During the second year of the Council members’ terms, the AGIFORS Council has the privilege of selecting up to two AGIFORS Fellows. The Fellows Award is the most prestigious award an AGIFORS member can receive, and is reserved for individuals who have demonstrated outstanding and exceptional accomplishments and experience in the application of operations research to air transportation and who made significant contributions to the AGIFORS community over an extended period of time through participation and leadership. This year, AGIFORS is breaking with tradition and announcing its Fellows in advance of the 2016 Annual Symposium so that all members can join us in congratulating our two Fellows: Greg Lough and Armando Silva.

Greg Lough served tirelessly as an officer through four successive councils. In addition to the symposium meetings, he was consistently active in the RM study group. Greg started his career at Continental Airlines and retired in 2014 as Managing Director of Revenue Decision Support at United Airlines following the merger of the two carriers. Greg spent much of his tenure simplifying complicated OR innovations to make them work within the limitations of the airline industry’s aging inventory & distribution infrastructure. He transformed the way the airline forecasted demand and led the implementation of O&D availability and marriage controls. Greg has been a long-term active AGIFORS member, and served for over a decade in many key positions on the AGIFORS Council, most notably as Treasurer from 2003 to 2014 where he led the implementation of robust processes for the management of the group’s finances.

Armando Silva was a founding member of AADT and rose up the ranks to eventually become the Managing Director of Operations Research at AA. He was influential in the early days of applying OR to customer loyalty, pricing, sales, and revenue management. Armando was a continuous and active participant in AGIFORS from the late 1990s until his retirement in 2012. He reinitiated the OR Manager’s Study group after many years of dormancy. Over the years, Armando supported many of this staff and encourage them to make presentations. Many of these presentations won awards, including those by Tim Niznik, Tim Jacobs, Matt Koral, Elizabeth Hunt, and Tuell Green. Armando was also more than willing to help recruit keynote speakers for AGIFORS meetings and host meetings, including the AGIFORS Symposium in Hawaii.

Planning for our five meetings next year is well underway. Marcel Sol from Qatar will be organizing the Crew meeting, likely to be held in Doha next spring, Michael Clarke from Sabre and Tim Niznik from American will be organizing the Ops conference in Seattle next spring, and Sunny Ja and Tassio Carvalho from America have signed the contract to host the Revenue Management meeting in Seeheim, just outside Frankfurt, on May 19-20, 2016 with welcome reception on May 18. The locations for the Strategic Scheduling and Planning (SSP) group (organized by Sergey Shebolov of Sabre) and the Annual Symposium will be announced shortly (for those that need a location for budgeting purposes, we are targeting Europe for the Symposium and Europe/Asia for SSP). As part of the 2016 Annual Symposium, Stefan Karisch of Jeppesen will launch the new OR Strategy and Management Working Group as successor of the former OR Managers Working Group.