Airline planning include complex and structured operations that must be planned in advance in order to exploit the available resources, provide a reliable and competitive service and forecast system's performances. Decisions regarding operations are based on data which is frequently due to uncertainty. Moreover, unpredicted events may disrupt the current schedule and force managers to take reactive decisions to recover to an operational state. On the other hand, proactive decisions, i.e. decisions which take into account the uncertainty of the data, tend to robust solutions which are able to absorb data deviation and small disruptions. In this talk we address the aircraft routing problem from both reactive and proactive point of view and suggest ways to integrate the two approaches to reach what we call a robust recoverable approach for aircraft routing, i.e. a proactive strategy which accounts for the presence of a disruption recovery strategy. We validate our ideas with a computational study based on real world data provided by a major european airline.