In aircraft concept selection, uncertainties, resulting from economic noise variables such as fuel price, load factor, so on always exist in the decision making process. These uncertainties are often addressed using Taguchi loss functions for robustness analysis. The study presented in this paper is to utilize multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) methods to solve an aircraft concept selection problem for a hypothetical airline when considering the robustness of the decision. Three MCDM methods were used to conduct the concept selection, including ELimination and Choice Expressing REality, simple additive weighting and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution. In this study, robustness is introduced as an additional decision criterion in the aircraft selection process. The impact with and without robustness consideration is compared in order to demonstrate how the proposed method makes trade‐offs between nominal performance and address uncertainty in the decision‐making process. In addition, sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate the influence of the decision criteria, especially robustness, on the final ranking of alternatives. The implementation of three MCDM methods on the aircraft selection problem also demonstrates the potential application of MCDM methods in the assessment of air transportation systems, while balancing economical, ecological, and technical constraints. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.