How Many Cabin Crew Are There On Each Flight?

How many flight attendants operate on each flight? Sounds like a simple question, doesn’t it? Truth is it isn’t all that simple to answer it. There are many factors to consider when manning an aircraft. So, let’s dive into the question and most importantly the answer.

In this post:

• How Many Cabin Crew On a Low Cost Carrier Plane?
• How Many Flight Attendants a Full Service Airline Plane?

How Many Cabin Crew On a Low Cost Carrier Plane?

We can start by saying what is the minimum number of crew you can find on a flight. On jet liners, you’ll see a minimum of one crew per aircraft door. However, the in some cases there might be less. The reason for it is that the capacity and passengers onboard determine how many attendants are needed. That is one attendant every fifty passengers.

For instance, though, if you’re flying in Europe on Ryanair (the European low-cost carrier), they fly exclusively the 737, and have four cabin crew members per flight. However, it wasn’t uncommon with staff shortages in the post covid years to see only three flight attendants onboard. They were allowed to do so by reducing the maximum number of passengers per flight. That meant that they could continue to operate regularly even throughout the staff shortages.

How Many Flight Attendants a Full Service Airline Plane?

However, having minimum crew aboard is something most common to low-cost carriers and short haul flights. Longer range services are staffed differently. Full-service airlines on long range flights will man the aircrafts with more flight attendants than minimally required to cover the doors. They need extra crew to operate the in-flight service in an efficient manner.

Let’s take as an example an Emirates 777-300, how many cabin crew members are there on this kind of plane? The answer is from a minimum of 14 to a maximum of 16. With the highest number of crew placed on the ultra-long-haul flights where the flight attendants in turn take a rest time off duty on board. An A330, which is slightly smaller, it will have between 12 and 14 crew members.

Obviously, a bigger aircraft will need more crew. For instance, an Emirates A380 will need twenty-four crew members to operate at its full potential with a full cabin of passengers. The smallest turboprops in some cases only have the two pilots in some rare, exceedingly rare, cases and no cabin crew.

So as you can see from this post there is not an exact number, it varies from type of airline, type of aircraft and type of route to operate on.