Egypt Air losses since the January 2011 uprising amount to six billion Egyptian pounds, 650 million of which are attributed to the upsurge of the U.S. dollar price, an Egyptian minister said.

Political unrest following the Egyptian uprising led to exhausting the resources of foreign reserves which the country's central bank said were down to 13.6 billion dollars by the end of last January.

The civil aviation ministry formed a committee headed by the chairman of Egypt Air’s holding company to handle the losses.

Vice president of the Central Bank of Egypt and two American University in Cairo professors are members of the committee which has been working for a month now, the Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported.

The losses of the airline company are serious but not disastrous and will not lead to shutting down the company or selling it, Civil Aviation Minister Wael al-Ma'adawi said.

32 thousand employees are working at Egypt Air when only 12 thousand are needed to run the company, the minister said.

Egypt's social circumstances make it difficult to get rid of the excess 20 thousand employees, he added.

Tourism, one of Egypt's main income sources, slowed down after the Muslim Brotherhood won in the first presidential elections after the revolution, the new constitution had been approved, and the Islamists dominated the parliament.