Airline planning is inherently challenging, in part because many planning inputs are outside an airline’s control. The global aviation ecosystem relies on interwoven networks shaped by competing stakeholder priorities. Travel demand patterns are forever shifting and tough to forecast. Unpleasant surprises—including major storms, airport infrastructure breakdowns, IT failures, ground staff shortages, and aircraft delivery delays—can add significant uncertainty to any projections. This can be further exacerbated by global crises, geopolitical challenges, and other external factors. Making flawless decisions, up to a year in advance, about which exact aircraft should fly which route, with what crew, and how to react to unforeseen disruptions (and these are only a portion of the variables involved) would require airline executives to be clairvoyant.
That said, airlines could mitigate some of these planning challenges if they took steps to update their tools, methods, and mindsets. Many of the decision-making processes through which airlines establish route maps, schedules, fleet management, airport staffing levels, and so forth remain impeded by siloed communications and outdated technology and metrics. There have been some recent positive developments in the planning sphere. At the same time, many airlines have abandoned many of the collaborative and flexible approaches they pioneered (out of necessity) during the pandemic.
A fully integrated approach to airline planning, using a process that unites commercial and operational considerations, could achieve improved results. There are billions of dollars in opportunities for airlines that can get this right (according to one industry group estimate, each additional minute an airplane spends taxiing or airborne costs the airline more than $100 while also imposing personal costs, such as lost productivity and wages, on delayed passengers). But enacting changes would require airlines to commit to adopting more holistic strategies, building more accurate simulations, modernizing their collection and analysis of data, enabling nimbler decision-making, and intensifying focus on customer experience. This article presents a vision of future integrated planning that could help airlines soar above the competition.
Factors complicating effective airline planning
Synchronizing operational components (such as scheduling, crew management, and maintenance) with commercial objectives (such as maximizing revenue and enhancing customer satisfaction) has always posed a challenge for airline planners. Long lead times and suboptimal tools and processes can add to the difficulty. As the complexity of operating environments increases, these challenges will only be magnified.
Inflexible processes and long lead times
Airline operations are inherently unstable—often constrained by prolonged, externally dictated lead times that can require schedules to be set nearly a year in advance—and they are subject to uncontrolled developments, such as weather issues, equipment malfunctions, or airport construction work that unexpectedly increases ground times. The need to plan for a probability distribution of scenarios, instead of for discrete events, adds considerable complexity to decision-making processes. Different airlines have responded to this challenge in different ways. Network carriers have historically tended to be reactive, waiting for demand to materialize before adding capacity. Low-cost and ultra-low-cost carriers have tended to take more of a venture capitalist–type approach to planning, featuring some successes, many failures, and significant experimentation. Airlines in Europe and other slot-constrained regions (where limited slots are distributed for airport take-offs and landings) must also try to capture changing demand while maintaining their valuable slot portfolios.
Siloed teams with misaligned priorities
Historically, there has been a disconnect between commercial and operational planning within airlines. Fragmented workflows cause both sides to misjudge critical factors. Commercial teams will sometimes underestimate operational constraints (for instance, how aircraft routing can affect crew pairing) when setting a schedule. Operational teams might size the impact of schedule delays without fully understanding the effects on the customer. Without the right tools and a common language, both commercial and operational teams frequently resort to inserting precautionary buffers into schedules to account for potential delays—but these buffers are not always optimally positioned or removed when they are no longer needed.
Inadequate tech
Technology often limits airline planning. Tools sometimes lack adequate capabilities, and upgrades can be very costly to implement. For the most part, existing optimization software is unable to handle the complexity of combining all the aspects of planning into one calculation. It cannot consider every variable (and the interactions between those variables) and isn’t quick enough when analyzing a plethora of different scenarios and options.
This means problems frequently need to be broken down into manageable components that are solved independently. The result can be outputs that offer conflicting solutions. This siloed approach to employing tech also often leads to the use of narrow KPIs that focus on the activities of individual departments instead of the overall performance of the airline. For instance, a maintenance planning organization might reroute aircraft to ensure they get to their maintenance slots without realizing that this could cause inefficient crew connections.
Clouds on the horizon
Some emerging trends could exacerbate these challenges. Increasing congestion in both airspaces and airports, potential economic uncertainty or geopolitical tension that causes passenger demand to fluctuate, and rising costs (for items such as fuel, labor, and emerging requirements to compensate passengers for delays and cancellations) could all put additional pressure on planning processes, necessitating more sophisticated and dynamic solutions.
Positive airline planning developments
In recent years, the airline industry has seen some improvements in coordination between commercial and operations functions. Collaborative practices adopted as emergency measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have emerged as catalysts and crucial building blocks for the future of airline planning. Meanwhile, technology has steadily advanced. Efforts on these fronts should be expanded and incorporated into a cohesive framework.
Creation of joint planning teams
Airlines have increasingly adopted integrated-planning processes to bridge the gap between commercial and operational priorities. Initiatives have ranged from establishing cross-functional planning forums to undertaking full organizational restructuring. In 2023, for example, Southwest Airlines created a joint department1 that combined its network planning (responsible for deciding where the airline flies to) and network operations center (responsible for monitoring daily flight activity). The airline described this move as an effort to create “a tighter feedback loop between schedule design and schedule execution.”
Agile process born from a crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic forced airlines to adopt unprecedented levels of collaboration and flexibility in their planning processes. Business-as-usual processes ceased in most airlines. In many cases, small cross-functional teams would meet daily in the same room to address crew shortages, staffing challenges at airports, rapidly shifting competitor capacity, and changing passenger demands. These approaches proved effective, as airlines communicated end to end, established clear ownership over processes, and prioritized agility and tight feedback loops. As labor shortages eased and commercial considerations regained importance, many airlines reverted to their pre-COVID-19 planning approaches—abandoning some of their hard-won process improvements—while others carried forward the wisdom earned during a challenging moment.
Improved tech to tackle complexity
Airlines are rich with data. Technological innovations can enable greater use of complex data sets and have given airlines tools that can inject the power of simulation (digitally replicating a situation to test different theses) and optimization (automatically generating a solution) into their planning processes. Amadeus’ Sky Suite, for instance, incorporates both simulation and optimization capabilities to help airlines rapidly generate and test different network plans. This can allow planners to better understand trade-offs between competing priorities, such as revenue maximization and operational efficiency.
A vision of fully integrated planning
While there have been green shoots, many airlines continue to plan in much the same way they have for decades. Turning a critical eye on the current state of planning could help airlines imagine a more efficient and effective future.
What if … there was a single tool to plan the airline?
Rather than completing a series of hand-offs from group to group and optimizer to optimizer, a consolidated planning organization could use an integrated architecture (meaning a single tool or ecosystem of connected tools) that incorporates customer demand, aircraft availability, crew requirements, maintenance requirements, gate availability, and other factors to create a schedule that considers and solves for all of these varying constraints. The role of long-term planning would shift from repeating tedious runs on the same data to instead steering the core models and testing new scenarios that could help reach more efficient frontiers. Improved feedback would be seamlessly fed into the system, which quickly learns and adapts to new operating conditions. The organization could confidently balance its commercial, operational, and risk considerations based on current company priorities.
What if … customers mattered more than the schedule?
Airlines could make a leap from thinking about their own binary on-time performance and completion factors to instead thinking about customers’ minutes of delay and journey completions. Instead of worrying about whether a flight is 15 or 16 minutes late, airlines would care more about the experience of each individual customer—noting those who are flying on a quick day trip or making an internal connection. This would fundamentally change schedule design features, as density could be built into key lanes to ensure there are recovery options for flight connections or delays. Simulation could be used to model customer flows and outcomes on good days and bad and to make schedule adjustments accordingly. Contingency plans would be built with rerouting options to proactively move customers around major areas of disruption when conditions require. The end result would be greater confidence for customers that the airline will get them where they need to go.
What if … flights were planned days, not months, in advance?
Imagine a world where itineraries can adjust far more dynamically to changing conditions. Months out, customers with more flexibility would purchase arrival windows instead of to-the-minute schedules that might change several times before they actually fly. Block times would be far more dynamic and could adjust to changing congestion or airport conditions. Instead of locking the schedule more than two months in advance to account for crew bidding, crews would be flexibly assigned as the day of operation approached, allowing their quality of life to be preserved through enhanced open-time and trading systems. When weather drives large cancellation packages, the aircraft and crew would be reassigned to help route customers around the disruption. While this end state would require contractual and technological enhancements to be realized, the possibilities it offers for utilization, customer satisfaction, and cost efficiency could be transformative.
The path forward
While the vision of fully integrated airline planning holds great promise, realizing it could require overcoming entrenched mindsets and outdated tech. Many of the airline industry’s traditional ways of working are deeply embedded in siloed team structures and legacy optimization tools. A successful transformation will involve bold, deliberate, and sustained effort across three critical dimensions: data-driven technology, analytics for integrated processes, and organizational structures.
Building the tech and data foundation
Any effective future planning process will be underpinned by accurate and reliable data. Today, airline data is often fragmented and not organized in a way that enables a constant feedback loop. For instance, operational data, such as indications of consistent disruptions occurring on a specific route, are often not fully integrated into future planning cycles, undermining schedule reliability.
To address this, airlines should look for ways to create dynamic and interconnected systems to close data gaps and enable continuous learning—particularly around underlying operating constraints and interactions. Better understanding of, for instance, airport staffing approaches (such as part-time options or rules relating to overtime) or the playbooks used by operations control centers (governing which flights to delay or prioritize) could provide valuable inputs for more effective planning. A clear strategic vision and collaboration with technology providers could accelerate new simulation capabilities. Digital-twin technology that constructs replica environments where experiments can be run could enable testing different scenarios and adapting operations in real time.
Establishing analytically integrated processes
The fragmented workflows employed by traditional planning software tools are rooted in airlines’ historical reliance on separate, siloed systems for scheduling, crew management, and aircraft maintenance. While these technological tools have served airlines well in the past, they are not equipped to handle the complexities of integrated planning. Disjointed priorities and misaligned KPIs (such as revenue-focused metrics that ignore operational costs) lead to inferior process creation and hinder analytics outputs. To unlock the full potential of digital tools and their teams, airlines should consider how to develop end-to-end processes, supported by shared objectives and KPIs.
After identifying the company-wide and within-workgroup metrics that matter, executives and operators with profit-and-loss responsibilities can make those metrics the focus of weekly, monthly, and quarterly performance discussions. This shift in emphasis can be accelerated by equipping teams and decision-makers with real-time information while building analytics and reporting capabilities that are rooted in the proper data.
Reorganizing planning structures
Achieving integrated planning will require a fundamental rethink of how airline planning is organized. Traditional organizational structures, which separate commercial and operational functions, often reinforce silos and hinder collaboration. Some airlines, such as Air New Zealand, have already implemented agile methodologies in cross-functional teams that focus on end-to-end decision flows instead of departmental boundaries. By breaking down silos, integrated planning can become a core function of an organization, spanning both commercial and operational priorities. Supported by technology, these changes foster collaboration and shared accountability, delivering reliable schedules and consistent service.
The future of airline planning lies in integration—bringing together commercial and operational priorities to create a more nimble, efficient, and customer-centric process. But achieving this vision could require comprehensive technological and organizational transformations. The journey to integrated planning might be full of obstacles, but the potential rewards—greater operational reliability, enhanced customer satisfaction, and improved financial performance—make it a goal worth pursuing.