ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on an airline’s day-to-day operation, how airlines cope with alterations that were not envisaged at the strategic level. It looks at operational activities performed by airlines that may not be considered as strategic in itself, but nevertheless are indispensable for airline operations, like ground handling operations or catering production. The chapter considers airline management at a tactical and operational level. As such, airlines deploy a large capacity to relevant business destinations in the early morning and the early evening, with perhaps a rotation to a leisure destination in between. On long-haul operations, fleet flexibility is limited due to this crew planning element and airlines need to make a careful trade-off between capacity flexibility versus crew efficiency. Airlines need to have their ground operations in place in order to actually execute all the flights that they plan. These operations involve passenger processing in the terminal, and aircraft handling at the ramp, with luggage handling in between.
