This is one field that I find absolutely fascinating these days. In its operations (be it an airline or an airport), it has every type of management problem and I think each facet of its operations is its own field of research.

1. Books

  1. Airline Operations and Management: A Management Textbook: A great book that introduces the subject of Airline Management (only tactical management, not strategic) from a managerial perspective. It is heavy on concepts and jargon, a great introductory book. The manager in me got very excited reading this book. The latest edition of this book is available on libgen.
  2. Airline Operations and Scheduling: A great book if one wants to dive into the world of modeling various aviation management problems, solve them using excel and get a taste of application of operations research in aviation. The author makes it clear that the book is a bridge between the theory and the actual mathematical research that happens on aviation (which is highly technical and regular management students may miss out on it). The Author, Prof. Massoud Bazargan is an expert in the field, he is broadly into Operations Research and Decision Sciences and using them to solve problems in various fields, looking at his page. Give it a try if you want to get a glimpse of how things are modeled and how things are made to work.
  3. Airport Operations, by Norman Ashford: I have read parts of the book necessary for my research (chapters on Passenger Flows, Cargo Operations and Airline Scheduling to be precise), I found it to more than an introductory book.
  4. The Global Airline Industry, by Prof. Peter Belobaba
  5. Airport Engineering: Planning, Design, and Development of 21st century airports, by Norman J. Ashford

2. Research Papers

  1. A Survey on Reinforcement Learning in Aviation Applications: November 2022.
  1. AGIFORS: A crazy society of people who are into Operations Research and the Aviation Industry. The society has researchers from all over the world, universities and industry, and has produced ground-breaking research. One may join it as a Correspondent (it is free of cost) and can get access to all the great work they do.
  2. Airline Management: MIT OCW Course: A neat course on Airline Management by Prof. Peter Belobaba. I refered to parts of the courses while reading the above books, found it useful at places. Covers all aspects of Airline Management, but has concise slides and a few readings. I think one can gain more from this course if pursued along with reading the book written by Prof. Belobaba (The Global Airline Industry).
  3. INFORMS: Well, INFORMS is a society by researchers into Operations Research and Decision Sciences. From what I have seen, the Transportation Science part of it has a lot of stuff on Aviation (mostly route scheduling and so on).