I really want to play this game because of nostalgia, but it (is one of many games that) won't even start up in Windows 8 for me; the blue loading circle appears and the game crashes before any game screen even appears.

Should I post some kind of data here, if someone could be friendly enough to think of a possible solution for this?

Try the initial troubleshooting like described here:
http://www.gog.com/support/airline_tycoon_deluxe/crashing_in_general

Especially running the game as an administrator, installing June 2010 DirectX runtime package and if that doesn't help apply different compatibility modes.