This paper presents an overview of several important areas of operations research applications
in the air transport industry. Specific areas covered are: the various stages of
aircraft and crew schedule planning; revenue management, including overbooking and legbased
and network-based seat inventory management; and the planning and operations of
aviation infrastructure (airports and air traffic management). For each of these areas, the
paper provides a historical perspective on OR contributions, as well as a brief summary of
the state of the art. It also identifies some of the main challenges for future research