In the strategic management literature the concept of "value", in its declination of value creation and value capture, nowadays still occupies a central position in the debate among academic scholars. This debate and the consequent development of these research issues sink the roots into their huge complexity. This work deeply analyzes the issues of value creation and capture, with a glimpse on the human resources, working at the operational level of the major U.S. commercial airline companies. In particular, the purpose of the present research is to discover how human resources create value, understanding at what level resides the created value, to after analyze if the so created value is appropriated by the source who generated it.