Ailsa's father remained in England and served as a Catering Officer in RAF Bomber Command stations until the end of the War in 1945.

By 1944 they were both working in clerical jobs in the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa which was run entirely by female staff to replace male soldiers that were dispatched to England to prepare for the invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

Ailsa and her mother ultimately obtained compassionate discharges to return to the UK as Harold Dicken, (serving as a catering officer in the RAF), was undergoing a dangerous operation (which he survived).

[7] Land obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics in 1956, her dissertation was entitled An Application of the Techniques of Linear Programming to the Transportation of Coal,[8] supervised by George Morton.

[9] Her PhD work focused on solving a large transport problem without a computer in which the origin to destination costs are unknown and only the rail network distances between junctions are known.

This work was initially carried out at the London School of Economics under the sponsorship of British Petroleum, with the aim of enhancing existing linear programming models for refinery operations.

In addition, Land advanced OR methodology through the publication of notable work on shortest path algorithms, quadratic programming, bicriteria decision problems, and statistical data fitting.

Following her retirement from the LSE in 1987, she continued several research projects, resulting in contributions to data envelopment analysis, the quadratic assignment problem, and combinatorial auctions.

In 1973, Ailsa published her book Fortran Codes for Mathematical Programming: Linear, Quadratic and Discrete, written jointly with Susan Powell.