The Routledge Companion to Air Transport Management

p.238

15

Airline capacity planning and management

Cheng-Lung Wu and Stephen J. Maher

Introduction

This chapter focuses on capacity planning and operational management for airlines (for airports, see Chapter 16). In general, the purpose of airline capacity planning is to respond to current and future travel demand of passengers (see Chapter 19). While the capacity of an airline is certain and can be planned, travel demand attracted to a particular airline is fairly uncertain. Travel demand typically depends on marketing, product offerings in the market, competition, and to some extent the market power (share) of an airline. Economies of density are identified in the literature for airlines running a hub-and-spoke network, while low cost carriers ...