Trucks, trams and trains have had a specialist for every cargo for a while. Planes and helicopters had one passenger line and one do-everything freighter. Now every cargo a truck carries has its own cargo jet and its own cargo helicopter — coal, grain, oil, goods, livestock, gold, mail and the rest, on every climate that has them — each in seven generations and eight Mk tiers, unlocked by the same talent node that gives you the truck.
For each of the thirty-one truck lines there is now a Cargojet and an Airlift carrying exactly the same cargo on exactly the same climates: Coal Cargojet and Coal Airlift beside the Coal Truck, Grain, Wheat, Maize and Sugar beside the hopper trucks, Oil, Water, Rubber and Cola beside the tankers, Bullion, Gold, Diamond, Bubble and Rock Candy beside the armoured vans, and so on. Generations I to VII run from the first aircraft of the era to the far future, and every generation carries the Mk1 to Mk8 ladder. The fleet grows from 10,950 to 14,534 vehicles.
They are locked to their cargo, the way a specialist truck is. A cargo jet is a jet with the seats taken out: it flies at the jet's speed and lands on the jet's runways, and its hold is priced by the cargo's character — mail and perishables fast and small, minerals and liquids slower and roomier.
The Airlifts are heavy-lift sky cranes: slower than the passenger helicopters, two to three times the lift, and it grows with every generation — a late crane hauls a truckload and needs no runway. They pay for it — a crane costs about three quarters more to buy and half as much again to run as the helicopter line would otherwise price it. Research and talents that cut purchase and running costs are how a good player makes them work.
Each line sits on the node that already grants its truck, so a build that reaches the trucks reaches the aircraft for nothing extra:
The nodes now read as rail, road and air talents, and searching the board for “air” or a cargo name finds them. The node text is shorter too: instead of a catalogue of every model, a node says what it unlocks in one line per cargo — “Coal specialist Trucks / Trams / Engines / Wagons / Planes / Helicopters” — turns green once you hold it, and the build summary lists everything your taken nodes have unlocked the same way.
OpenTTD sizes an aircraft's hold in passenger seats and shows other cargoes against that: a freight hold shows a quarter of the seat figure, a mail hold half. So a cargo jet whose airframe carries 240 seats' worth shows 60 tonnes of coal in the buy menu, and that is what it hauls. The talent board's Ctrl-hover tooltip shows the same number the buy menu does.
Ships already had a hull for every cargo in seven generations and eight Mk tiers; nothing changed there. Their grants stay grouped on the three sea-wedge nodes rather than spread across the cargo nodes.