- I've been wanting to interview, Sir Tim Clark,
the president of Emirates Airline, for a very long time.
During COVID, I think his airline must've went through hell
with limited connectivity to the Dubai hub,
with lots of A380 grounded,
and also no domestic market to support a recovery.
How the largest international, long-haul airline's
going to fight for it's survival?
Throughout the interview, I found Sir Tim Clark
is a very passionate av geek.
He still remember what he ate on his very first
Boeing 707 flight back in 1960.
Let's hear him out.
Do you remember which aeroplane was the very first one
you ever flown on?
- Oh, of course, I used to fly on
the Stratocruisers of Pan Am with the,
and maybe as a baby I was looking around saying,
yes, you know, they've got lounges,
they've got a dining room downstairs, et cetera.
So, in all the years we've got the 380 where it was,
however, no, I don't remember the first one.
I did travel a lot as a kid throughout my formative years.
I was going backwards and forwards on Super Constellations,
on Britannias, all the turboprops, the DC-7s, the DC-6s,
the Strats, and then the thing I remember most
was the first Boeing 707 I first flew on,
which was in January, 1960.
- Wow.
- It was an Air India 707,
and they were one of the first international carriers
to get the 707, amazing.
Here's a carrier that was so visionary and got the.
So yes, I remember that one.
I'm sorry to say, I can even remember
what I ate on the aeroplane.
(Tim chuckles)
Sad as it may be.
In my shorts and my long socks, as you travelled around
as an unaccompanied minor,
'cause I was always travelling on my own
when I was seven or eight or nine.
I've got a bit of a memory like an elephant,
and those kind of things always remember.
That's probably why it's shaped the way I've gone about
looking at the interior design of our aircraft.
- Why did you choose aviation?
- It's like everybody who has a passion or a hobby.
Why did you do that?
And you actually say, well, I really like painting pictures.
I'm really good at painting pictures.
I have a gift at painting pictures, I don't know what it is.
So it's very difficult to ascertain,
for me it was a passion.
I was particularly interested,
for some of the reasons you said.
One of my brothers became a 747 captain
with British Airways.
So, it was in the blood.
My father was a seafaring, he was like a tanker,
oil tanker captain.
So this kind of travel thing was always in the blood.
We were always flying.
The brother who became a pilot,
he was interested in the front end.
I was always looking around the cabin thinking,
oh, wood here, even as a kid, you know, I was sort of
interested in the way it all worked.
And as I progressed through my education
and you know, finished my degree,
I kind of really didn't want to do anything else.
Could I have done something else? Yes.
But would I have had the passion for it? Probably no.
- You are taking the final A380 and two more this year,
ahead of the delivery schedule.
So you still believe in this aeroplane?
- Oh, very much so.
Yes, we were really keen to take the
last three aircraft of our order and coincidentally,
the last one that will ever be delivered this year,
simply because we've refurbished the interiors,
or redesigned the interiors to include premium economy.
And we've taken the opportunity
to refresh the business class, the lounge upstairs,
the showers and everything downstairs as well.
So essentially, it's a new aeroplane coming out.
- But your competitor didn't believe you.
Your competitor parked the 380.
You know, it was too expensive
to go through a heavy maintenance check,
and they didn't believe this aeroplane anymore.
- Well, I can't speak for them.
They all have different business models
as to how they use their fleet of 380s,
the numbers that they have, where they deploy them.
But for Emirates, the 380 was the linchpin
for our network.
We have 118, when we get these three.
And they have been so successful
for not only our bottom line, but defining what we are
and where we intend to be and stay in the next few decades.
So, the 380 has been hugely popular.
We really decided this was the future for Emirates.
And frankly, these aeroplanes that we're receiving
later on this year, will remain in the fleet
until the mid '30s at least.
As the environmental pressures grew
with regard to what this aeroplane was actually doing,
we were able to placate, simply because we can put
617 seats into a two-class 380,
and then the fuel burn per per seat
is actually a tad lower than it would be
on some of the wide-body, new twins out on the market today.
So, environmentally she's still very solid.
She will always be a very elegant solution
to congestion and slot problems at airfields.
And if people think that those are going to go away,
think again, once we're through the pandemic,
air travel demand will grow.
Congestion will once again return to be a major factor
in airline planning.
And the airports that we currently serve
are still going to have the same kind of pressures
as they had before, whether they be
in the eastern operation, the North American,
South American, or European operation.
So the 380's likely to come more into its own
than it ever has done in the next five, seven years.
- How many premium economy are you going to refit actually?
Are you refitting soon?
- Yes, we have a plan to retrofit 124 of our 777s
with premium economy and large numbers of our 380s.
Those that aren't scheduled to go out of service,
we're going to do the whole lot.
It's a very expensive operation, of course at a time
when cash is king, but nevertheless,
to go forward we're going to do that.
And all the new aircraft, you mentioned the 777,
the 350, the 87s, will all have premium economy in them.
- What about the 777X?
What's going on with the programme?
When are you expecting to receive 777X?
- That's a very good question.
The answer which I cannot give you at this stage.
We are due to see our friends in Boeing later on this month
or the early part of next month to try and establish
what in fact is going on.
So, we are not altogether sure what's going to happen.
So that's why these 380s are fairly important,
that we have some continuum of fleet, a fleet platform,
which doesn't give us any concerns about when
or what other aircraft are going to do for us in the future.
- How can we get through this
without a consistent government border policies?
How can, you know, aviation industry instil confidence
for people to travel, to bring people back on?
- Well, it's a very good question,
and it is the $64,000 question out there at the moment.
At the moment, it's looking pretty bleak.
The ability of governments to produce a standard protocol
with regard to acceptability of whatever it may be
in the health side of things, vaccinations, PCRs, antigen,
I don't know, rapid flow, et cetera.
What the airlines are having to do,
and what we are doing at the moment,
is navigate our way through this ever-changing landscape.
It's a shame that there is such a discrepancy
in the vaccine programmes across the planet.
For instance, only about two or 3% of Africa
have been inoculated,
and it's not much better in South America.
So, you know, we have to sort that out,
as who takes the lead, the G7, the G20, I don't know.
But to leave them there is going to be
very, very counterproductive
with regard to the OECD economies.
So, they've got to get that right.
It's very much in their interest to vaccinate
the very markets they need to access and interact with.
And it's no good leaving them
so they can't move or do anything.
So, in the end, I'm hoping sense will prevail.
Now, when's that going to happen?
Probably not before the middle of next year, '22.
Already we're seeing countries using
the vaccination protocol as the access entry requirements,
without all other bits and pieces.
Europe has started doing it, France has started doing,
Germany's doing it.
Eventually, I hope that that's what will happen.
That makes life a lot easier.
So, we don't have the onerous imposition of testing.
For instance, if you come out of the UK and go back into it,
you could be faced with four PCRs,
and we know what they cost.
If you've got a family of four, you won't do it.
And that's all got to change if we're ever going to,
well, we will get there eventually,
but it's going to take longer than I thought.
- The behaviours of flying may have also changed
due to COVID.
People may want to go direct flights
between Europe and Asia,
or long-haul instead of transit via Dubai.
Do you think that will hurt Emirates?
- No, I'm afraid I don't subscribe to that.
This is an argument that has been used extensively
for the employment of say, the A350 or the 787,
and the single-aisle, 321XLR, great machines,
make no mistake about it.
The irony of it all is that when in the '90s,
we were going to Boeing and Airbus to suggest
that we needed an aircraft that would do
14 or 16 hours nonstop with a full payload,
we were kind of scoffed at because everybody said,
nobody will do that.
And of course, they'll want to get off
and stretch their legs and all the other strange arguments.
But we really persevered with it.
And so we saw the 340-500 and the 777-200X as it was called.
And then the capabilities of the manufacturers
when they realised that people really did want to go
long-haul, nonstop, very good.
So, we scored on that and we actually defined
what it needed to be.
Emirates model has always been
that we don't only serve primary hubs.
We serve first, second, third, and in some cases,
fourth level airports.
Then you can maximise the opportunity
of city pair combinations, which you might,
I use the example of say
Seattle to Dar es Salaam, for instance.
Now, to go Seattle, Dar es Salaam on a nonstop 787 or 350,
full of of passengers is unlikely to happen.
But we can get you from Seattle to Dar es Salaam
with an hour and a half's connection here,
and I can feed it with 20 other flights,
which makes the Dar es Salaam sector
look very profitable for us.
That's how it works.
- Do you think Emirates will go supersonic one day?
- With technology as it is today,
to scale supersonic transport to match the economics
and the environmental footprint of some of the
modern-day twins, I would say probably not in my lifetime.
Would we go supersonic? Could we go?
We can go supersonic now.
We've got, it's not about Concord.
We've got great advances in the area
of dynamics understanding, the materials understanding,
composites as against the metallurgical solutions,
propulsion has advanced, et cetera.
But whether or not that's enough to scale
to where we need to be with regard to getting an aircraft
that's going to match the economics
and the environmental requirements of something like
the aircraft I've mentioned, I'm not sure about that.
I'm not sure we're there yet.
I'd like to see aircraft fly at mach .9, economically.
And that requires changes to the wing aerodynamics of course
and everything else.
I'd like to see us being able to get more utilisation
out of the assets because they are so expensive.
So, you got to take an aircraft from something like
.79 to .82, up to .9.
It makes a measurable difference on the utilisation,
particularly over long distances.
And you can get the turn times down.
You can actually, you know,
you can get one and a half aircraft instead of two.
And that starts when you've got a fleet of our size.
So, if we could get the aircraft to fly faster,
more efficiently, environmentally friendly,
that's where I think we should be going,
rather than over cooking
the supersonic argument at this stage.
- Do you know when you're going to retire?
Or as long as Emirates want you to be here?
- I would like to see this through,
this particularly difficult time.
It is the most difficult time in the airline's history.
Don't get me wrong, it doesn't require me to see it through.
There are plenty of people in the business
who can do the right thing.
I think my boss would just be more comfortable
if I was around for a bit longer.
That's not indefinite.
I'm not here to spend the next 10 or 15 years.
But personally, I'd just like to get the job done.
Set the airline on a course that I know is sustainable.
- You must have lots and lots of great moment
and proud moment in your career.
Could you give us one or two?
- Well, I think from a personal point of view,
when I was knighted by Prince Charles, that was in 2014.
I've had some wonderful moments in my career in Emirates,
which is now 36 years, plus.
I've been here right from the beginning.
That in itself was something for any aviation manager
to be at the beginning of something as great
and good as Emirates has become.
Was something that at the time of course,
we weren't aware of.
But when I look back and I realise
that I was part of a team of 10,
that has to be a defining moment for my career, of course.
Although I didn't know it at the time.
But looking back, yes.
When I took that decision to join,
it was wonderful to be part of that.
And I will look back when I've finally retired, and say,
yes, good job, well done.
(Tim chuckles)