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,