Foreword to the Special Issue on Aviation Operations Research: Commemorating 100 Years of Aviation

There is much celebration this year surrounding the seminal achievement of Orville and Wilbur Wright exactly 100 years ago—that is, the first successful powered flight of an aircraft. Today, the success of these two bicycle designers seems relatively simple compared to the very complex aircraft that fly through an even more complex air transportation system. While it is truly fitting to celebrate the marvelous transformation in aviation that has occurred over the last 100 years, it is equally important to ponder what the aviation system will look like 100 years from today. Will we be able to recognize airplanes in 100 years? Will some other mode of transportation supplant aviation? Will the star Trek transporter become a reality? Whatever the case, given the prominent role that operations research has and continues to play in aviation, it is a safe bet that the OR community will play a vital role in whatever advancement occurs. This special issue of Transportation Science reflects the joint effort by the INFORMS Aviation Applications and Transportation Science and Logistics Sections to celebrate this event and highlight the important contribution of operations research to the advancement of aviation. This issue also highlights the very successful matching of methodology and applications that was the genesis of OR and that must continue to be our life blood. Aviation has been both a focus of attention for both sections for some time. For the aviation applications community, the methodologies developed by the transportation science community are used by airlines and air traffic control provides throughout the world to improve their efficiency. For the transportation science community, aviation is an important application domain for the methodologies and models they develop. No matter how you look at it, the partnership has worked because we see ourselves as one community with complementary emphases. We truly hope that this continues to be the case into the future. We are incredibly pleased to have commissioned this special issue of Transportation Science and are very grateful to Michael Ball for agreeing to organize the issue and, perhaps more importantly, for doing such an excellent job in pulling it all together. Now that it has been completed, our wish is that all the great papers that are in this special issue will serve as impetus for the great ideas that our community will develop to shape the next 100 years of aviation.