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Prepare multifaceted financial analysis to plan operating expenses for an airline’s Inflight department.
Just like in our personal lives, budgeting for an organization is an important process that entails excellent communication, analytical and personable skills. In this Build Project, you’ll wear the hat of a Financial Analyst and prepare a reasonable hypothetical budget for an airline’s Inflight group. Under the supervision of an experienced Build Fellow, you'll develop multifaceted financial models and conduct analysis with tools most commonly used in the industry: Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. You'll also become familiar with aviation terminology and advanced modeling techniques like block hours/staffing and Excel model ‘dials’, respectively. All this will happen in an environment that simulates the operations of a real Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team.
This workshop will focus on the students and the project leader spending some time and learning about each other's backgrounds, goals and expectations from the project.
The project leader will introduce the students to the basics of the aviation industry - starting from history to basic terminology that will be important during the project. We will also learn some basic terminology of the flight attendant contracts, to better understand their role in the aviation industry.
We will focus on learning the foundations of income statements and learn their importance in the world of finance, and the aviation industry. We will spend some time reviewing examples of financial statements, specifically airline financial statements. This will allow students to understand how public airlines publish their financials on the SEC filing.
This workshop will focus on Excel exercises - from beginner level to advanced formatting, use of formulas and introduction to a snapshot of the final budget model for the project. This will give students a chance to get an idea of what their final model should look like.
This workshop will focus on learning names of major airports and their ICAO/IATA codes (this a fun exercise, in that you learn to shorten the names of airports and abbreviate it in three letter codes), specific terminology related to the project, such as block hours (perhaps the most important term for a regional airline) and more details on how to start building the financial model.
This workshop will focus on understanding the availability of flight attendants and other management employees. This in turn will help students understand the required staff, and plan hiring/attrition assumptions accordingly.
This workshop will be the final inputs in the financial model whereby students will add pay hours, weighted average wage rates and calculate wages for the entire department.
In this workshop, students will present their final projects with the entire class. The project leader will assume the role of the Inflight VP, CFO and CEO to ask appropriate questions and give the students a hypothetical scenario of how budget meetings usually take place within departments.
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Nidhi Trambadia is a Finance Build Fellow at Open Avenues, where she works with students leading projects in Finance. Nidhi is a Sr. Financial Analyst at Air Wisconsin Airlines where she works on developing and analyzing multifaceted financial models and budgets to support decision making. Nidhi has over four years of experience in Finance and Aviation/Airlines. She has also worked with an aftermarket aircraft parts company and interned with another US airline. She holds multiple Master's degrees in Aviation Finance and Business Administration.A fun fact about Nidhi: she has spent almost a decade in each of three separate countries: India, Kenya and the US!