The airline industry has experienced enormous growth over the past decades, providing the opportunity to travel and explore new countries to more people than ever before. The enormous growth and serious drop in prices has created an ecosystem of very large airline groups and increasing consolidations of companies forced by very low profit margins. The airline environment can be conservative and innovation processes can be relatively slow, therefore startups can be an interesting and valuable sources of innovation for the airline industry. The survival rate of startups in general is very low and sources indicate that the airline industry is even more challenging for startups. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate the key success factors for startups in the airline industry and identify a strategy to exploit the key success factor successfully. The final objective of this research is to gain a better understanding of the success factors and find a strategy for startups to successfully exploit the key success factor. This should lead to an increased survival rates for startups in the airline industry and more efficient innovation. The results can than be used by multiple stakeholders such as airlines, incubators, startups and investors to better tailor their strategies and policies.