The Success Story of Sir Tim Clark | Emirates

I think I got the bug when I was about 2 or 3 years old. I was flying on airplanes all the time, even then when I was a kid, and it never left. Right through my childhood I was flying the Far East, the West Indies, boarding school in England, backwards and forwards to see the parents in the holidays, and these were long journeys then, three or four days to get to the Far East. So you got the bug. They offered me a job at the time as a steward. So then I did a few other jobs and then joined BCAL. I went into BCAL at the very bottom as a check-in agent and worked on the ramp, and then I joined the corporate planning unit of BCAL in those days. A lot of people that had been in that unit had gone to GIA and they kept sending me messages: 'Come on, this is the place to be.' I was there for 10 years. I was fairly much involved in how the company shaped. It was a really good grounding for me. So I came in as head of airline planning and my task was, in those days on a clean sheet of paper, to try to map out what this airline was going to look like. All I can say is that the team of people there, about 10 of us, were all like me: anorak geeks, aviation fanatics, and they were all so fired up about having a clean sheet of paper and to build something from nothing. Not many aviation professionals in this day and age get the opportunity to do that. This underlying dedication and, yeah, I would say love for this industry and for aircraft and for everything flying. So it became not only a work thing, it was a hobby. We didn't really know how we were going to do this, how we would be received, how Dubai would be able to deal with what was coming. We started to acquire smaller widebodies. The A310-300 became the workhorse for us. One was to create a service delivery, an in-flight service product, which blew the world apart. Frankly, we went after that in a very, very big way. So we had to get noticed by what we were doing. And frankly, that wasn't very difficult to do because the product offering of most of the carriers in those days was seriously bad.