I completely agree with you about fault-tolerance. However Erlang, CSP, actors and message passing are heralded as the key to parallelism. The Erlang book still promises n-times speedup for n-cores, with not enough of a caveat.

I'm not familiar with the plane scheduling problem, there is probably room to parallelize it further. I suspect people are far less likely to book seats on both sides of the aisle(s) at the same time, for example. Knowing more about those things, airline regulations, and so on will probably present other opportunities.