INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE: Emirates chief Tim Clark

Sitting somewhere in the desk of Emirates president Tim Clark is the airline's first ever statement of intent, writes Mark Summers.

These days when the Dubai carrier wants to set out its goals for the future - say like its recent announcement that it plans to fly 70 million passengers a year by 2020 - its media team can flash a statement around the globe.

But prior to the airline’s launch in 1985, things were a bit more modest. Clark was one of the “team of ten” tasked with starting up the new Dubai airline. Things weren’t easy in the beginning.

“The Gulf states wouldn’t allow us to fly to their points - Gulf Air was the dominant carrier and there was no love lost, quite a lot of blood-letting in those days,” he tells 7DAYS. With Dubai being “starved” as the number of flights in and out of the emirate was slashed, Emirates prepared to take to the skies.

Clark, then in charge of planning the fledgling carrier’s routes, was forced to identify promising routes outside the Gulf - and when the first Emirates flight took to the skies it headed for Karachi in Pakistan. At the outset of the airline’s journey, Clark sat down to sketch out its goals.

“I’ve still got the piece of paper. Hand-written. The business model. It is sitting turning sepia in my bottom drawer. We haven’t deviated from it to this day. The only thing that tickles me is that I put at the bottom ‘We must be respected, even though we will always be a small Arab carrier…’”

Fast-forward 28 years to the 2013 Dubai Airshow and Clark is speaking to 7DAYS three days after Emirates announced orders for 50 Airbus A380 superjumbos and 150 of Boeing’s ultra long-haul Boeing 777X aircraft. At just shy of $100 billion at list prices, the airline is describing the deal as “the biggest in civil aviation history.” It’s quite a story. And so is that of Clark himself.

“I make no secret of it - I am an anorak of this business,” he says. Having expected a place on a graduate training scheme run by BOAC - the forerunner to British Airways - he found “they’d canned it, because even then, in those days, times were tough for the airline industry”.

“So I said, ‘I’ll just go and get a check-in desk job’ and I absolutely loved it - walking the ramp, walking around the airplane, smelling the high-octane fuel - oh, it was wonderful,” he laughs. The early years at Emirates were heady times too, he says, creating a strong camaraderie among the airline’s early staff as the carrier added routes and was consistently profitable.

Clark claims that persists to this day.

“We never lose pilots,” he says simply. Today the Emirates brand can be found attached to some of the famous sporting franchises in the world - and Clark says marketing was an early priority.

“We spent a fortune on it,” he says. “And people used to say ‘how many aircraft have you got - 300? And we would say ‘no, we’ve got four…’” Not any more - by 2020 Emirates anticipates having a fleet of 250 wide-body aircraft. But having reached the summit of the industry - those 70 million annual passengers the Dubai carrier is targeting by the end of the decade would make it the biggest airline in the world for international flyers - don’t make the mistake of thinking things are any easier for Clark and his team.

“Things are getting difficult out there, the competitors are starting to ratchet up - finally after 28 years they have kind of woken up to the fact that ‘maybe we ought to do something about these people’,” he says. This year alone the carrier has inaugurated a complex partnership with Australia’s Qantas and shaken up transatlantic travel by starting an eye-catching new route between Milan and New York - its first not to stop in Dubai.

Ask if he can see the airline adding further routes without a Dubai connection and Clark says it’s not really part of the business model he wrote out all those years ago.

“Flying to the US from London, Frankfurt or Paris? That’s not in our plans,” he says. Following the announcement of the Milan-New York route, Clark says, “all hell let loose - everyone was suing us”. You get the impression that he still quite enjoys such clashes, having thrived in the early acrimony that followed the airline’s launch. But he really should get that early business plan out of his desk drawer and into a frame...

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