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The Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy graduated 12 pilots, 60 flight attendants and 125 aviation maintenance technicians last week.

The Academy contributes significantly to the success of the airline by preparing trained manpower in all sectors said Tewolde Gebremariam, Chief Executive of the airline speaking on the occasion.

Ethiopian Airlines expects to employ 17 thousand personnel by the year 2025 and most of these employees will be graduates for the Aviation Academy he said.

Ethiopia Airlines plans to add 14 more new aircraft to its fleet this year as part of efforts to increase revenues by five fold in 2025 according to Tewolde Gebremariam, Chief Executive of the airline.

The company is an a phase of ‘fast growth’ targeting annual sales of 10 billion US dollars by the end of its Vision 2025 plan, which also entails increasing its fleet to 120 aircraft said Tewolde.

The airline is committed to re-investing profits in financing infrastructural development and in building a new fleet which means considerable investment he said.

Ethiopia was placed in the bottom five countries on the World Wide Web Foundation’s Web Index according to a survey which ranked 61 countries on a range of criteria including the number of people online and the amount of useful content available.

The Index measures the economic, political and social impact the Internet has made on the countries.

The survey was intended to fill a need for uniform and publicly available date comparing countries and identifying areas for improvement according to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

The most basic question asked if people were actually connected and if they had hardware to access the web he said.

The Ethiopian Airlines office in Muscat is processing Ethiopian Visa requests for Omani nationals. The airline expects that it will attract more passengers from the Sultanate to visit Ethiopia for tourism purposes by allowing them to apply for visa’s through its office.

The visa application process will be facilitated within ten working days from the time the documents are initially submitted and the actual visa will be stamped into travel documents on arrival in Ethiopia it was noted.

Many Omani nationals who would like to visit Ethiopia for tourism purposes are unable to do so because Ethiopia does not have an Embassy in Oman to facilitate visa requests explained Sami Muctar, Country Manager for Ethiopian Airlines in Oman.