  This article proposes an efficient heuristic in accelerating the column
generation by parallel resolution of pricing problems for aircrafts in the tail
assignment problem (TAP). The approach is able to achieve considerable
improvement in resolution time for real life test instances from two major
Indian air carriers. The different restrictions on individual aircraft for
maintenance routing as per aviation regulatory bodies are considered in this
paper. We also present a variable fixing heuristic to improve the integrality
of the solution. The hybridization of constraint programming and column
generation was substantial in accelerating the resolution process.
