice pass is worth it.

If the clock runs out before she is pushed back, the treatment fails: frost creeps visibly back over the skin and the de-icing job un-ticks itself. This is not a violation and it is not a penalty — it is a race you lost. The cost is doing it again with the slot clock still running.

Once she is pushed back, the coat is the flight's problem, not yours.

On the de-icing pad

Shifts on the remote de-icing pad run the full two-step: step one with Type I until she is clean, then select Type IV and step two to anti-ice her. The film only counts as anti-ice if every working boom is on Type IV — Type I in the mix dilutes it.

On the pad she is not released by the work being finished. When the treatment is on, you must get your machine clear of the aircraft and then transmit "de-icing complete" on the pad radio. That last call is what releases her, and it is what stops a four-handed crew letting a jet go with a boom still at the tail.

6. When there is a fire

Fuel on the ground, a machine left cooking too close, a wing that catches — the stand becomes an incident scene.

What happens to the turnaround. While there is a live fire near the aircraft, the service points refuse to be worked and passengers stop coming out. A standing incident warning sits on the HUD. Everything resumes once she is soaked.

Fighting it. Get into the airport crash tender and drive it to the stand. On top of the usual driving controls it has:

• the roof monitor on the spray key — it throws water much further than a de-icing boom sprays fluid, which is the point of the machine: you fight an aircraft fire from a distance;
• a bumper turret on the boom-up key;
• the siren on the boom-down key.

Water aimed at the fire puts it out; water aimed anywhere else does not. About eleven seconds of a monitor held on the seat of it will do it. The tank is 12,500 litres and the monitor empties it flat out in about a minute and a half, so commit to a position rather than standing off at the fence — and refill at the fire station when you are dry.

The clock. Left alone, a fire goes fully involved in about seventy seconds, and a fully involved fire left long enough takes the aeroplane with it and ends the shift. The game measures your response time — ignition to first water on the fire — and tells you afterwards what it was. A hot seat that nobody soaked can reignite, so finish the job properly.

7. The modes

Tutorial

Your first shift is a crew-change turn: guide her in, secure her, walk around her, stairs, door, power, and out again — every ritual of a turnaround with none of the service trucks, so a first completed flight lands in about five minutes. The full fleet is day two. Instructions name the key or the pad button you are actually holding, so they stay correct if you remap anything.

Scenarios

Thirty-eight authored shifts, listed in order of difficulty rather than alphabetically, from a quiet first morning to the shift that decides your season. Each one fixes its own weather, time of day, wind, aircraft and board. Harder rows are locked until you reach the rank they ask for, and the list shows your best score and grade for each.

The duty roster

Six of those shifts are a duty roster — Day 1 through Day 6, sitting in the same list, meant to be worked in order, and saving the worst for last.

Free Operations

An endless shift on the live field. Everything defaults to Random, so pressing the button just deals you a morning — but you can choose the weather (clear, rain, snow or fog), the time of day (day, sunrise, sunset or night), and whether incidents are allowed to happen.

Every shift has a seed, a number shown on screen. Type a seed into the box before you start and you get that exact shift back — same weather, same board, same everything. Leave it blank for a new one. Quote a seed to a friend and they can work the same morning you did.

Online co-op

One aircraft, one clock, a whole crew. See the next section.

8. Playing together

From the title screen, open Multiplayer. You can host a room — you are given a short code — or join one by typing the code somebody sent you. Rooms are private by construction: there is no server browser and no public matchmaking, just the code you share. Online play is part of the Windows edition.

Once you are in:

• Pick a job. The pause menu has a crew roster and a MY JOB picker — crew lead, bags, fluids and so on. Shifts are started from the pause menu.
• Talk. Press Enter to type to the crew; your controls go limp while you are typing. Hold the parking-brake key for the quick call wheel — eight preset calls, faster than typing and reachable on a controller. Hold the push-to-talk key to speak on the radio.
• Mute. Any player can be muted individually, from the crew roster, and muting is applied at the door.
• Racing for a task costs nothing. If two of you go for the same job and you lose, you are not penalised. Timed jobs mark the checklist with whoever is on them, as advice, not as a lock — nobody can jam the board by walking away.
• The clock scales. Par time and the tolerance for violations both move with the size of the crew, and a violation names whoever caused it.

9. Scoring, rank and the hangar

A shift is scored out of a base of 1,000. Safety violations take 75 each. You gain a time bonus for finishing inside the par time, and equipment bonuses for positioning machines well. The grade runs S (no violations, and finished in under half the par time), then A, B and C. Your best score and grade are kept for every scenario.

Work earns XP, which raises your rank and unlocks harder scenarios, and credits, which buy upgrades in the hangar. The title screen shows your rank, XP, credits and the number of turnarounds you have completed, and the logbook keeps the history. There are fifteen achievements.

Settings has a Start over option at the bottom, marked as the hazard it is and confirmed twice: it wipes your career, logbook and hangar upgrades. Your settings and achievements are kept.

10. Controls

Keys below are the defaults on a standard keyboard layout. The game reads your actual layout, so the letter printed on your key is the letter the game shows you. The pause menu has a Controls page that reads the live bindings, so it can never disagree with the game.

On foot

Driving

Lights

De-icer

Baggage

Crew (co-op)

Menus and map

Remapping

The Controls page in the pause menu lets you rebind keyboard keys. If the key you pick is already doing something else the game names the clash instead of silently doubling it up, and there is a reset that puts the defaults back. Two keys are deliberately fixed — Esc (pause) and Enter (chat) — because moving them can strand you mid-shift with no way back to the menu. Controller buttons are fixed: every button is already spoken for, and the allocation is context-sensitive.

The action names are stable, so a wheel or a joystick can be mapped onto the same actions as the pedals and the steering.

11. Settings and accessibility

Settings is reachable from the title screen and from the pause menu, and it is fully operable with a controller. Everything here is saved and applied when a shift starts.

Looking and moving

• Mouse sensitivity, and a separate controller look speed.
• Invert look, vertical and horizontal, independently.
• Field of view, 65 to 105 degrees.

Picture

• Graphics preset, V-Sync, a frame-rate cap, window resolution, fullscreen, and an optional frame-rate readout.
• Brightness and contrast sliders.
• Reduce motion — turns off the camera flourishes that exist only for flavour, such as the sweep over the field at the start of a shift.
• Large UI — bigger interface text and controls.
• Time of day — normal, frozen (the shift keeps the hour it started on) or fast.

Sound

• Master volume, plus separate faders for world sounds, radio chatter, music and crew voice.
• Radio subtitles, on by default — everything spoken on the radio is also written on screen.
• Music in shifts can be switched off entirely if you would rather have only the airfield.

Language

English, German, French and Spanish, plus Auto, which follows your system. Menus, briefings, lessons and radio subtitles are all translated.

12. Saves

The game saves by itself. Your career, logbook, best scores, achievements, key bindings and settings all live in one small file in your Windows user application-data folder, with a backup kept beside it. On Steam it is synced with Steam Cloud, so the same career follows you to another machine.

There are no manual save slots — a shift is a shift, and it either goes well or it does not.

13. If something goes wrong

• A machine is stuck or somewhere it should not be: use the recover key to send it back to the depot.
• A job will not tick: check the checklist for what it is waiting on, and check that the machine it needs is still parked at the aircraft — driving it away breaks the connection.
• The aircraft will not come onto the stand: something of yours is in the restraint area. The docking display names it.
• She will not push back: the jetbridge is still on the door, or the chocks are still in.
• Still stuck, or something is genuinely broken: write to support@arcadebox.ai and tell us what you were doing. If you were in Free Operations, send the seed — it lets us load the exact shift you were on.

14. All of it is invented

Every airport, airline, aircraft, ground vehicle, company, flight number, radio call and procedure in Ground Ops: Turnaround is an original creation. Nothing is based on, copied from, or endorsed by any real airline, airport, aircraft manufacturer or ground-handling company, and no real operator's markings or documents are used.

The procedures are simplified for play. This game is not approved or certified training software for airport ground operations, de-icing, pushback, marshalling, refuelling or anything else, and must not be used as operational training material of any kind.

Back to the game page · Health & safety information