This paper provides a bibliometric review of the usage of OR in the airline industry, systematically synthesising 309 articles from 2000 – 2026. Articles were retrieved from Publish or Perish with the phrase "airline scheduling + optimization + operations research" and refined with Mendeley Desktop to identify duplicates, non-English language, and articles lacking airline application focus. The bibliometric analysis using Biblioshiny in RStudio produced maps of emerging themes and co-occurring keywords, time-sliced evolution maps demonstrating the field development, and evolution arrows.

The analyses show that scheduling, machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing are the current driving motor basic themes of the field, and crew scheduling, fleet assignment, and spare parts are internally well-developed isolated niche themes.

The analyses also show the general evolution of OR research in airline scheduling and revenue management, from the current focus on operations/analytics to the future focus on AI/technology. While technically mature, the fields of airline OR have remaining weaknesses: lack of integration across planning stages, narrow dataset validation of machine learning models, inconsistent accounting for uncertainty, and limited consideration of sustainability. These findings guide future OR research directions to develop integrated, uncertainty-aware OR frameworks in airline operations.