The Importance Of Airline Management

One of the main factors that affects airline success is bringing supply and demand in observed market conditions and economic environment as closely together as possi-ble. Moreover, airlines should both make profit and keep their customers (passengers) satisfied, while costs should be as low as possible. In order to be able to accomplish their mission in the market most suitably, airlines need appropriate methodological approach for the fleet planning process, corresponding fleet selection and permanent fleet management.

When it comes to airline fleet, it should be noted that the two main fleet features are fleet structure and fleet size. Fleet structure represents the number of different aircraft types in the fleet; thus, it could be single

The existence of a large number of different aircraft types, which would have certain mission and purpose and which could operate markets that have different air travel demand and characteristics, emphasizes the complexity of aircraft type selection problem. Aircraft should be chosen to be used in the future and to meet air travel demand in given market conditions (price and competition). In order to select appropriate aircraft type, planners very often have to balance multiple, usually conflicting criteria. Interests of both the airline and passengers must be considered, as well as operational requirements. In order to provide a satisfactory choice while dealing with multiple criteria, planners can apply some of the multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods as an aid to decision making. Since the last decade has been very turbulent for the global airline industry, airlines - as one of the players - are faced with the inability to respond to market and demand changes adequately. Different infectious diseases, volcanic eruptions and terrorist attacks had direct impact on air travel demand. Since the airline industry is one of the main pillars of global economy, it was directly affected by the world financial crisis which has further resulted in job

According to 14 and 13, AHP and FAHP are applied to various problems, and could be considered as widely used methods (over 150 pa-pers are cited in each paper). Considering their application in different areas and their frequencies of appearance in the relevant literature we have been found reasonable to choose them for comparison. Furthermore, the AHP and FAHP are MCDM methods based on pairwise comparisons, while the ESM is a method that belongs to a group of so-called dominance methods, which is not widely used. It was interesting to compare these three methods due to their diversities. Sometimes it is possible to use each of the techniques, but sometimes the technique is determined on the basis of the data availability. The main contribution of the paper is that it indicates methods suitability depending on the data availability. Our goal is to show that different MCDM methods can be used as an effective solution for the same