Research on the Impact of Logistics Services on Airlines’ Financial Performance from the Perspective of Sustainable Development—Based on the Entropy Weight TOPSIS Combined Method

As one of the major auxiliary businesses of airlines, air cargo is profoundly reshaping their profit models and development patterns. Combining the industrial characteristics of high liquidity and high risk in the air transportation industry, this paper constructs a multi-dimensional evaluation index system covering financial and logistics operation dimensions, selects the panel data of China Eastern Airlines from 2012 to 2024 as the research sample, and applies the entropy weight-TOPSIS combined method to conduct an empirical analysis of financial performance evaluation for verifying the feasibility of the adopted method. On this basis, taking the cargo indicators reflecting logistics capability and its operational strategy as independent variables, and the comprehensive index of operational performance formed by the coupling of key financial indicators and logistics operation indicators as the dependent variable, multiple groups of experiments are designed to systematically explore the influence mechanism of changes in logistics capability and its operational strategy on airlines' operational performance. Meanwhile, scenario experiments on the variation of weight coefficients are conducted to observe its sensitivity. The research results show that changes in logistics capability and its operational strategy have a significant impact on airlines' operational performance. This study not only reveals that different degrees of attention to enterprise operation elements will exert a profound influence on the overall corporate performance, but also highlights the value of air cargo, making up for the deficiencies in existing studies combining airline performance evaluation with cargo logistics. Against the backdrop of growing global economic uncertainty, this study can provide decision-making references and theoretical support for airlines' business operations and sustainable development strategic planning.