Leo, your figures in your first posting on this thread are distinctly suspect. You quote Ryanair as having 28.6 employees per aircraft. As I understand it RYR operate mostly a 5 on/3 off crew roster. That can be a very efficient roster but as an absolute minumum it requires 4 crews per aircraft before any leave, training, sickness stand by etc. At 2 pilots and 4 cabin crew that totals 24 people per aircraft as an absolute minimum. It is impossible to see how all bases can be equally efficient, particularly in view of the small number of aircarft deployed at some of them. So I suspect that the real crewing ratio will have to be at least 4.5 crews per aircraft. That makes 27 people per sircraft and at this level it would still make RYR stunningly efficient. There is no possible way that RYR can possibly operate their airline with only 1.6 iother people per aircraft (147 people in total). There are things that they simply have to do that will quickly gobble up far more than that. Accounts, marketing, maintaining and developing the website, engineering, crewing, negotiations with suppliers, customer relations, MOL and his directors, call centre, etc.
In any event the total employee and employee per aircraft figures are irrelevant. What really matters is the number of full time equivalents required to support and operate the total operation and this includes man-hours bought from all suppliers. When you get that figure you can make real comparisons.
It is worth pointing out that any positive return or margin achieved makes any airline far better than the industry average. Remember that the entire airline industry (that is airlines and not including suppliers) throughout its entire history is still in net defecit.
Finally BA had a better margin than 6% last year.