A column generation-based heuristic for aircraft recovery problem with airport capacity constraints and maintenance flexibility

•Airport capacity constraints and maintenance flexibility are explicitly considered.•A column generation-based heuristic is proposed accordingly.•Continuous-flight-delay model can improve the recovery cost by up to 37.74%.•Utilizing maintenance flexibility may reduce recovery cost by about 20% and 60%.•Real-world problems can be solved within 6 min with parallel multi-thread computing.