The Disruption Funnel: A Model for Fleet Asset Management During Sustainable Disruption

At the time of pandemics and sustainable disruptions, all carriers struggle with their existing assets. The airline overhead is always a burden specially with the lack of operation; hence, the airlines are always seeking a way to produce earnings from their fleet either by leasing it or by optimizing the utilization. In this paper, the aim is to find the most significant factors affecting the operating cost and the revenue for an airline during a sustained disruption. Through multiple regression analysis, the scheduled flights are categorizing into short-haul and long-haul operations to find the effect of all operating factors on flights assigned to narrow-body or wide-body fleet types. With finding the most significant factors in each type of operation assigned to the different fleet types, airlines shall find the optimum utilization of their fleet with the loss of demand at the times of the sustainable disruption. This way, airlines can allocate the number of aircraft that is needed to be leased and the ones that will bring them a better return during disrupted operations.