Hiring an Aviation COO? What Organizations Should Look for in Their Next Operating Leader

J. Stephen Jay

Principal, Frank Jay & Associates

August 2026 | Aviation Leadership Briefing

The Chief Operating Officer is the executive most directly accountable for whether an airline runs the way it says it does. Flight operations, maintenance, ground handling, network reliability, safety culture, and labor relations all eventually land on the COO’s desk. Boards and CEOs tend to recognize how consequential the role is only after a bad hire is already six months into the job, when the operational strain the wrong leader creates has become visible in on-time performance, safety metrics, or workforce morale.

Hiring well for this role is different from hiring a COO in almost any other industry, and treating it as a generic executive search is where many searches go wrong.

Why the airline COO search is not a generic COO search

In most industries, a COO is an operational generalist, someone who can run manufacturing or logistics or service delivery with the specific domain treated as learnable. Airlines don’t offer that luxury. The role sits at the intersection of a heavily regulated safety environment, a 24/7 network operation with no room for improvisation under pressure, and a workforce that is often unionized and highly attuned to leadership credibility.

A COO candidate without direct airline or closely adjacent aviation operating experience faces a steep, visible learning curve, one that plays out in real time in front of regulators, employees and passengers. That doesn’t mean every successful hire has spent their entire career at one carrier. It means the search has to balance operational fluency and industry credibility as heavily as general management pedigree, and be honest about which parts of the role are transferable and which aren’t.

What Presidents and boards should actually be evaluating

Four things tend to separate a strong airline COO from one who struggles, regardless of resume quality:

• Operational judgment under irregular operations. Every airline COO will manage a major weather event, an IROP cascade, a fleet grounding, or a labor action within their first eighteen months. The interview process should probe how a candidate has actually made decisions in these moments, with specifics rather than hypotheticals: what they decided, what they deprioritized, what it cost, and what they would do differently.

• Credibility with front-line and union leadership. An airline COO who is seen as disconnected from operations will struggle to earn the trust that enables disciplined execution. Someone who arrives from a strategy or finance background without having stood on a ramp or in a hangar won’t have an easy time gaining the trust of the front-line. This is a qualitative judgment, and it is one of the hardest things for a board to assess without direct industry reference checking.

• Safety culture, not just safety compliance. Every serious candidate will speak fluently about safety. Fewer have actually built or protected a safety culture when it was in tension with cost or schedule pressure. The distinction matters enormously and rarely appears on a resume.

• Fit with the CEO and the ownership structure. A COO’s effectiveness depends heavily on how clearly operational authority is delineated from the CEO’s role, and how much latitude the COO actually has versus how much they are perceived to have. Board and CEO alignment on this before the search begins prevents a strong hire from being set up to fail.

Where searches go wrong

The most common mistake is casting too wide a net for the sake of optionality. A slate padded with impressive but operationally unproven executives from adjacent industries (logistics, manufacturing, even other transportation modes) tends to produce along process that ends in a compromise hire, because the board discovers late in the process that “impressive resume” and “can actually run this airline” are not the same evaluation.

The second common mistake is moving too fast on an internal candidate to avoid the disruption of an external search, without rigorously testing that candidate against what an external market actually looks like. Internal promotions can be the right call, but they should survive the same scrutiny an outside candidate would face, not be exempted from it.

The third is underestimating how much confidentiality matters. A COO search that becomes visible internally, before it needs to be, creates exactly the kind of operational uncertainty (e.g., rumor, hedging, distraction, etc.) that a strong hire is supposed to prevent.

How this search should actually run

A retained search for an airline COO benefits from three disciplines that a contingent or generalist process often skips.

• Direct outreach to passive candidates who are performing well in their current seat and have no reason to be job hunting. The strongest airline COO candidates are rarely applying anywhere. They have to be identified and approached directly, by someone who can speak credibly to the operating realities of the role. A well-plugged-in aviation industry-specific search consultant knows who the best and worst companies in the industry are, who within those companies is making the operations successful, and who would be well positioned to make a move to the COO role. The consultant also has a name that is recognized within the industry and can open doors that others can’t get through, either through brand-name recognition, indirect personal relationships, or direct personal relationships.

• Reference conversations that go past HR-sanctioned references to people who have actually worked alongside the candidate during an irregular operation, a labor negotiation, or a safety incident. This is where the operational judgment questions above actually get answered.

• A tight, senior-led process. A COO search with too many intermediaries loses the nuance a board needs to make this decision well, particularly the qualitative judgment calls around culture and credibility that don’t reduce to a scorecard.

The cost of getting it wrong

An airline COO hire that doesn’t work out rarely fails quietly. It shows up in operational metrics, in safety culture, in labor relations, and often in six figures or severance and search costs to do it again, on top of the twelve to eighteen months of operational drag while the wrong person is in the seat. The upfront cost of a rigorous, aviation-specific search is small by comparison.

Frank Jay & Associates has conducted retained executive searches for airlines, aviation, and aerospace organizations since 1986, with particular depth in operational and technical leadership roles. If your organization is considering a COO search, start a confidential conversation with a senior partner.