Grant Bradley Aviation, tourism and energy writer for the Business Herald Big Read: How Emirates took on the world
-
Loading... - GEMMA BROWN
- 14 Oct 2020
- 808 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
The big western airlines were already decades old in 1985 when Tim Clark joined a tiny Middle Eastern start-up with two aircraft leased from Pakistan.
Clark's job was with Emirates, an airline set up with a US$10 million loan from Dubai's royal family. Its first flight took off from a dusty runway bound for Karachi.
Brought in as head of airline planning, the economics graduate had a vision that would go on to see Dubai at the heart of an aviation boom like no other. With two-thirds of the world's population within eight hours of the emirate, Clark aimed to have his new airline carrying millions of them.
By various measures, that vision has come to fruition; the airline's growth has been staggering.
While other established airlines have folded, merged or gone backwards, Emirates has known only one trajectory - up.
Thanks to its international reach and billions of dollars spent on promotion, marketing and sponsorship, it's the biggest brand in aviation, has the largest available flight kilometres of any international carrier and in absolute size, is in the top three behind American and United Airlines.
"I wouldn't have dreamt that in 1985 when we set the thing up," says Clark - now Sir Tim, and one of aviation's most powerful executives.
Asked about Clark's place in the airline industry, a leading aviation analyst this week described him as being "slightly south of God".
Clark extends a half-hour interview with the Herald to nearly an hour at Sydney's Shangri-La hotel. There are fine views out to the Opera House, but much of his focus is on the meeting room, where there are two scale models of the Airbus A380 superjumbo, Emirates' signature aircraft.
The airline now has more than 80 of the double decker planes and close to 150 other widebody aircraft flying to more than 150 destinations. Almost the same number of aircraft are on order and it carries more than 50 million passengers a year.
