Airlines are being squeezed on two axes at once
Engine maintenance downtime and jet-fuel price spikes are hitting carriers together. Optimizing for either one alone leaves the other exposed — the gap is a tool that trades them off jointly.
The call, up front. Air New Zealand mapping a recovery from engine and fuel pressure is the tell: these stopped being separate problems. Spare-engine scarcity caps available aircraft; fuel volatility caps which routes are economic. Manage them in separate spreadsheets and you optimize one into the other’s blind spot. The gap is joint optimization.
The gap
Engine MRO and fuel hedging sit in different functions, on different planning horizons. But a grounded aircraft and an uneconomic route compete for the same scarce thing — profitable block hours. The binding constraint is the absence of a single model that allocates the fleet against both at once.
Source: GAPTIQ engine — challenge definition; Air New Zealand recovery reporting
The lever is a joint engine-and-fuel allocation model. Hedging fuel or buying spare engines in isolation just moves the squeeze.
So what
The move for a carrier is to stop planning maintenance and fuel on separate clocks. Whoever builds the joint resilience model — which aircraft to fly, which to service, which routes to hold — sells decision software into an industry currently running two optimizers that fight each other.
Source: Air New Zealand maps recovery from engine and fuel challenges, FlightGlobal, Jun 2026. Surfaced by the GAPTIQ engine.