Business Leader of the Week: Air India bets on Tewolde Gebremariam to engineer a turnaround

The board says it looked at internal and external candidates worldwide before settling unanimously on the 61-year-old Ethiopian, who spent more than 36 years at Ethiopian Airlines Group.

An internal Air India document reviewed by Reuters described him as a “change leader” with particular strength in crisis management. That phrasing matters. Air India is not asking him to grow an airline. It is asking him to steady one.

From the cargo desk to Africa’s largest carrier

Gebremariam joined Ethiopian Airlines in 1985 as a traffic officer in the cargo unit in Addis Ababa.

He worked through cargo, sales and commercial operations, and served as regional director for India and South Asia in the 1990s, which gave him early exposure to the market he is now walking into.

He took over marketing and sales in 2004, became chief operating officer in 2006, and was appointed group chief executive in January 2011.

The eleven years that followed produced one of the industry’s better growth stories. Revenue rose roughly fourfold, from about USD 1 billion to about USD 5 billion. The fleet grew from 33 aircraft to around 134.

The international network roughly doubled to 128 destinations and annual passenger numbers went from three million to twelve million.

He was named “African CEO of the Year” in 2012 and later collected the International Civil Aviation Organization’s “Award for Excellence” and CAPA’s “Airline Executive of the Year.”

The number that explains him best, though, is the roughly USD 1 billion he ploughed into the ground rather than the air. Addis Ababa acquired the continent’s largest cargo terminal, an aviation university, maintenance hangars, a catering centre and a 1,000-room hotel.

Ethiopian also took anchor stakes in ASKY Airlines in Togo, Malawi Airlines and Zambia Airways, extending its reach without flying every sector itself. He did not build an airline so much as a hub economy, one that pulled Africa to Asia and Africa to Europe traffic away from Gulf carriers.

Two crises, no bailout
His crisis record is the reason Tata has hired him. In March 2019, Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 went down six minutes after departing Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board and helping ground the Boeing 737 MAX worldwide.

Ethiopian sent the recorders to France rather than to the United States, defended its crew publicly and refused to hurry the aircraft back into service.

The MAX returned to its fleet only in February 2022, and Gebremariam framed the decision entirely around safety. The airline kept expanding and stayed profitable through it.

Then came the cOVID pandemic. Ethiopian took no government bailout, converted passenger aircraft into freighters and let cargo carry the group through the collapse in travel.

By its 2021/22 financial year the group was back at about USD 5 billion in revenue with profit sharply higher. He stepped down in March 2022 on health grounds, then ran his own consultancy, TGM Advisory Services, and advised Delta Air Lines.

The inheritance in Delhi
The parallel with Air India is uncomfortably close.

On 12 June 2025, flight AI171, a Boeing 787-8 bound for London Gatwick, came down about 32 seconds after leaving Ahmedabad and struck a medical college hostel.

Of the 242 people on board, 241 died, along with 19 people on the ground. The preliminary report found that both engine fuel control switches moved from RUN to CUTOFF within a second of each other.

In late July 2026 the government told Parliament that detailed testing had found no abnormality in the switch or its locking detents, and that the full thrust control module is still being examined at Boeing’s facility.

The final report is expected around October. Until it arrives, the airline lives with an unexplained accident, and the reputational cost of one.

The scrutiny has not let up in the meantime. In February this year a 787 was grounded in Bengaluru after a pilot reported that a fuel control switch would not lock into RUN, an episode that triggered a public disagreement with the UK regulator over the decision to operate the sector home.

The financial picture is worse. Air India and Air India Express posted a combined net loss of Rs 22,238 crore in FY26, more than double the previous year’s Rs 10,859 crore, on combined revenue of Rs 71,870 crore that fell almost 9%.

Chairman N Chandrasekaran has told shareholders that great airlines are built over decades rather than quarters, which is a fair statement of aviation economics and also an admission that the timetable has slipped.

Fleet renewal, the centrepiece of the Wilson era, is running behind the marketing.

Of 570 aircraft ordered, 524 are still to arrive. The narrowbody refit is largely done, but the widebody programme runs to mid-2027 for the 787s and to October 2028 for the legacy 777s, held up by a worldwide shortage of premium seats.

Seventeen ageing narrowbodies meant for retirement are being kept and refitted instead. Net capacity this year is close to flat.

Around all of this sits geopolitics. Pakistan has kept its airspace shut to Indian carriers since April 2025, renewing the notice month by month, most recently to August 24.

Air India has put the cost at around USD 455 million a year in forgone profit before tax, with fuel burn up as much as 29% on affected sectors and some journeys three hours longer.

Washington DC has already gone. Meanwhile IndiGo took a record 66.3% of the domestic market in June, with better punctuality and a quarter of Air India’s cancellation rate.

What he can actually change
Four levers look plausible.

The first is safety credibility, rebuilt slowly and visibly. Ethiopian’s response in 2019 was to be transparent, protect the internal reporting culture and let the evidence run its course. Air India needs the chief executive to be the public face of that, not the communications team.

The second is hub economics, which is his specialism. Delhi as a genuine transfer hub for India to Europe and India to North America traffic is the Addis Ababa idea transplanted, and it is the only structural answer to the Gulf carriers taking Indian passengers through their own hubs.

The third is revenue that does not depend on seats. Cargo, the greenfield maintenance base in Bengaluru and the training academy in Gurugram are already built or building. Ethiopian showed what happens when those units stop being cost centres.

The fourth is network honesty. Routes that cannot pay while the airspace is shut should stay parked, and the retrofitted aircraft should go where premium yields actually are.

The caution is that Ethiopian had a protected home market, state ownership and a low cost base. Air India has none of those, and faces a rival carrying two of every three domestic passengers. Gebremariam cannot reopen Pakistani airspace or speed up Airbus and Boeing. What he can do is decide what this airline is for, and stop it losing money while it works that out.