Ethiopian Airlines employed 6,559 people in June 2012 while operating 48 aircraft that year. The Eastern African airline transported a total of 4.64 million passengers in 2012. That means that Ethiopian Airlines had 14.14 employees per 10,000 passengers and 136.65 per aircraft
in its fleet. To understand these numbers it is also important to know
that in Ethiopia, the airline does their own maintenance &
engineering, catering and ground handling, besides the core flight and
ground operations. The fleet and staff numbers also include the cargo
division of the airline, which means that staff per 10,000 passengers is
a bit higher than in reality.
Data for 2013 is incomplete, but
Ethiopian Airlines had a fleet of about 55 aircraft that year and 7,642
employees, transporting 5.23 million passengers. Taking into account
that the fleet number is an average towards the year-end, that shows
that there is a small increase in staff per 10,000 employees (14.61) and
per aircraft (138.95). Data for 2014 is not available yet, but with a
fleet of already 72 aircraft, the number of staff must have increased
beyond 8,500 if the same level of employees per passengers and aircraft
is maintained. Especially the long haul fleet has grown significantly
over the past two years, mainly due to the introduction of the Boeing
787 of which the African airline already operates 10. But also the fleet
of Bombardier Q400’s and Boeing 737’s has been expanded.
The distribution of employees for the
largest departments can be seen in the graph below, showing that
‘marketing & sales’ and ‘maintenance & engineering’ are the two
main departments in terms of number of employees.
When we look at FastJet, this is just a very small airline which had 3 aircraft in its fleet in 2013. It transported only 370,000 passengers with a total of 433 employees. That comes down to 11.70 employees per 10,000 passengers and 144.33 per aircraft.
Also for FastJet the breakdown of employees per department can be seen
below, showing that ‘sales & marketing’ and ‘flight crew’ are the
two main departments in terms of employees. In this case both cockpit
and cabin crew are combined in ‘Flight Crew’. This category is
responsible for 30% of the total number of staff, while at Ethiopian
Airlines this is just 18%. This can be explained through the importance
of primary and secondary activities. For example the maintenance
department of Ethiopian Airlines which does most of its maintenance in
house and is responsible for 28% of the employees compared to just 7% at
FastJet which only does its line and base maintenance in-house and has a
single fleet type.
When comparing the numbers of Ethiopian
Airlines and FastJet, we see that FastJet has less staff per 10,000
passengers (11.70 versus 14.14). Though FastJet has more staff per
aircraft (144.33 versus 136.65), but this can be explained because of
the very small fleet of FastJet. Departments such as administration,
management and marketing and sales tend to have a large number of
employees per aircraft compared to larger airlines, but will experience a
lower growth when expanding the fleet compared to flight crew,
maintenance and flight operations.
The lower number of staff per 10,000
passengers is more interesting. FastJet as a low-cost carrier focusses
more on its core activities and outsources processes such as ground
handling and catering (which is only a buy-on-board offer). But also its
own staff has to achieve a higher productivity and flexibility. Still
the number of 11.70 is high and also the 14.14 of Ethiopian Airlines
seems to be high, even for a full service airline. When we compare with
for example easyJet (see graph below), there is a huge difference. Still
Ethiopian Airlines is a profitable airline. This can be explained by
the extremely low labor costs in Africa compared to western Europe.
Ethiopian Airlines had only slightly more than US$ 110 million staff
costs (in 2012) and FastJet US$ 12 million (2013). In comparison,
Brussels Airlines (Belgium) with only 3,500 employees (compared to more
than 6,500 at Ethiopian Airlines) had labor costs of almost 220 million
US Dollar in 2013. That’s double the cost for almost half the amount of
employees. This makes that African airlines push less for higher
productivity and flexibility because employees are so cheap.
Ethiopian Airlines (2011/2012) and FastJet (2013) annual reports
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