ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unexpected demand for air cargo in terms of rapid mobility of critical basic needs. Air cargo carriers aim to maximize their profits by taking advantage of the current demand and using their limited capacity in the right place. At this point, some of the qualifications of the airports in the places where demand plays a crucial role in this decision of the carriers. Thus, evaluating the factors considered in the airport selection for air cargo carriers during the COVID-19 period is curious. This study proposes a triangular fuzzy Dombi-Bonferroni best-worst method (BWM) framework with vast flexibility to establish the priority preferences of factors considered in selecting airports. The fuzzy BWM model becomes a superior decision support system by combining the Bonferroni mean operator's ability to consider interrelationships between attributes and the flexibility of the Dombi operator. In this sense, we highlight eighteen criteria based on five airport aspects: location, physical features, performance, costs, and reputation. Findings reveal that the foremost aspects are location and costs, whereas the most crucial factors are airport charges and handling charges. The study suggests that airports should follow a low-price policy for airport-related charges without compromising their sustainability to have a share of the increasing number of air cargo flights, especially during the COVID-19 period, when airline passenger flights are decreased. The study is crucial in deciding the strategy and policy of air cargo carriers and airports during the pandemic period.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic increased the risk of financial distress, bankruptcy, or both, in the airline industry. Whether airlines can survive or not during and/or after the pandemic is closely related to their decisions and actions which will enable their success by increasing their resilience. In crisis periods such as COVID-19, the decisions taken by airlines are strategically important for achieving sustainable success. Thus, it is critical to understand which factors are more important for airlines to shape their actions and make correct decisions. This paper investigates the sustainable success factors on which airlines should focus to provide resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It provides a robust model using the interval type-2 fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (IT2FAHP) and interval type-2 fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (IT2FDEMATEL) to identify and rank success factors. The findings indicate that financial and operational factors are extremely important to ensure resilience for airlines. In addition, the results of the study reveal that operational factors and information sharing factors have an impact on financial factors and customer satisfaction.
ABSTRACT
This paper aims to draw lessons from retrospectively evaluating the evolution of the air transport discipline right up to the COVID-19 outbreak through the Journal of Air Transport Management (JATM), the main scholarly air transportation journal globally. As such, this study deploys a comprehensive bibliometric analysis and graphical mapping of the JATM knowledge body through CiteSpace visualization of 1483 JATM papers from 2001 to 2019. Our results suggest that while the industry has experienced pandemics and economic crises in the past, both were not dominant in influencing JATM literature neither in frequency nor in impact. That said, recovery, crisis and disruption are important key words in JATM papers not just in regard to safety and economic crisis management but increasingly also related to health concerns with recent key papers published in the pandemic and recovery management context which may have helped the industry dealing with the current crisis as well as current JATM papers on this topic assisting with preparing for a transitioning out of COVID-19 world.