Finding Good Cargo Routes

[madflava13]

Hello all,
I'm back to AWS after several years away, and excited to find cargo has been added.  Aside from the tried and true method of checking every route, is there a way to find good cargo airports and routes?  Right now I'm just playing around with different set ups, but in the next GW I join, I may shoot for a cargo only airline if that's feasible. 
Thanks for your help!

[Tha_Ape]

Looking for routes
Not really another way than the classic one. You'll soon discover some cargo heavens that you're almost certain to have good demand to, but the rest is still click-click-click.
Cargo is heavily asymmetrical, but one fat leg is enough to make the route completely profitable, even if the other one is virtually nothing.
However, it means that the search for potential routes quite painful: you have to check both legs every time, instead of jumping quickly from one pop-up to the other.
Nonetheless, it is really rare that there is heavy cargo on one leg on not on the other, thus you can eliminate routes where you don't spot HC (no need to check the return leg. On the opposite, small HC (even if really small) makes the verification on the other leg worth it.

Finding an airport
USA - Europe (UK and Germany, mainly) - Japan - Hong-Kong (until the 90s: not big but ok )
The rest of Asia only after the economic boom in the 90s
More specifically / regionally, it depends if you want to be big or not. However as for now, secondary airport that are often the local cargo hub IRL are still hard to play because a feature on infrastructure is still incomplete, and it's hard to get those airports growing big, with a large catchment radius. So as for now, large and "classic" airports are still (usually) better.
But no curfew is a must have, as cargo doesn't care about the night (indeed, if there is one night flight vs plenty of daily flight, you'll drag a good part of the demand because you have a very different timing).

CBD + cargo mechanics
Check the manual carefully, and have an eye on the recent GWs' forums, there is plenty of useful info. Really worth having an eye.

Welcome back

[madflava13]

So helpful - and thanks for the welcome back!

[JumboShrimp]

One thing that would be helpful in this exercise if the figure for cargo demand was shown just like the pax demand on the Route Planning screen.  I posted a Feature request for it here:

https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,74722.0.html

We now have to read it from the chart, and the tiny number is not easy to read.

[JumboShrimp]

Edit: wrong link, I meant this one:

https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,74650.0.html