The European aviation sector agrees that a mix of several smaller operational innovations collectively have great potential to help shortening the pathway towards net zero aviation. Nevertheless, from the operator's point of view, hardly any insights have been provided on how the sustainability perspective aligns with industry specific corporate objectives. In order to improve the effectiveness of sustainability-driven decision-making in airlines, this study aimed to address this gap. Specifically, the goal was to view the evaluation of operational innovations as a multi-criteria decision-making problem. To that end, a case study was conducted at the low-cost arm of Europe's third largest airline group.

The definitions of the main criteria to support the evaluation of operational improvements in flight operations were synthesized from literature and expert opinion. Using the Best-Worst Method, inter-criteria preference data were collected from seventeen senior and executive airline managers. The data were analyzed through the aggregation of individual preferences as well as probabilistic modeling.

Results from both approaches showed that "Safety" plays by far the most important role in the evaluation of operational innovations. It is followed by the four criteria, "Employee Experience", "Passenger Experience", "Finance", and “Sustainability", between which there seems to be no evident relative preference based on the aggregation of individual data. From the probabilistic approach could be concluded that Finance outranks Sustainability, which in turn outranks Employee Experience and Passenger Experience. Still, neither the aggregation of individual data, nor the probabilistic model revealed practically meaningful differences between the magnitudes of the weights assigned to the four intermediate criteria. Both approaches established however, that the criterion “On-Time Performance” is clearly the least important.

The results presented in this study can be interpreted three ways: i) as a high-level framework to assess the priority of sustainability relative to the five other dimensions of the firm, which can be used by airline managers to develop an effective corporate strategy for the appraisal of operational improvements in flight operations; ii) as the conceptual foundation for the quantitative comparison of a set of projects with respect to the six perspectives presented in this report; and iii) knowing the relative preference from key decision-makers can help other practitioners to improve the performance of their innovative efforts.