For most of us, taking a plane trip involves finding the best fare, dealing with security, choosing a comfortable seat and hoping someone will be there to pick us up at our final destination. For the airlines, however, a three-hour jaunt from Houston to New York involves much more work: Cost-per-ticket projections, scheduling comparisons, flight planning, maintenance reviews and fuel allocation analyses -?C just to name a few of the multitude of operations. Without the benefit of the detailed information provided by such functions, an airline is at a distinct disadvantage. In the currently super-charged aviation industry environment, Continental Airlines decided to accelerate the return on investment for its information technology projects by performing a strategic IT consolidation and infrastructure re-design. It turned to a trusted partner, Hewlett-Packard Company, to provide a proven mission- and business-critical solution. (2002)