Who creates flight schedules? How hard is a job like that?

The airline marketing department along with other departments make the decisions on when, where and how often the aircraft are going to fly between the city pairs. Once the flight schedule is set then the "flying lines" are put out for bid to the flight crew, (i.e. pilots and flight attendants). If a route is bid by 2 pilots - the most senior will get that route.
Some pilots like long routes, i.e West Coast to East Coast, other pilots like the shorter routes like Seattle to San Francisco.

Hey there!

Major airlines have a special department for this, it's called Network Scheduling and Planning. They analyze what routes to start/end, what planes to order/retire, and what time of departure is best to make the most profit.

It involves a lot of information gathering from areas such as economics, demographics, risk assessment, and even politics, among others. It's essentially one big puzzle!

I suggest you go for a business related degree for this job. That way you learn a lot about economics and how to carry out various statistical analyses.

I hope this helps! Good luck!

As those before mentioned, the group is usually called Network planning or something similar. They make the decisions on when, where, how often and the types of aircraft. They look both at longer term 3-5 years as well as closer in to departure. These jobs are very heavily weighted to understanding data and using it to make decisions. Having a finance background is helpful, but also they employ people with an operations research background. A lot of people in Network Planning get their starts in revenue/inventory management to which there are usually a lot of entry level positions available.