AirlineManager

The work

Network planning, scheduling, crew rostering, revenue management, ground operations: an airline is a logistics business with a very expensive fleet and almost no margin. The decisions are commercial but the constraints are operational and legal, and a schedule that ignores crew duty limits or turnaround times will fall apart in a week.

A typical day

• 01Model a route or a schedule change and argue for it with numbers
• 02Balance aircraft utilisation against crew rules and maintenance slots
• 03Work out what a disruption actually cost and what would have prevented it
• 04Talk to operations, commercial and finance, who all want different things

How people get in

• Graduate scheme

  Most large carriers run one, rotating through commercial and operational departments.

• From the operation

  Dispatch, ground operations or crewing experience is a strong route in, and it shows.

How it unfolds

1. Year 1Graduate scheme or an operational desk. Nobody starts by planning the network.
2. Years 2-4Analyst: scheduling, revenue or ground operations, with real numbers and real constraints.
3. Years 5-9Owning a route group, a base or a function, and defending decisions to finance.
4. LaterHead of network, operations or commercial.

Is there a job in it

The hard parts

Airlines run on margins thin enough that a good year and a bad year look similar from the outside. Your decisions are commercial and their consequences are operational, which means a schedule that looked clever in a spreadsheet can fall apart in a week and everybody will know whose it was.

What you would need

• Network and revenue modelling
• Operational constraints
• Data literacy
• Negotiation