The Ethiopian Airlines Story: The only African airline that actually works
In the spring of twenty twenty, the global commercial aviation industry stopped flying. Airlines parked their fleets in the deserts of Arizona and the salt flats of Australia. Singapore Airlines reported a billion-dollar loss. Lufthansa took the largest state bailout in German corporate history. Kenya Airways went to its government for cash. South African Airways collapsed into business rescue.
In Addis Ababa, the chief executive of Ethiopian Airlines did not call his government. He called his maintenance engineers.
Inside eight weeks, twenty of Ethiopian’s widebody passenger jets had their cabin seats pulled out, cargo nets installed, and went back into the sky as freighters. Between March of twenty twenty and March of twenty twenty-one, the airline operated more than thirty-three thousand cargo flights and moved more than seven hundred thousand tonnes of freight. It laid off nobody. It cancelled nothing. It ended its pandemic fiscal year with a profit of around two hundred and sixty million US dollars.
Every other major flag carrier on Earth was begging. Ethiopian was hiring.
This is the story of how an airline founded by an emperor in a country with no paved runway became the only African flag carrier that has never failed.
The Emperor and the Airline
To understand Ethiopian Airlines, you have to begin in nineteen forty-five, in a country that had just been handed back to itself.
For five years, between nineteen thirty-six and nineteen forty-one, Ethiopia had been under Italian occupation. The Emperor, Haile Selassie, had spent those years in exile in the English city of Bath, addressing the League of Nations in Geneva to almost no effect, while Mussolini’s army rebuilt highways and barracks across the Ethiopian highlands. When British and Commonwealth forces drove the Italians out in nineteen forty-one, the Emperor returned to a country that had its sovereignty back and almost nothing else.
Ethiopia in nineteen forty-five had no scheduled domestic airline. It had no permanent paved runway at Addis Ababa. It had a single railway line, built by the French, that ran from the capital down to the port of Djibouti. The terrain that had made Ethiopia almost impossible to colonise also made it almost impossible to govern. The highlands rose to three thousand metres. The Rift Valley cut the country in two. The lowlands of the Ogaden and the Afar were weeks of road travel from the capital.
Haile Selassie’s calculation was that a national airline would do three things at once. It would bind the country together, connecting the highland capital to the lowland provinces in hours rather than weeks. It would connect Ethiopia to the rest of Africa and the world without depending on Italian or British carriers. And it would signal to the international community that Ethiopia was a serious, sovereign, modern state. Aviation, in the Emperor’s mind, was not a business. It was a state-building project.
The Emperor sent his foreign-affairs advisor, an American historian named John Spencer, to negotiate. On the eighth of September, nineteen forty-five, Spencer signed an agreement with Trans World Airlines, the American carrier then controlled by the industrialist Howard Hughes.
The structure of the deal was unusual, and, in hindsight, brilliant.
TWA would not own the airline. The Ethiopian government would put up the capital and own one hundred per cent of the equity. TWA would manage the airline under contract, providing the general manager, the pilots, the engineers, the accountants, with one explicit instruction: indigenise the workforce over time.
Ethiopian Air Lines was formally incorporated on the twenty-first of December, nineteen forty-five. Its first commercial flight took off on the eighth of April, nineteen forty-six, using surplus American military Douglas C forty-sevens, flown by TWA pilots, between Addis Ababa, Asmara, Djibouti, and on to Cairo. By nineteen fifty-one, Ethiopian was flying intercontinentally, to Bombay via Aden, and to Frankfurt via Athens and Rome. It was one of the first sub-Saharan African carriers to operate international routes at all.
The four founding challenges are still visible in the airline today.
There was no infrastructure. The runway at Bole, the field that would later become Bole International Airport, was a grass strip until the late nineteen fifties. There were no people. In nineteen forty-six there were essentially no Ethiopian commercial pilots, no maintenance engineers, no air-traffic controllers. There was the terrain. Addis Ababa sits at over twenty-three hundred metres of elevation, and to this day, departures from Bole climb out over volcanic peaks at reduced payload. And there was no capital. A country emerging from occupation and from a world war had almost no foreign exchange.
The TWA contract was renewed five times between nineteen forty-six and nineteen seventy. With each renewal, TWA’s role was reduced. By the nineteen seventy renewal, TWA had been demoted from manager to adviser. By nineteen seventy-five, the contract had ended entirely.
From nineteen seventy-five onward, Ethiopian Airlines was run by Ethiopians, trained by Ethiopians, and maintained by Ethiopians.
That was a generational head start over every other major African flag carrier on the continent. And it was about to be tested.
The Airline That Outlasted the Empire
In September of nineteen seventy-four, the man who had founded Ethiopian Airlines was deposed.
Haile Selassie was arrested by a committee of military officers calling itself the Derg. He died in custody less than a year later. The Derg installed a Marxist-Leninist government, nationalised the country’s banks and industries, aligned Ethiopia with the Soviet Union, and fought a brutal civil war that would not end until nineteen ninety-one. The country went through famine, the Red Terror, the war in Eritrea, and the eventual collapse of the Derg under Eritrean and Tigrayan rebel pressure.
Almost every other African flag carrier of that era did not survive its country’s political turbulence. Nigeria Airways was looted by successive governments and eventually liquidated. Air Afrique, the regional carrier shared by francophone West Africa, ran out of cash and dissolved. Kenya Airways spent decades as a chronic loss-maker. South African Airways would eventually collapse into business rescue.
Ethiopian Airlines, through all of it, kept flying. The Derg did not break it. The civil war did not break it. The famine did not break it.
The reason was a quiet feature of the corporate architecture that the TWA era had bequeathed. Ethiopian’s board chair, by design, sat outside the line ministry. Ministers could not directly appoint pilots, set ticket prices, dictate routes, or override the chief executive. The airline reported up to the government, but day-to-day operating authority sat with professional managers who had been trained inside the company. The political insulation was not perfect. But it was enough.
By the early nineteen nineties, with the Derg gone and a new government in Addis, Ethiopian Airlines had quietly become something rare on the continent. A state-owned company that had been profitable, without subsidy, for decades.
Then, on the twenty-third of November, nineteen ninety-six, came the most public crisis in the airline’s history.
Flight ET nine sixty-one, a Boeing seven sixty-seven with one hundred and seventy-five people on board, took off from Addis Ababa bound for Nairobi. Twenty minutes after takeoff, three Ethiopian hijackers stormed the cockpit. They demanded to be flown to Australia.
The captain, an Ethiopian airman named Leul Abate, knew the airplane he was flying. The seven sixty-seven did not have the fuel range to reach Australia. It barely had the fuel range to reach the East African coast. Captain Abate told the hijackers he would comply. He then, without their knowledge, turned the aircraft south, toward the Comoros Islands.
The fuel ran out over the Indian Ocean. Captain Abate brought the widebody jet down onto the water just off the beach at Grande Comore, in front of a crowd of tourists who captured the entire ditching on video. The left engine struck the water first. The fuselage broke apart. One hundred and twenty-five people died.
Fifty people lived. They lived because Captain Leul Abate, in a situation that aviation training does not prepare you for, made the call to put a fuel-exhausted widebody jet on water rather than crash it on land, and made it land flat enough that half the people on board could swim out.
Before September of two thousand and one, ET nine sixty-one was the deadliest hijacking in commercial aviation history. The video of the ditching is still one of the most watched aviation disaster recordings ever filmed. Inside Ethiopia, Captain Abate became a figure of national pride.
The crash should have been a moment of reckoning. Instead, it became part of the institutional memory of an airline that was about to enter the most consequential decade of its life.
Because by two thousand and four, Ethiopian Airlines had a new chief executive. And he was about to do something nobody in African aviation had ever done.
Vision Twenty Ten
His name was Girma Wake. He took over as chief executive of Ethiopian Airlines in two thousand and four.
The airline he inherited had twelve jet aircraft. It carried one point two million passengers a year. It served forty-two international destinations and sixteen domestic ones. Inside Africa, it was respected. Outside Africa, it was almost unknown.
Girma Wake’s diagnosis was that the airline was operating at a fraction of its potential, and the constraint was not capital or talent. The constraint was ambition.
In two thousand and five, he hired the consulting firm Ernst and Young and built a five-year strategy he called Vision twenty ten. The plan called for the airline to triple in size in five years. Fleet, destinations, revenue, passengers. Triple everything.
The same year, Girma Wake did something no African airline chief executive had ever done. He signed a preliminary agreement with Boeing to buy up to ten seven eighty-seven Dreamliners. The seven eighty-seven had not yet flown. The first delivery would be years away. Most established Western and Asian carriers were still studying the order. Ethiopian Airlines, with annual revenues of about two hundred and forty million US dollars and a fleet of twelve jets, had just placed a multi-billion-dollar order for the most advanced commercial aircraft in development anywhere in the world.
Inside the African aviation industry, the order was treated as a bluff. Inside Boeing, it was treated very seriously.
Between two thousand and five and two thousand and ten, the airline grew at twenty-five per cent compound annual revenue growth. Passengers nearly tripled, from one point two million to three point two million. The fleet expanded from twelve aircraft to thirty-seven. New destinations opened across China, Brazil, the Middle East, and the United States. The hub at Addis Ababa Bole began to function as something it had never been before: a true international transit point, equidistant from Lagos, Cape Town, Cairo, and Nairobi, and within one-stop range of Europe, the Gulf, and Asia.
The geography had always been there. Bole had always sat near the geographic centre of the African continent. What Vision twenty ten did was build the airline that could finally use that geography.
On the thirteenth of December, twenty eleven, Ethiopian Airlines was admitted to Star Alliance, the global airline grouping that includes United Airlines, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, and Air China. Ethiopian was the third African carrier ever admitted, after EgyptAir and South African Airways. It was the twenty-eighth airline in the alliance worldwide.
Star Alliance membership was not a marketing exercise. It meant that an Ethiopian boarding pass would now interline with hundreds of other carriers globally. A passenger from a secondary African city could be ticketed all the way through to a connecting flight in Tokyo or Toronto on a single itinerary. The transit machine at Bole had just been plugged into the global aviation grid.
On the first of January, twenty eleven, Girma Wake stepped down. His successor was a man who had spent his entire adult life inside Ethiopian Airlines. His name was Tewolde GebreMariam. He had joined the company in nineteen eighty-five as a young commercial officer in the customer service department. Twenty-six years later, he was in the chief executive’s chair.
Tewolde inherited an airline that had just finished tripling. He was about to be the man who made it triple again.
The Worst Day, and the Year of the Cargo
On the seventeenth of August, twenty twelve, Tewolde GebreMariam took personal delivery of a brand-new Boeing seven eighty-seven Dreamliner. Ethiopian Airlines was the first carrier outside of Japan to operate the type, and the first carrier anywhere in Africa. In twenty fifteen, Ethiopian became the first African carrier to operate the Airbus A three fifty.
By twenty eighteen, Ethiopian had become the largest airline in Africa by fleet, by destinations, by passengers, and by cargo. Twelve million people a year were flying it. Revenue had reached four and a half billion US dollars.
Then, on the tenth of March, twenty nineteen, the worst day in the airline’s history arrived.
Flight ET three oh two, a brand-new Boeing seven thirty-seven MAX eight with one hundred and forty-nine passengers and eight crew, took off from Addis Ababa Bole at eight thirty-eight in the morning, bound for Nairobi. Six minutes after takeoff, the aircraft crashed near the town of Bishoftu, south-east of the capital. Everyone on board died. The dead were citizens of thirty-five countries. Thirty-two were Kenyans. Eighteen were Canadians. Nine were Ethiopians. A large contingent were United Nations aid workers, on their way to an environment summit in Nairobi.
The cause was a Boeing-designed automated stabiliser system called MCAS. The same system had brought down a Lion Air seven thirty-seven MAX off Indonesia five months earlier. On the Ethiopian flight, MCAS activated repeatedly based on faulty data from a single damaged sensor, forcing the nose of the aircraft down. The crew could not recover.
Inside forty-eight hours, every Boeing seven thirty-seven MAX in the world had been grounded. The global grounding lasted twenty months. It was the longest commercial aircraft grounding in the history of aviation.
The investigation was unusual. Ethiopia chose to send the black boxes to the French air-accident bureau in Paris, rather than to the American NTSB. The final Ethiopian-led report, released in December of twenty twenty-two, blamed the accident solely on the MCAS system. The American and French investigators both took the unusual step of publishing separate statements arguing the report had under-weighted crew performance. That dispute is, as of twenty twenty-six, still live.
Less than a year after ET three oh two, the world stopped flying. The pandemic response, the one this episode opened with, became the second defining moment of Tewolde GebreMariam’s tenure. No layoffs. No bailout. A profit, when every other large carrier on Earth was burning cash.
But there was a third moment of that period that the airline does not put in its annual report.
In November of twenty twenty, the Ethiopian federal government opened a military offensive against the regional government of Tigray in the country’s north. The war that followed killed an estimated half a million people. In October of twenty twenty-one, the American broadcaster CNN published an investigation citing cargo manifests, eyewitnesses, and photographs alleging that Ethiopian Airlines aircraft had been used to transport weapons, ammunition, and soldiers between Addis Ababa and the Eritrean cities of Asmara and Massawa during the early weeks of the war. A parallel investigation alleged that Tigrayan employees of the airline had been ethnically profiled, suspended, or pushed out. The airline denied both sets of allegations. The American government called the reporting incredibly grave and authorised a sanctions framework against parties prolonging the conflict. Ethiopian Airlines itself was never sanctioned. The Tigray war formally ended with the Pretoria peace agreement in November of twenty twenty-two.
By March of that same year, after thirty-seven years at Ethiopian Airlines and eleven as chief executive, Tewolde GebreMariam stepped down for health reasons. The airline he handed over had carried the entire weight of those three crises in three years, and was still standing.
Bishoftu
The man who replaced him was an engineer. His name is Mesfin Tasew Bekele. He joined Ethiopian Airlines in nineteen eighty-four as an associate engineer, fresh out of Addis Ababa University. By two thousand and ten, he was chief operating officer. On the twenty-third of March, twenty twenty-two, he became Group Chief Executive.
Mesfin Tasew inherited an airline at an inflection point. The Tigray war was just ending. The MAX litigation was still moving through American courts. And the hub at Bole was running into the wall of its own physical capacity. Designed for twenty-five million passengers a year, it was already handling close to twenty.
In March of twenty twenty-five, the airline unveiled its third generational strategy, Vision twenty thirty-five. The targets: two hundred and seventy-one aircraft, two hundred and seven international destinations, sixty-five million passengers a year, twenty-five billion US dollars in revenue, a top-twenty global airline group.
But none of that is possible at the current Bole airport. Which is why, on the tenth of January, twenty twenty-six, ground was broken on a new airport at Bishoftu, forty-five kilometres south-east of Addis Ababa. Four parallel runways, with provision for a fifth. A first-phase capacity of sixty million passengers a year by twenty thirty. A fully built-out capacity of more than one hundred million. Total cost: around twelve and a half billion US dollars, with the African Development Bank committing seven point eight billion of it.
When Bishoftu opens, it will be the largest airport on the African continent. The aviation industry already understands what is being built. Bishoftu is a head-on bid to compete with Dubai, Doha, and Istanbul as the transit hub between Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Today, in twenty twenty-six, Ethiopian Airlines carries nineteen million passengers a year. It operates one hundred and fifty-eight aircraft. It serves more than one hundred and thirty international destinations. It has reported a profit, without a single dollar of government subsidy, for more than sixty consecutive years. In February of twenty twenty-six, it broke into the global top fifty airlines by daily flights.
Mesfin Tasew has signalled that he will step down later in twenty twenty-six. The succession, almost certainly from within, will be the next test of the institutional model the airline has been refining since the day TWA handed over the keys in nineteen seventy-five.
The empire was built on geography, discipline, and a willingness to keep flying when nobody else would. The next ten years will decide whether that is enough to make Bishoftu the new centre of African aviation, at the exact moment the founding generation hands the airline over to the next one.
Every empire has an origin.
Ethiopian Airlines’ origin is an emperor returning from exile to a country with no runway, a contract signed in nineteen forty-five with the American carrier Trans World Airlines, and a slow, decades-long handover that left the continent’s most successful flag carrier in the hands of Ethiopians. Eighty years later, that airline is about to bet itself on the largest airport ever built in Africa.
This is Asili Africa.
Key Takeaways
- The Emperor and the Airline. To understand Ethiopian Airlines, you have to begin in nineteen forty-five, in a country that had just been handed back to itself.
- Vision Twenty Ten. His name was Girma Wake.
- The Worst Day, and the Year of the Cargo. On the seventeenth of August, twenty twelve, Tewolde GebreMariam took personal delivery of a brand-new Boeing seven eighty-seven Dreamliner.
- Bishoftu. The man who replaced him was an engineer.
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