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From the cover picture of a Concorde nose-diving out of the sky, you might be forgiven for thinking that Airline is the latest marketing twist - a disaster movie computer program! Not so. Airline is a business game in which, as the blurb says, the object is to be more successful than Sir Freddie Laker.

You are chairman of L-AIR, a small struggling airline with initial capital of £3 million. Within seven years - not real time! - you have to try and increase your net assets to £30 million.

At the beginning of each financial year you are presented with a graph of the forecast passenger payloads, from which you choose the best number of aircraft to operate. For the first year of trading you don't have enough money to buy an airplane outright - the cost £10m each - and so you have to charter the required number, referring to a graph of charter rates. In more profitable years you have to decide whether it is cheaper to hire or buy aircraft, and in this case a graph of loan interest rates can be studied.

In a similar fashion the manning, maintenance and insurance levels have to be chosen: too low means some flights might need to be cancelled, too high and the cost might be crippling.

At the end of the year the accounts are closed and a balance sheet gives L-AIR's overall performance before you start a new financial year. If you lose £10m in one year - as I did! - however, the receivers are called in and the company is liquidated!

A nice touch in the program is a 'ticker tape' which occasionally crosses the screen with telex messages - OPEC increase oil prices, for example. Two versions of the program are on the tape: the basic version for model A, and one for the B with graphs of interest charges and 'chairman's statements' at the end of each year.

Airline features excellent use of graphics, simple instructions and a fair degree of financial realism. It is quite compulsive!

Geoff Nairn