Executive Order
Overseeing everything from major aircraft purchases to the details of his planes’ interior cabins, Emirates president Sir Tim Clark is looking to the future
SIR TIM CLARK has been with Emirates since it started in 1985—and is still going strong as president at 74. With his recent announcement of big aircraft orders at the Dubai Airshow, he set the scene for the Gulf carrier’s success through the late 2030s.
Clark dominated news surrounding the event for days on end, keeping manufacturers, suppliers and the media in suspense. Held every two years, the Airshow is the ideal stage for Emirates to put itself in the limelight on its own turf.
The world’s longest-serving leader of an airline, Clark has held the top job since 2003, and still is the mastermind behind every major move. In late 2019, Clark announced his intention to step down from his post by mid 2020. Then came the pandemic, and it wasn’t hard for his superiors to convince him to stay on to steer the airline clear of trouble.
That has now been achieved, and Clark doesn’t show any signs of fatigue. Rather the opposite, acknowledging at London’s Airlines 2023 conference how he gets a “real buzz” out of leading Emirates and arriving at his stately office overlooking Dubai Airport at 6:15 every morning.
“Does it give me a kick? Yes, of course it does,” he admits. And that was just days after a grueling Airshow week, with Clark being one of the major players in public and behind the scenes.
On the first day, Emirates announced an order with Boeing for a total of 95 additional wide-bodies, worth $52 billion. The shopping spree also included 55 Boeing 777-9s, plus 35 777-8s in the passenger version. On top of that, Emirates altered its earlier order for 30 787-9s, converting them to 15 787-10s and 20 787-8s instead. Airbus initially went away empty-handed but got a consolation prize on the fourth day of the show—a small order for 15 additional Airbus A350-900s, bringing the total to 65. Later, Clark blamed Rolls-Royce’s XWB-97 engines powering the bigger A3501000 as “defective.”
He admitted to Reuters that the engine standoff had “opened the door” again for the Boeing 777-8 as a freighter and passenger aircraft while stressing, “We were ready on the A3501000. You have no idea how much work I’ve spent on the interiors of these airplanes.” That’s classic Clark—probably no other big airline boss is as
meticulously involved, especially in the details of aircraft interiors, as he is.
During fleet meetings, his in-house experts parade their ideas and sketches, and are often rebuffed if Clark already has had other strokes of design genius. He then tells the executives, “That’s how it’s done, now go and do it,” having scribbled some quick pencil drawings of his visions on paper.
After he retires from the top, Clark has agreed with his chairman that he’ll remain as an adviser for everything concerning the aircraft cabin.
Hours before the Dubai Airshow started, a relaxed but sharply focused Clark received Business Traveler in his office for an exclusive interview. “I’ve been quite open about the fact that we are going to buy more aircraft to expand our network,” he said, adding that Emirates needs to be equipped to enter the third epoch of its history.
“The first era was from our formative years from 1985 to about the early 2000s,” he said. “We transitioned ourselves, we expanded, we scaled. Covid was then the close of Emirates’ second epoch.”
That was when the A380 appeared, “a massive disruptor to the global scene. And now we enter a phase where we need to accept that over time, the A380 will disappear. We know exactly what we want to do, where we want to go, and how we want to do that by the mid ’30s. For that, we have to put our markers down now. That has been worked on for two years. Covid was the accelerator for us.”
There are no signs of him contemplating bailing out anytime soon. Watch this space.