For decades, airline planning was like charting a course on a well-known map. You optimized routes, set schedules, and forecasted demand based on predictable patterns. But today's aviation landscape isn’t a map — it’s a storm.
For airlines operating on thin margins, the most unpredictable and costly disruptions are now happening on the ground.
- A geopolitical conflict closes critical airspace overnight, adding millions in costs
- A sustainability mandate forces a rapid, costly shift to reworking your entire budget
- A supplier shortage delays deliveries, throwing capacity and workforce plans into disarray
- A cyberattack or a widespread GPS outage brings air travel to an immediate halt
- A sudden pandemic or environmental issue grounds your entire fleet for months
Your plans for network, fleet, workforce, and finance plans are all deeply interconnected. And while many airlines have built solid annual planning muscles, today’s pace of change makes it harder to keep those plans aligned without more frequent updates and tighter collaboration.
Why airline planning must evolve
From government-mandated shutdowns to sudden labor shortages, unexpected disruptions have become a critical challenge for the airline industry, revealing a stark reality: rigid, forecast-based planning is no longer sufficient. When an unforeseen event grounds thousands of flights overnight, it triggers a domino effect with immense consequences that ripple across the entire operation.
- Operational chaos: Disruptions force airlines to instantly rework schedules, reroute aircraft, and manage idle crews, turning simple scheduling into a high-stakes strategic challenge.
- Significant financial strain: Beyond lost revenue, disruptions create cascading and unpredictable costs from grounded crews, overtime upon service resumption, and passenger compensation.
- Poor customer experience: Thousands of frustrated travelers are left scrambling for alternatives, which quickly erodes trust and loyalty in the airline's brand.
While it’s impossible to predict every crisis, modern planning allows leadership to model the financial implications of different scenarios in real-time and adjust capacity plans dynamically. By building agile, responsive, and data-driven processes, airlines can adapt to a world where disruption is guaranteed, turning a potential financial crisis into a managed, data-driven response.
Are you flying with a blindfold?
Ask your leadership these critical questions:
- When a crisis hits, how long does it take to get a consolidated answer on financial damage? Or are your teams left validating separate spreadsheets, delaying a critical response by hours, days, or even weeks?
- Can you instantly model the cascading impact of a fleet-wide maintenance issue across the entire enterprise? Or are you making decisions in a vacuum, blind to the downstream effects on crew and revenue?
- Can you confidently model the financial trade-offs of a sustainability mandate before you commit? Or is every major investment a slow, high-stakes gamble?
If the answer is "no" or "not fast enough," you're not just reacting to the market — you’re falling behind it.
The era of static, traditional planning is no longer sustainable. Success depends on a company's ability to respond swiftly to change and to coordinate planning across the entire organization.
| Traditional planning limitations | Today’s aviation needs |
|---|---|
|
Static plans and manual spreadsheets create slow, error-prone processes. |
Dynamic planning: Agile, continuous, enabling real-time decisions. |
|
Siloed and rigid processes limit cross-functional collaboration. |
Collaborative planning: Fostering integrated strategy across all departments. |
|
Unreliable and historical data leads to flawed, backward-looking insights. |
Intelligent planning: Combine real-time insights with AI for secure, forward-looking data. |
Leading airlines are those that are connecting data to see around corners, anticipate challenges, and seize opportunities faster than the competition. It's about having dynamic, connected plans that allow you to model any scenario, collaborate in real-time, and make informed decisions with confidence, no matter what the world throws at you.
Anaplan: Your command center powering every critical decision
Anaplan's scenario planning and analysis platform integrates critical planning processes across your entire organization, breaking down silos and providing a single source of truth for business insights.
For finance:
Connect every financial decision — from route planning to fleet acquisition — on a single platform to steer your airline toward profitability.
- Achieve total financial visibility: Go beyond basic budgeting with continuous rolling forecasts and understand the full financial impact of every operational decision before it's made.
- Maximize network revenue: Rigorously assess flight and route profitability in real-time to ensure every part of your network is contributing to the bottom line.
- Optimize high-value assets and costs: Conduct sophisticated "lease vs. buy" analysis and streamline vendor cost management to optimize capital allocation.
For workforce:
Transform workforce planning from a reactive scheduling exercise into a strategic advantage, ensuring you have the right people in the right place at the right cost.
- Align crew to corporate strategy: Connect top-down goals with operational headcount plans and forecast skill requirements to proactively close talent gaps.
- Optimize workforce operations: Streamline complex crew and station hour planning to ensure operational readiness, reduce costly overtime, and improve resource utilization.
- Control labor costs: Predict and reduce employee attrition and understand the full financial impact of labor agreements to ensure you have the right talent for profitable growth.
Gatwick Airport, the UK's second largest, unlocked £1 million in operational savings and achieved 95% forecast accuracy with Anaplan, empowering confident, data-driven decisions.
Turn volatility into your competitive advantage
Anaplan gives you a unified, real-time environment that connects your people, data, and plans across the entire enterprise. This empowers you to:
- Accelerate your sustainability journey: Model the full financial impact of SAF adoption and optimize purchasing strategies to ensure your green initiatives are also economically sound.
- Boost operational efficiency: Move beyond legacy systems to enable real-time re-planning for disruptions like airspace closures, driving down costs while enhancing punctuality.
- Innovate with intelligence: Leverage AI for unparalleled forecasting accuracy, integrating data from aircraft sensors and weather services for richer insights and smarter, safer decisions.
- Having foresight to prevent problems and agility to act on opportunities empowers your leaders to build a stronger, more profitable business.
Brussels Airlines fueled its expansion to 85 destinations by using Anaplan to identify high-performing routes and improve collaboration for more agile, data-driven decision-making.
Imagine a shared cockpit where finance, operations, and workforce leaders see the same data, work from the same assumptions, and understand the impact of every decision—all on a single platform:
- Finance sees the instant P&L and cash flow implications of a new route or a change in fleet
- Operations understand the financial trade-offs of their network and maintenance schedules
- Workforce teams align hiring and training directly with the strategic fleet and network plan
When these core functions are connected in Anaplan, you move from departmental conflict to strategic alignment. Decisions are no longer slow and compromised; they are fast, intelligent, and optimized for the best enterprise-wide outcome.
With Anaplan, you're not just flying through the storm; you're charting a clearer, more profitable course for the future of aviation.
