How we calculated the Airline World Cup using the Kaminski Index

This was inspired by the infamous "Capello Index", which you might have heard of, which takes a whole bunch of performance statistics from professional football players and tries to calculate their value and aptitude for winning.

In the same vain, we looked for the key elements that indicated an airline's potency. That's not just how big it is or how many routes it flies, but a real effort to calculate its health within its chosen market and size of operations as compared to any other airlines regardless of their market position.

We've calculated the "Kaminski Index" score through the formula below:
The key below shows the associations between real data sets and the equivalent value for a football team.
 

	Kaminski Index values
F	Fleet	[Squad strength]
R	Route	[Tactics]
W	Change in Airline Business World Ranking	[Form]
O	Aircraft on Order	[Attack]
T	Sky Trax Rating	[Defence]
B	Airline Boss experience (years)	[Coach]
P	Annual Passengers (millions)	[Fans]
S	Livery Rating	[Style]
X	Luck factor	Luck

All data was compiled by the Flightglobal Insight team (who provide bespoke research projects) sourcing data from our ACAS and ATI databases (find out more).

Obviously we can't give all our database gold away for free but here's a sample of the Kaminski Index in action from the first stage of the knock out stage between American Airlines (USA) and Qantas (Australia):


So to walk through the calculation for America Airlines in this case:

Step 1.     F     +     R                +    W   +   10
           613   +   149  = 762    +     0     +     10                                                = 772

Step 2.    O    +   T   +   2              x         B   x   P   +  10
                57     +    3    +     2  =  62    x         7   x   92.7   +   10  =  658.9       =  40,851.8

Step 3.  Step 1 total  x      Step 2 total   
                  772           x       40851.8                                                                 = 31,544,211
 
Step 4.    Step 3 total     divided by          X squared
                31,544,211            /                  54   x  54                                           = 10,817

Step 5. Step 3 total       x       S        divided by 10
                     10817            x  5             /           10                                             = 5,408.7


So there you have it. And having run it through the tournament, it proved surprisingly realistic.

Most of the bigger teams made progress but occasional freak results occurred. Some teams had extraordinary runs of good luck (Korean Air, esp. in the QF) while others kept steady and ended up where you would've predicted they would, such as KLM and Lufthansa.

And a few caveats:

• Where a "Kaminski Index" figure was equal, the highest rated livery went through.
• The luck factor is a random number between 1 and 100. Extremes of this figure can completely sway results - although it is an unlikely event. That's a intentional element to mirror the same "against all odds" results that occur in real football matches.
• The Luck factors effect in the equation is slightly tempered by the style rating (livery), which is intended to reflect that ability for teams to "style out" random misfortune.
  
• The Livery rating is obviously Flightglobal staff members' own subjective judgement and in no way an official figure.
  
• Where a nation has no active airline, we have used historic data from the largest historical carrier that has been active within the last 10 years.