Our political and military leaders consider the efficient deployment and maintenance of personnel and hardware to be of equal importance to the task of planning the military operation. However, inasmuch as today’s military budgets are under great financial strain the military needs to rely on the civilian merchant navy for the provision of additional sealift capability. NATO acknowledges that member countries' ability to meet the politically desired levels of strategic sealift could be inadequate. Without a basic knowledge of the workings of the merchant navy, the military transportation desk officer cannot make an informed decision concerning the sealift capabilities required for strategic defence, humanitarian aid or refugee evacuation. This thesis reviews the range of militarily suitable commercial shipping and the different processes for chartering appropriate vessels while also considering the present state of civil/military synergies within NATO. It also examines the different types of insurance, including hull & machinery, third- party liability and commercial war-risks insurance and presents an overview of the problem of piracy. Its objective is to provide an introduction to the complex operational workings of the merchant navy for the military transportation officer. It is hoped that such knowledge could improve the sealift project not only in terms of operational effectiveness but also through increasing financial efficiency over a broad range of military and civil emergency maritime transportation services. Finally, two case studies are examined to demonstrate that there exists a plethora of solutions to the indicated challenges. A suggested handbook and flowchart are presented to assist in the implementation of this study's conclusions concerning the enhancement of acquired strategic sealift assets for defence, humanitarian aid or refugee evacuation.

Despite the recent Asian economics crisis (1997-1998), air traffic volumes in Asia- Pacific will continue to grow over the next decade. As the market is becoming more and more attractive, the competition amongst the airlines operating in the region has challenged the Southeast Asian carriers. The demanded quality of product/service by the customer has become a crucial issue. The ability to provide quality products and services is increasingly becoming a key determinant of an airline's business success. The quality of any organisation's products and services is determined by the core business or operational processes that create them. If the chain of processes is made effective and efficient, then the resulting products and services will also be effective and efficient. Airline business activities consist of sales and marketing, engineering and maintenance, flight operations, and ground services. For the purpose of this study the operations function, which consists of aircraft maintenance, flight operations and ground services, becomes a focus, as it is the core activity of operational processes that causes the success or failure of delivering quality products and services to the customer. The study was aimed at developing a model of quality management practices for the operations function of the 'developing' airlines of Southeast Asia. It was conducted through extensive literature and field studies, based on the quality management practices of certain airlines in Southeast Asia and Western Europe. The study found that there were twelve critical success factors of quality practices in the operations function, which should be managed differently depending on the airlines' organisational contexts, in order to keep their operational effectiveness and efficiency at the required level. The findings configured a model that provides airlines' executives or managers with guidelines, which they can consult in their decision-making process when conducting quality improvement for their organisation. They may well be used by other airlines as well. The findings from the study also contribute to the knowledge of process quality, and the applicability of the quality concept developed in the social and business disciplines of airlines' operational organisation.

Crew scheduling problems have been well studied in a variety of areas within transportation and logistics; however, the application of mathematical modelling techniques within a specifically maritime setting has received relatively little attention in the literature. This research focusses on the crew scheduling problem faced by a large, global company providing support services in the offshore oil industry. Starting with an introduction to crew scheduling and the maritime industry, this thesis goes on to review literature in related areas before giving details of the broader business context and the specific crew scheduling problem in which we are interested. With the company currently using a manual method to update their crew schedules weekly on a rolling basis, often under time pressure, we argue that there is scope for a decision support tool to be introduced which will help the crew planners to find feasible, and potentially good quality, schedules. Two main formulations are presented - a Task-Based model, which makes simplifying assumptions about crew contracts and working patterns, and a more realistic but more complex Time-Windows model. Both of these models can be likened to the crew recovery problems seen in other transportation scheduling literature, and can be solved with the objective of minimizing either the number of changes from the existing schedule or the cost of these changes. While the Task-Based model proved relatively easy to solve, a number of solution methods had to be considered for the Time-Windows problem. Ultimately, a heuristic method was proposed to underpin the scheduling tool. This heuristic method finds an initial solution with a low number of changes, before performing a neighbourhood search which seeks to reduce the solution cost. Results however show there is still much room for improvement, and the thesis concludes with ideas for further extending this research.

No description available.

The aim of the research was to develop and apply improved measures of capital productivity using published airline data, and to evaluate the role of capital investment and productivity in overall airline performance. As well as contributing to total factor productivity, capital productivity is a partial measure, and the investment upon which it is based should improve the productivity of other inputs to the production process, in particular labour and fuel. Productivity ratios require outputs and inputs to be combined and indexed. Index numbers have been developed using weights that are consistent with the underlying economic theory, and also meet various tests (such as reversal and products). Airline passenger, cargo and incidentals were combined using a number of such index number approaches. Capital inputs were estimated using annual lease equivalents which when discounted to the present over the expected future economic lives of the assets resulted gave either balance sheet values adjusted to a common year’s prices, or the total of the market values of individual assets (aircraft).

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the way in which civil airlines exploit their resources in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage. This is done within the framework of the resource-basedv iew, rather than using the market basedv iew, thought without of cause presuming to test that paradigm. The first chapter offers a fairly detailed account of the airline industry. This is felt to be necessary to render the thesis accessible to readers who may not be industry experts. The second chapter examines the literature on and overall merits of the resource based and market based view, reformulates the research objectives and outlines the methodology, primarily the use of data published in specialist sources, supported by personal industry knowledge. The subsequent chapters develop the thesis with regard to cross airlines ownership stakes and occasional merger and acquisition, the leverage exercised by bigger airlines at airports, and the issue of strategic alliances. The findings that emerge from this exercise are that in a sense checked via a series of interviews with key informants, and some qualifications to the resource based view are offered before proceeding to a summary statement of the conclusion.

This thesis presents an analysis of the role of intermodal transport in Notteboom and Rodrigue's (2005) port regionalisation concept, an approach to port development that focuses on the inland aspects of the process, as well as taking port development models from a spatial focus to a focus on institutions. It is argued that the port regionalisation concept is insufficiently disaggregated; it does not identify or classify different processes within the concept, nor does it explain how they operate or who drives them. In this thesis, the port regionalisation concept is broken down into its three constituent parts: inland terminals, market and logistics and the resolution of collective action problems. Each of these is examined in its own chapter, based on a case study methodology. The methodology was chosen for its ability to provide rich detail and build or extend theory, as the overall aim of this thesis is to critique the port regionalisation concept and extend its explanatory power. Part one follows a multiplecase design, analysing numerous European inland terminal developments in order to improve inland terminal classifications that can then contribute to the port regionalisation concept. Parts two and three each utilise a single case design, taking a single case in depth in order to explore in rich detail how these issues play out in industry. Part two studies the role of large retailers as the primary drivers of intermodal transport in the UK, while part three examines the development of an intermodal corridor in the United States, offering the opportunity to study a collective action problem in detail Part one reveals that port actors, both port authorities and port terminal operators, can be directly involved in the development of inland terminals, and that differences can be observed between terminals developed by port actors and those developed by inland actors. A conceptual distinction is proposed to capture this observation. Part two identifies barriers to port regionalisation, such as operational issues, spatial development decisions and a lack of integration between inland market players. Part three demonstrates the difficulties faced by public bodies attempting to direct regionalisation strategies, constrained by legitimacy and agency conflicts and an institutional structure that limits their effectiveness. An added contribution to the literature is the theoretical framework that is developed for the analysis of the institutional factors at play in resolving a collective action problem. While additional cases are required to advance the concept further, the cases in this thesis elucidate reasons why ports may not be controlling or capturing hinterlands through the strategies of integration that the port regionalisation concept suggests. It may be more accurate to state that regionalisation can only occur as long as a set of favourable commercial and institutional conditions are maintained. The findings from the cases presented in this thesis suggest that it is not easy to maintain such conditions, implying that regionalisation may be the exception rather than the norm.

The thesis sets out the political, economic and social forces and the parallel institutional and technical factors that shaped the development of the ferry sector between 1948 and 1987. It provides as full an account as the available record permits of an important shipping industry sector that previously has received little serious historical consideration. Most of the ferry industry, dominated by its railway industry parent and ravaged by war losses, came into public ownership in 1948 as a consequence of railway nationalisation followed by a decade of under-investment. The period ended with a loss of supremacy for the railway-owned shipping sector, privatisation, increased competition, the 1987 Herald of Free Enterprise disaster – in no small part exacerbated by the drive through vehicle deck which had done so much to facilitate the ease of passenger car and freight movement - and the certainty of the Channel Tunnel, which spelt the end of sea transport primacy on its most important routes. The era saw ferries transformed in terms of design and capability from being largely tied to rail-connected passenger traffic, there came the innovation of roll-on, roll-off and the hovercraft, with ports undergoing change scarcely less extensive. The thesis examines the basic structural changes that affected the industry, specifically the process that resulted in the establishment of privately-owned firms in situ, the bureaucratic problems that beset British Railways and which hampered its formulation of a coherent response to the varied challenges it faced in the Fifties and Sixties. It shows how the growth in private motor car ownership proved a catalyst for change in a conservative industry and explores the way in which the introduction of newcomers and the hovercraft drove the development of competition, transforming the ferry business but ultimately leading to the government decision to construct a fixed link between the United Kingdom and France. The thesis concludes that the drive and entrepreneurial flair of three private ferry operators, Townsend, Bustard and Thoresen, was largely responsible for the transformation of the industry and argues that the new and growing market created by motor transport would not have been exploited at such a rate or with the same degree of forethought and innovation without their involvement.

The appearance of low cost scheduled airlines in Europe, operating with the same philosophy of low fares, `no-frills' and high frequency service to that of Southwest airlines has been the main departure from the existing market `status quo'. After a 6-year period which saw such airlines becoming more numerous and gaining wider acceptance from the public, this study tries to investigate whether they will have an assured future and, if so, what form this will take. The investigation is in two parts. In the first part the background environment is investigated in terms of the policy application, the industry infrastructure and the economic conditions prevalent in the past years as well as currently. Additionally, comparisons of the differences between the approaches to deregulation of the US and the EU policy makers are analysed, hence their repercussions on the low cost carrier market are examined. In the second part, a model was thus developed to simulate the direct costs of operations of a low cost airline. The model provided information about the cost per distance flown for an airline flying on a given route. Following that a number of routes were surveyed to find the aircraft costs per sector of flying each route so that a fully costed route portfolio was available. In the next stage an airline intra-European scheduled operation was created using a small number of aircraft with two different schedule types: a typical low cost high frequency operation and one reflecting a full cost, business and leisure traffic mix. Comparisons of the overall performances between the two schedules were carried out. Subsequent to that, 381 European routes grouped as scheduled, charter and domestic were used to apply the derived data to check their suitability for entry by the low cost carrier. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the increased operational efficiency of the low cost type of schedules. Growth will continue as the low cost formula makes considerable inroads to existing markets. Secondly, the future route entry opportunities are to be found with many monopoly or duopoly city pairs currently under-served, provided airport access is assured. The biggest opportunities though are with a large number of leisure routes served by charter carriers, as they fit both the low cost airline passenger profile as well as the airline's requirements. Finally, the domestic routes were all served too intensively to make them viable for entry.