Only 6 percent of pilots worldwide are women. And that is why, easyJet writes in a new recruitment campaign that started on Monday, the British budget airline is actively calling on women to apply for a job in the cockpit.
EasyJet wants to hire 1,000 new pilots over the next five years. Women and men. And the British company isn’t the only low-cost carrier to return work to thousands of people in the coming years.
Irish Ryanair announced on Monday that it will need an additional 6,000 employees until 2025. And Wizz Air, the Hungarian challenger to easyJet and Ryanair, announced last summer that it would recruit 4,600 pilots over the next eight years.
The announcements signify the way the three companies operate. In recent months they have cut thousands of jobs, and now that aviation is picking up somewhat, they are recruiting again.
The cost here far outweighs the benefit, according to the results of the three largest budget airlines in Europe in recent days.
Ryanair reported a multimillion-dollar loss for the last quarter of 2021 on Monday – the third quarter of its broken fiscal year for the Irish company. It previously said its full-year loss would be much larger than previously reported: between 250 and 450 million instead of 100 to 200 million.
Last week, Wizz Air and easyJet published comparable quarterly figures. The euphoria of a good summer and autumn seems to be over. The revival in travel traffic is taking longer than expected before the Omikron variant of the corona virus advanced, Ryanair reported Monday. And it is precisely the budget airlines that are expected to recover the fastest in European aviation. They are more flexible than traditional competitors such as Air France-KLM and Lufthansa.
make haste
The three large budget airlines are making haste with recruiting new employees and investing in new aircraft. Budget airlines, Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz Air say in unison, have much lower costs and can respond much better to changing market conditions due to the corona crisis and travel restrictions.
First of all, the numbers.
Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline, carried more than 31 million passengers in the last three months of last year. In the same quarter of 2020, there were 8.1 million. The occupancy rate – the number of passengers in relation to the number of available seats – rose from 70 to 84 percent. Ryanair’s turnover was 1.47 billion euros in the last three months of 2021, four times as much as in the same period a year earlier. The loss amounted to 96 million (2020: 321 million). More than the two budget competitors, Ryanair appears to be able to cut costs.
EasyJet also had many more passengers on board in the last three months of 2021 (11.9 million compared to 2.9 million in 2020). This brought turnover to (converted) 969 million euros, almost five times as much as in the last quarter of 2020. Yet easyJet suffered a loss of 256 million euros from October to December 2021.
The British company, which rejected a hostile takeover bid from Wizz Air last year, is positioning itself between ultra-low-cost carriers such as Ryanair and Wizz Air and traditional carriers. easyJet would rather fly to ‘primary’ airports (airports close to the most popular cities in Europe) than from an airport like Charleroi, euphemistically called ‘Brussels South Charleroi’ by Ryanair, even though the airport is more than fifty kilometers from the center of the Belgian capital.
Wizz Air, the smallest of the three budget airlines, is trying to make the move from Eastern Europe to the West. The Hungarian company recently acquired a series of slots (take-off and landing rights) on London Gatwick from Norwegian Air Shuttle. Gatwick is the second airport in London.
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Wizz Air carried 7.8 million passengers in the last three months of last year. That was more than three times as much as in the same period in 2020. The quarterly turnover amounted to 408 million euros (2020: 150 million euros) and the loss was 268 million (2020: 116 million).
Temporary setback
What makes the three budget airlines so positive that they want to recruit thousands of employees again?
Ryanair as well as easyJet and Wizz Air regard the rise of the Omikron variant as a temporary setback. They think that while airfare sales will fall short of previous expectations in the coming months – and that demand will therefore have to be boosted with stunt prices – everyone wants to go on holiday again after that. “Wizz Air expects a quick recovery after the summer,” chief executive József Váradi said last week. He expects to transport 50 percent more passengers in the summer than Wizz Air did in pre-corona year 2019.
Look at the easing of travel restrictions in the UK, airlines say. Aviation was delighted when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted most of the restrictions there last week. Vaccinated persons can simply travel in and out of the country. Unvaccinated people must be tested but no longer need to be quarantined.
That will stimulate the recovery of aviation, the three budget airlines hope. That is, part of aviation. The holiday flights within Europe to be precise.
Business air traffic will be at 2019 levels much later, analysts predict. That affects easyJet slightly more than the other two budget airlines, but it is especially detrimental to companies such as Lufthansa, Air France-KLM and British Airways. The ‘national’ companies, the flag carriers in aviation jargon, will announce their annual figures in the coming weeks.
Also intercontinental flights – traditionally the lucrative domain of the established airlines – are still far from the level before the pandemic.
“People don’t want to go on holiday closer to home,” Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said Monday morning in a commentary on the quarterly figures. “Because of all the uncertainties, people not only book later, they also want to spend less on flights.” His company benefits from the substantial investments that, for example, the Irish and Portuguese governments are making in the tourism sector.
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