Estimation viability of dedicated freighter aircraft of combination carriers: A data envelopment and principal component analysis

The authors investigate how air cargo business affects the efficiency of passenger-cargo combination carriers (CCs). The globalization of the supply chain has impacted airlines and resulted in competitive pressure on the air cargo industry. Since 2008, the air cargo growth rate has not sustained the growth of previous years. We show that the cargo business of CCs using wide-bodied dedicated freighter aircraft (DFA) has had not a positive relationship on the airlines’ efficiency due to a lack of similarities between the passenger and cargo networks for asset sharing. The findings indicate that the DFA that use CCs should have independent and improved supply chain strategies to assist their customers in positioning global supply chain capability as part of their integrated supply chain strategies.