The man who decides when and where your next flight will be going

By Francesca Street, CNN

(CNN) — Every time you board a flight, you’re stepping into a matrix — a web of choices that have been made for you weeks, sometimes months, before departure.

Most travelers won’t think about these behind-the-scenes machinations as they squeeze their carry-on into the overhead, slump into their seat and gaze out of the window at the long line of other planes waiting on the taxiway.

But the time you’ll take off, the plane you’ll fly on and even the route you’re taking all come down to decisions often managed by one person, aided by a team of experts.

And in a time of turmoil, when spiking jet fuel prices are prompting many airlines to drastically reduce services, that person’s role becomes even more significant.

Behind the scenes, the chief planning officer — as they’re often known — is a key figure at most major commercial airlines, overseeing teams tasked with managing some of the most intricate aspects of air travel.

“It is an incredibly difficult role, and probably one of the most important roles in an airline,” aviation expert Tony Stanton of Australian consultancy Strategic Air tells CNN Travel.

At British Airways, that person is Neil Chernoff.

“Running an airline is like a very complicated jigsaw,” Chernoff, who oversees network and schedule planning at the UK flag carrier, tells CNN Travel. “You have to make tradeoffs to make sure that this whole jigsaw puzzle comes together and fits.”

Assembling the jigsaw

Months before you board your flight, Chernoff and his team will meet to determine the logistics of your journey — right down to how many, and which class of, seats will be available for you to choose from.

Every few months, they’ll return to these decisions. They reassess which routes are working, which are in decline and — as has been the case for many airlines in the wake of the Iran conflict — which to scrap.

At the heart of these decisions is money. Operating an aircraft is expensive, and unless it’s being put to the best use, a plane will become a drain on profit. For passengers, flying on a near-empty flight is a dream. For airlines, it’s a nightmare.

“It’s my team’s responsibility to make sure that we’re making money off that aircraft or maximizing profits,” says Chernoff, who worked in investment banking before moving into the aviation world 15 years ago.

When there’s a surge in demand, Chernoff’s team reacts quickly. British Airways recently doubled daily flights between London and San Diego and Austin after both routes overperformed.

When routes underperform — perhaps because a flight’s arrival time doesn’t work for travelers connecting to other flights, or a destination falls out of favor — it gets more complicated. The team will examine customer habits and flight data to assess what’s going wrong.

“It really is a complex jigsaw game,” says aviation consultant Stanton. “What works on paper in theory doesn’t necessarily work in the real world.”

Airline chief planning officers will typically liaise with sales teams to keep across vacation trends, which ebb and flow as different destinations light up travelers’ Instagram feeds.

Sometimes a destination or region’s popularity is a flash in the pan, other times it’s more enduring. Post-Covid, says Chernoff, the Caribbean experienced heightened interest among British travelers, and continues to be popular.

The key is trying to get ahead of these trends.

“We’ve definitely seen that leisure travelers want new destinations and want to be able to do something different and explore new markets,” he says. New BA routes between London, Bangkok and Colombo were recently brought on in anticipation of such a wave.

The team will change up aircraft to better accommodate demand.

“If it’s much fuller, and we’re seeing more and more demand come in, we might make a decision to either add an extra flight, or sometimes what we’re able to do is swap an aircraft between a different route, to put more seats into the market,” Chernoff says.

They’ll also monitor wider societal movements, such as a shift away from short-haul business trips — another post-Covid trend — which has come hand-in-hand with an “increase in leisure travel.”

For British Airways, that has meant pulling some planes off classic business travel destinations like Frankfurt, Munich or Rome and switching them to vacation routes like Southern Spain, Italy or Greece.

Flight timing

Planning teams aren’t just responsible for choosing where an aircraft is going, they also decide when it’s departing.

At the world’s busiest airports, airlines can’t just pick their preferred departure times. They must secure what are known as “slots” — specific time windows to take off and land. The market for slots is highly competitive, with the best fetching big money.

If you’ve ever gone to book a regular flight and found it’s shifted from its convenient morning departure time to the afternoon, there’s a good chance that slot politics are involved.

“We have a very tight slot portfolio,” says Chernoff. “Sometimes you might have to make some trade-offs around what is the timing of a certain flight based on the rest of the schedule and the slots that might be needed there.”

Availability is limited, particularly at busy airports like London Heathrow, BA’s base, meaning there’s little flexibility for changing slots. This is something planners need to consider when setting up new routes, often years in advance.

“Slots are fixed. They’re very difficult to move,” says Chernoff. “If you’re going to add a flight, you can’t just add it at any time. It needs to be at the time that you have that slot available … to get that to fit across the 350 departures a day that we have at Heathrow.”

Slots are only part of the equation. Planners also need to consider lounge availability, runway capacity, gate space, fuel logistics and ground crew. “Very busy airports are limited in just how much traffic they can have,” says aviation consultant Stanton. “All of those things come into play.”

Chernoff also works closely with his counterparts at BA’s alliance airlines. Different airlines have different kinds of business partnerships, but BA has a tight partnership with American Airlines and the two carriers will regularly discuss route planning.

“We might coordinate how much capacity between the two of us are we going to fly between Miami and London,” explains Chernoff.

Weather is also a factor. While seasonal surges in the transatlantic jet stream might please New York-London passengers by cutting down flight times, they can create headaches for airlines.

“When you have those really strong jet streams and you arrive an hour early, on the one hand, customers think it’s great, but you need to make sure that you can get onto a stand and that you’re ready to service the aircraft at the time,” says Chernoff. “So ultimately, we really try to make sure that it’s actually going to arrive right on time.”

Choosing the aircraft

Most passengers don’t care about the kind of plane they’re traveling on — until it suddenly matters to them, that is. Maybe it’s the moment they step on board and enter a fully-booked economy cabin. Or when they see a double-decker A380 jetliner through the terminal window and hope it’s their airplane.

None of this is accidental. Choosing the right aircraft to match a route and ensuring a seamless customer experience is part of a planning officer’s job.

“What aircraft they put on to what route can make or break a route,” says Stanton. “What’s the right size aircraft with the right fuel burn, what’s the right capacity for that route?”

For Chernoff and his team, it often comes down to a simple question: What aircraft are available?

This “sounds like it should be a relatively easy answer,” he admits. But at any given time, a significant percentage of an airline’s fleet will be out of action, with aircraft requiring maintenance or refitting.

Then there’s the question of how to use available airplanes.

Take the A380, the world’s largest passenger plane. British Airways has a limited number of these popular super jumbo jets — 12 in total — and typically deploys them on popular, high-demand long-haul routes.

Even that seemingly obvious decision comes with complications. Longer flights need more pilots and not every pilot is trained to fly every airplane.

“A 380 that flies to Boston, for example, only has two pilots on it, but a 380 that flies to Singapore has four pilots on it, and it’s a very long trip,” says Chernoff.

Then comes the question of passengers — not just how many, but what kind. That means getting the balance right between premium and economy or finding an airplane that has the right level of business-class seating.

For example, says Chernoff, a BA Boeing 777-300 is “very premium-heavy” with eight first class seats and 76 business, but the airline’s smaller 787-8s have 31 in business.

“What we try to do is tailor the aircraft size to what we think the market is going to demand,” he explains.

Uncontrollable events

For all the forecasting, poring over data and logistical wrangling, some things in airline scheduling are just unpredictable. Dealing with the aftermath of what Chernoff calls these “uncontrollable events” is a big part of the airline planning officer’s job.

“They tend to happen more often than you think,” he adds.

Sometimes weather or other atmospheric conditions get in the way — such as the 2010 eruption of an Iceland volcano, which shut down transatlantic aviation for several days, grounding thousands of flights.

Geopolitical tensions also force airlines to reroute planes or reschedule services at short notice, reshaping the map of global flight paths almost overnight.

When that happens, the puzzle that Chernoff and his team have spent months putting together has to be taken apart and quickly reassembled.

Planning teams do try to prepare and plan for the uncontrollable as much as possible.

“Big airlines don’t sit back and wait for the events to happen,” explains aviation consultant Stanton. “They’re all pre-thought about, risk managed.”

For example, flight times usually include a buffer of about an hour to account for unexpected delays like airspace closures. If a situation becomes more permanent, planning teams will start to recalibrate flight times or cancel flights.

The conflict in Iran is currently having a widespread impact on aviation. Chernoff says his team continues to respond to an “evolving, fast-moving situation.”

British Airways, like many airlines, canceled services and arranged unscheduled repatriation services in the early days of the war.

Escalating jet fuel prices in recent weeks have also forced many planning teams back to the drawing board as once marginally profitable routes become unsustainable. Germany’s Lufthansa Group this month announced it was withdrawing 20,000 flights through October.

Chernoff acknowledges that uncertainty is a “really bad situation for customers,” and his airline’s main goal is to try to provide as much clarity as possible in hard-to-predict scenarios.

Not all surprises are negative, though.

When the England men’s soccer team reached the finals of the 2024 European Championship, Chernoff’s team was able to lay on extra flights to help fans get to the match.

And it’s not just an airline planning officer’s job to handle crises and unexpected twists and turns. Every year, Chernoff is also involved in mapping out his airline’s next five years, examining prospects for growth and change.

It’s fun, he says, to reopen the puzzle box, mix up the pieces, and start putting them all back together again.

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