MIT Airline Data Project

The U.S. airline industry focused significant attention on total compensation of employees - the total cost to an airline for salary and wages, pension, benefits, payroll taxes and other items affected by terms included in a collective bargaining agreement. These labor costs, which are interdependent, are key to calculating an airline's fixed cost of its respective work forces.

Historically, benchmarking productivity between airlines has been limited to comparing each airline to a select group of carriers that often are arbitrarily chosen to be the comparator group (e.g., "low-cost" airlines). The ADP makes a concerted effort to provide the data and analysis to make meaningful comparisons between companies as well as sectors of the industry and to address a lack of consistent metrics. To align with unit costs, we assess ASMs (output) per employee (input) for all employees and flight employees. We then take that analysis a step further and assess the number of ASMs produced per dollar of labor compensation. Calculating the output per employee is only one part of the equation. It is equally important to understand the cost of that output. Often the two produce very different results. We do not exhaust all of the measurements that could be used to gauge productivity. Instead, metrics within the data-set allow users to make adjustments for average aircraft size and stage-length in addition to the analysis we provide for the carriers included in the industry average. For example, an adjustment for average aircraft size is relevant when analyzing the number of ground employees an airline employs per aircraft.