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Your objective: to manage the most profitable airline!

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Join our 3-week challenge!

As a university student or recent graduate from around the world, sharpen your management skills and apply your knowledge in a real-market conditions-based simulation game, vying for market share and profitability against fellow students and recent graduates.

Grouped in university teams, you will run your own airline and make fleet, network, schedule, pricing, and product marketing decisions. The winning team will present the results of their challenge in front of an international audience at an IATA Conference in 2025.

Who is the Challenge for?

  • University students in an undergraduate or graduate program in the field of aviation 
  • University graduates (bachelor, master or Ph.D.), current or within 2 years of graduation

What is the Challenge?

As part of a team, you will run a virtual airline, create your business strategy, make all the decisions, and compete against other teams. The objective of this challenge is to be the most profitable airline. All teams will compete against each other using the same scenario. Teams will make decisions on fleet, schedule, network, revenue, and distribution and marketing. The scenario will be revealed to all participating teams at the end of the initial training session organized by IATA.

The 2024 winning team share their experiences of the Challenge

The winning team were from Coventry University Wroclaw: Evelyne Uwayezu (Team Lead), Fadi Karima, Alexander Gorelashvili, Mateusz Lis, Adam Roemer and Dr. Roxani Athousaki (Mentor). We took the opportunity to interview several of the team members and asked about their experience of the Challenge.

How can you participate?

To enter the Challenge, you will need to apply as a team:

Application form

Please note that we are no longer accepting new team registrations for the Airline Management Challenge.
Please ONLY use this form to add team members to a team that is already registered.

Challenge rules

Teams

  •  Each team will consist of a minimum of 4, and a maximum of 10 participants; each university can participate with 1 team only. 
  • All team members will have access to the simulation platform, however, only one team member (“Team Lead”) will be able to input data on the simulation platform. All other participants (“Team Members”) will have read-only access. The team will decide the roles among themselves. 

Logistics

  •  IATA will organize an initial training session for participants to become familiar with the simulation platform, to introduce the teams and assign team roles. 
  • IATA will create a challenging scenario and business case, and provide historical data, which will be equal for all teams. 
  • The challenge will consist of 1 test round and 3 competitive rounds. 
  • Each round will last 1 week. 
  • Each team will have their space on MS Teams. 
  • All communication and documents will be shared via MS Teams. 
  • IATA will organize: 
    • weekly live session for Q&A and results
    • weekly live session + 3 days: 30-minute chat support session via MS Teams
    •  weekly live session + 5 days: simulation input deadline
    • weekly live session + 6 days: resolve any input issues + run of simulator

Prizes

  • Each participant will receive a completion certificate. 
  • The winning team will receive four free passes to an IATA Conference in 2025, where the team will be able to present the results of their participation in the competition. 

Judging criteria

The winner will be the team whose airline will be the most profitable at the end of the 3-week challenge.

Timeline 

  • Submission period: 1 September 2024 – 31 January 2025 
  • Simulation rounds: 7 April 2025 – 5 May 2025 
  • Results: 5 May 2025