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The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of research into the support activities of commercial aircraft (A/C).

The work is associated with A/C operations (OPS) providing a structure establishing the A/C sustaining during the in‐service phase. The process involved the implementation of a field survey in order to capture heuristically A/C support practices to enable one to identify system requirements. This part of the work utilized the collaboration of 21 A/C operators and maintenance repair and overhaul companies from various regions of the world.

Using systems engineering methodology, the research process led to the development of a prototype sustaining system. The solution comprises a tree of support functionalities (similar to a work breakdown structure). The result was verified by major local national airlines which confirmed the ability of the solution in terms of representing a viable structure establishing an A/C sustaining system.

The research initiative presented represents a contribution in the domain of A/C OPS, namely in terms of management aspects, by making available a solution that serves as a reference element, with a holistic nature, that integrates, normalizes and unifies commercial A/C support practices.

The paper aims to present a literary itinerary inspired in Julio Dinis’ novel An English Family (Uma Família Inglesa) through a comparative analysis of the places identified in the novel and the touristic attraction proposed by Visit Porto website. This novel is representative of the cultural identity and society of Porto city in the 19th century. Developing an itinerary based on this novel can facilitate the reading and understanding of the historical and cultural development of Porto.

This case study is based on the reading of the Julio Dinis’ novel An English Family (Uma Família Inglesa), whose storyline takes place in Porto city, Portugal in the 19th century. It used QGIS v. 3.12 software, a geographical information system to identify the places, to produce the maps and to create the itinerary.

The comparison between the places identified in the novel and the tourist attraction in Visit Porto website revealed that only 6 points in the novel are referenced on Visit Porto website. These points correspond to the ones in the historical city centre of Porto. However, the creation of an itinerary that brings together all the points mentioned by Julio Dinis in his novel, will allow the development of a new touristic itinerary, alternative to existing itineraries in the city and that can be seen as a distinguish offer that allows a different view of the urban space of Porto.

There are some limitations to this study that can be highlighted. First, it was difficult to find the correct location of some points identified in the novel, due to difficulty of finding historical maps with quality of the data. At the same time, as tourist information is dispersed by several sources, and most of those data is not georeferenced, it was time consuming the integration of all the information in the same geodatabase. The choice of the shortest path can also be considered as a limitation, rather than the route followed by the author in the novel, but geographic information systems operates on spatial and temporal scale, which can present a limitation in tourism analysis. In the case of this project, we have chosen the shortest path, assuming that tourist would prefer that.

This research allowed to address two areas of knowledge that are emerging in the study of urban centres as tourist areas: the use of GIS and literary tourism. Despite the fact that there are already articles on this subject, the originality focuses on the approach made around one of the greatest writers of Portugal in the 19th century, allowing to present a tourist itinerary about one of his literary works, and the comparison made between the places identified in the novel and the tourist points identified on the Visit Porto website.

The recent increase in the number of infections and mortality rates in many regions has emphasized the cyclical nature of this pandemic, with new variants emerging constantly. Understanding what has been done by efficient administrations to contain the outbreak is essential while new immunization developments for the new variants are not available.

This work adapts the traditional Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) Variable Returns to Scale model for including panel data on the Brazilian Federal Government spending over the first pandemic months in Pernambuco to identify efficient municipalities and conduct a benchmark on the best practices, reactions and implications that can serve as a guide for the post-Covid recurrence era.

The results provide an interesting panorama of municipal response to the pandemic and some quantitative and qualitative prospects on potentials for improvements from the perspective of efficient and inefficient cities. Only one administration (São Bento do Una) was identified as efficient for the entire period. The authors’ benchmark and discussion are focused on this municipality.

The authors believe this work has two innovative components. The first is a robust and systematic methodology integrating the advances in testing convexity and returns to scale in the construction of a production frontier based on panel data. The second is a discussion on what drives efficiency (benchmarking of best practices) in addition to how to quantitatively attain such efficiency prospects. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, both methodological and empirical implications are original to the present manuscript.

The city of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in the north-east of Brazil, presents a paradox as a present-day tourist destination, while also marked by features and processes characteristic of cities in the Global South, such as high levels of social inequality with fragmented urban margins and vulnerabilities. This research problematizes the idea of “historical ruins” proposed by Walter Benjamin as a viable way to understand how the organization process of today's city margins can be “denaturalized” by the past. The objective of this research is to assess how the urban margins of the city were organized as a history of resistance.

In theoretical terms, this research links critical urban studies with critical approaches to organizational history (COH) based on Walter Benjamin's philosophical concepts of “ruins” and “progress”. The historical and archival methodology, consisting of 193 documents, suggests the existence of a philosophical–historical nexus that helps explain the spatial fragmentation of the city, and especially the urban margins in the western region of Fortaleza.

The Benjaminian notion of “historical ruins” has been exemplified by the Brazilian government practices confining migrants fleeing drought in internment camps on the margins of the city of Fortaleza in three waves beginning in 1877, 1915 and 1932 respectively. The effects of such confinement policies put into practice in the name of “progress” influenced the organization of large urban spaces on the city's margins, whereas on the other hand, the analyses advanced in this research reflect on alternatives to re-frame the history of the organization of the margins of Fortaleza through a set of practices of resistance.

Based on the concept of “denaturalization”, and through re-activation of the memory of a circumstantial past, the gaze of the “ruins”, as represented by the belief in “progress” addressed in official reports of government confinement policies, spaces of resistance have emerged where new possibilities for the future of the city can be imagined.