Employees of an Airline

There are number of Airlines operated in Indonesia, with different  names, structures of organization, operations, but there is a certain amount of similarity among each airline. An airline's most important assets are its airplanes and its people. An airline can have the most recent and best planes in the, but without the employees, an airline can't do anything.

Airlines are most often represented in public by those employees who have the most contact with their passengers, such as pilots and flight attendants, but there are many more airline employees working behind the scenes. Larger airlines may employ more people, but the employee categories are generally the same no matter what the size of the airline.Here are the various types of employees in an airline:

• Line personnel - This is the group of people you most often see during a flight, and they form 85 percent of an airline's labor force. Line personnel include pilots and flight attendants, reservation clerks, airport check-in and gate personnel. Nowadays, some of duties of these line personnel, especially what so called ground handling (check-in, boarding gate, transfer desk, cleaning services, etc) are employed to subcontractors.
• Operations - If line personnel form the heart of an airline, operations keeps it's blood pumping. These people are responsible for scheduling aircraft and flight crews to man the aircraft. Operations personnel maintain guidelines to meet the safety and regulation standards. Included in operations are the dispatchers, who track all of the airline's flights.
• Maintenance - Airplanes are multi-million-dollar vehicles that must be maintained in order to prevent the airline from losing money. Aircraft only make money for the airline when they are transporting passengers. About 10 percent of an airline's work force is dedicated to aircraft maintenance.
• Sales and marketing - If you wonder who sets your prices, you can usually find them in the sales and marketing divisions of an airline. These people are also tasked with advertising, cargo sales, reservations, customer service and food service.

Raise of the Commuters

In 2009, is an initial period of increasing activity of commuter flights. For example, in 2008 only a few commuter operators that operate in Banjarmasin : Pelita Air and Riau Air. But in the year 2009, there are numbers of operators who operate commuter flight routes from / to Banjarmasin : Trigana, Kalstar, Susi Air, and Jhonlin Air Transport.


Number of users of air transport services within 5 (five) years is still estimated to grow relatively high. This is because of the factors of facilities and infrastructures of other transportation modes are still limited, while that in line with the essence of local autonomy program, whereby each Local Government, especially in Kabupaten level, competing their investment opportunities and development programs of their own regions, which impact on the increasing mobility of peoples between regions.

With an increase in business activity and investment in remote areas are supported by Local Governments to open the air route into the area, will open up opportunities for commuter operators for the developing world.

The classic problems of most of air operators (commuter) in Indonesia, is inability to provide aircrafts in accordance with needs and market niche.

This occurs because there is no balance between the operational and marketing aspects. Most of The Executive of Commuter Operators prefer to place the operational aspects as the main function and considers marketing as only an additional function.

Facing the ASEAN open sky policy in 2020, The Commuter Operators in Indonesia needs to start thinking about placing marketing function as one of key management functions.

It’s a tragedy, if someday, there’s foreign Air Operator fly over our own continent and grab all of the opportunities, just because we didn’t prepare for it…..