1. Introduction
During the one hundred years since the first flight of
Orville and Wilbur Wright, the air transport industry
has grown into a major sector of the global economy.
Even more importantly, it has become essential
to developing and maintaining cultural and economic
links among countries and peoples. The airlines alone
generated more than $300 billion in revenues in 2002,
a lean year, and carried about 1.6 billion passengers, a
number expected to grow at an annual rate of 4%–5%
over the next 20 years according to most forecasts.
According to the industry “air transport provides
28 million direct, indirect, and induced jobs worldwide”
and carries “over 40% of the world trade of
goods, by value” (Collaborative Forum 2003).
After spending roughly its first 40 years trying to
get off the ground, literally at times, the air transport
industry has grown by leaps and bounds during
the last 60, especially since the advent of the “jet
age” in the late 1950s. Throughout that second period,
operations research (OR) has played a critical role in
helping the airline industry and its infrastructure sustain
high growth rates and make the transition from
a novelty that catered to an elite clientele to a service
industry for the masses. More than 100 airlines and
air transport associations are currently represented in
AGIFORS, the Airline Group of Operational Research
Societies, which has been active since 1961. Indeed,
it is difficult to think of any single sector, other than
perhaps military operations, with which operations
research has been linked more closely. One of the reasons
is that airline operations and, more generally,
the air transport environment provide natural contexts
for the application of OR techniques and models.
A second is that the airline industry has consistently
been a leader in the use of information technology
and has relied heavily on the intensive use of computers
over the years.
The objective of this paper is to present a historical
perspective on the contributions of operations
research to the air transport industry, as well as to
offer an assessment of some of the challenges that will
be confronted next. Any reasonably thorough coverage
of this subject would probably require an entire
issue of this journal because the number of OR papers
published on air transport easily exceeds 1,000 over
the last 50 years. In view of the severe constraints
on its length, the scope of the paper will instead be
confined to a selected subset of air transport-related
topics, where operations research has made some