The urban myth goes that Sir Maurice Flanagan, the airline’s former executive vice chairman and one of its founding executives, who died in May this year, was a fan of the lamb and potato-based dish and made it a standard part of the menu across its network and at official functions.
It is not the only legacy Sir Maurice has left with the airline. While performing his national service in the British Royal Air Force, he suffered an injury and damaged the ligaments in his knee, ending an aspiring career as a footballer with his beloved Blackburn Rovers. While it ruled him out of playing on the pitch, he brought his passion for sport to the airline and was instrumental in its push to raise its international profile through headline-grabbing sponsorships.
To this day, Emirates has been linked to the likes of English Premier League club Arsenal, Germany’s Hamburger SV, France’s Paris Saint-Germain, AC Milan, Real Madrid, the New York Cosmos, the FA Cup, the FIFA World Cup, Formula One and many sporting events across cricket, horse racing, tennis and rugby.
It is likely Sir Maurice played a hand in the fact the airline is the shirt sponsor of the Lancashire County Cricket Club, his home team.
Sir Maurice originally came to Dubai in 1978 to take on the role of director and general manager of Dubai’s aviation services provider dnata. Speaking earlier this year about why he had been selected for the position, he credited his time at British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), which gave him an understanding of every facet of the airline travel industry.
“They needed someone with all-round experience to bring dnata — which had grown from 200 to 2000 staff in the 1970s, yet still had a system set up to deal with 200 staff — up to date,” he said. It certainly was a daunting challenge at the time; the emirate was unrecognisable from the lavish skyscraper cityscape it is today.
Sir Maurice recalled that, when his wife first saw the dnata offices in 1978, she asked quite anxiously what he had got himself in for. His reply was: “I’ve come for the way it’s going to be”.
Under his guidance, dnata’s growth accelerated. “Dnata, at that time, was in many ways quite advanced, a step ahead. It was already building the infrastructure needed for an airline centre. Over time, it became much like an airline, which is why — when the time came — it was possible to launch Emirates in such a short time frame.”
A little under six years after he moved to Dubai, Sir Maurice was in the UK celebrating the holidays — and his 30th wedding anniversary — with his family when he received a phone call saying he needed to get back to Dubai soon, as the emirate’s young Crown Prince, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, was talking about starting an airline.
Sir Maurice recounted how Gulf Air — which was owned by the governments of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Abu Dhabi — wanted Dubai to join the aviation group and were asking Sheikh Mohammed to declare Gulf Air as Dubai’s flagship carrier, giving it access to more international traffic.
The deal would have meant “the UAE would have been entitled to half of Gulf Air”, but Sir Maurice said Sheikh Mohammed preferred to go it alone. “The reason it was turned down was [because] Dubai had open skies, and it has been crucial to Dubai’s growth.Sheikh Mohammed said: ‘By the way, gentlemen, I’m starting my own airline’.”
With all the recent war of words from American carriers over the open skies arrangements in the US and allegations Emirates has received subsidies, Sir Maurice was always a loud and colourful distracter to what he called “the conspiracy theorists” who continued to claim Emirates was subsidised by the Dubai government.
“In fact we have had $80m in cash in kind since the start of the airline... That’s absolutely peanuts compared to whatever other national carriers have had,” Sir Maurice said as far back as 2010, during our first sit-down interview with Arabian Business.
“What does Etihad get every year?” he added. “I was given $10m by Sheikh Mohammed in 1985 and told don’t come back for any more, or subsidy of any kind, or protection of any kind.”
Sir Maurice also refuted allegations the carrier does not pay taxes and highlighted the fact that, unlike its competitors, Emirates incurred social costs of around $600m each year. “They say we don’t pay taxes. Of course we pay taxes. Dubai is a city, not a country; we pay municipal taxes. We incur social costs these guys don’t have to think about. Full family medical service, free furnished accommodation for pilots, cabins crew and managers.” Sir Maurice also added that “every year we have paid more than $100m in dividend to the owner of the company”.
As a Knight of the British Empire since 2000, Sir Maurice served his country and his company for decades and the expertise and insight he gained meant he was not afraid to speak his mind on a wealth of hot topics. On the issue of regional dominance, Sir Maurice was happy to let Qatar Airways and Etihad fight over the second place spot, remaining adamant there was only one clear dominant player in the Middle East: Dubai’s Emirates.
“Our [setup] is quite different from both of them,” he said. “There was an imperative as we knew we couldn’t go back if we lost money... We had to make money, so we had to be economical and the business model was very efficient.”
When setting up Emirates, Sir Maurice said one of the most difficult things to change was the attitude to the chain of command and tradition of having a bulging executive class.
“How many people were reporting to managers? No deputy managers or any of that sort of thing... That was one of the hardest things I had when I was setting up the airline.”
He said he believed “the basic principle is still there” and that is why Emirates had not needed government subsidies. “We are just a better-run airline,” he said in his typically direct fashion.
Emirates has delivered billions of dollars to the Dubai government exchequer in the form of dividends over the decades, but Sir Maurice admitted he had given some thought to whether a time would come when the airline might be sold, especially during periods when Dubai needed capital to dig itself out of its mountain of debt. “But I wouldn’t like to see it happen,” he said in 2012.
As recently as January this year, Sir Maurice said the airline would be worth $40bn if it went public, but an initial public offering [IPO] was unlikely as it did not have much support within the government. “That’s been hanging around for ten years, at least, to my knowledge. I think Sheikh Mohammed doesn’t like the idea,” he revealed.
“It would be good in some ways because if it went public they would have to publish more statistics — but actually Emirates is one of the most transparent [airlines] in the industry. But if it went public, it would be very, very clear that Emirates is not subsidised and there are no advantages from the government. It’s treated just like any other airline that is in Dubai. That would become rather more clear,” he said.
The figure of $40bn is nearly four times what it would have been worth in 2012, when it was previously mooted. “Emirates has just overtaken Delta as the second-biggest airline in the world, by all the usual measures,” Sir Maurice said in January. “The only bigger one is the combination of American and United. They’re too big. Airline economies of scale go in reverse after a certain point.”
For this reason, Sir Maurice was always adamant Emirates should pursue a solo path and was in no hurry to follow Etihad’s lead and enter into alliances or buy up stakes in smaller carriers.
“We would never dream of it,” he said, when asked if he saw Emirates ever joining Oneworld or Star Alliance. “You have to compromise too many things, including the IT system, to conform with theirs and that is the nervous system of the business…. You just wouldn’t do that.”
While he did not rule out code-sharing arrangements, Sir Maurice said Emirates’ acquisition of a 40 percent stake in SriLankan Airlines in 1998 was quite a negative experience and not one he believed Emirates should be in a rush to repeat.
“Absolutely not… It eats up an enormous amount of senior management time. They want you to develop that airline to be like Emirates... To do that, you have to base staff there and have senior managers going to and fro… It’s just not worth it,” he said. The Dubai airline pulled out of its management contract with SriLankan in 2008 and sold its stake in the airline two years later.
Emirates, did however, sign a partnership with Australian national carrier Qantas, which came into effect in March 2013. That saw Qantas move its Singapore hub to Dubai and the airlines now codeshare on more than 30 routes, including Australian domestic services operated by Qantas’ low-cost airline Jetstar.
Gaining additional landing rights was the top obstacle Sir Maurice forecast for Emirates’ future growth. Having suffered setbacks in securing landing rights in Germany and Canada, he placed much of the blame on one culprit: German carrier Lufthansa.
“Lufthansa hates us with a passion,” he said of Europe’s second largest carrier. Emirates has been looking to acquire further landings rights in Germany since 2004, and Sir Maurice was of the opinion the Dubai airline would eventually secure the extra routes as there was sufficient market demand.
“[Lufthansa] can’t touch us in Germany as the government seems to quite like us. Berlin is asking for us; Stuttgart is asking for us and we’ll get them sooner or later,” he said.
Of course, he’s not the only Emirates executive to accuse the German carrier of trying to undermine it. Sir Tim Clark, Emirates’ president, told Bloomberg in 2011, Lufthansa’s “mantra is to take the Gulf carriers down”.
As well as creating obstacles in Germany, Sir Maurice also frequently accused Lufthansa of encouraging the government in Canada to block Emirates’ bid for more landing rights to Canadian cities, in order to encourage Canadian passengers to continue using Frankfurt as their main hub for travelling east.
Similar to the situation in German cities, Sir Maurice claimed “there is so much support [for Emirates] from the cities and the provinces,” across Canada.
“The market is there for double daily to Toronto, double daily to Vancouver and daily to Calgary. We are limited to three nights a week to Toronto… The pay master of Air Canada is Lufthansa. It is a stupid thing for the government to do; it is neglecting the economy. Look at Australia: same size population as Canada but we have 70 odd flights a week to Australia and traffic rights for 80. We will build up to those and the Australians can see the economic benefit of that,” he said in 2012.
Emirates began life as a start-up in 1985 — with one Airbus A300 and a Boeing 737-300 leased from Pakistan International Airways and two routes to Karachi and Mumbai — but Sir Maurice was proud of how far the daring project came in three decades.
“We cover practically everywhere you care to mention now… With the aircraft we have, we can connect any two points in the world, from east to west and north to south.”
Speaking during one of his last appearances, earlier this year, Sir Maurice joked that “if I was on BBC’s Mastermind my chosen subject would be aeroplane types and I would do quite well at that”. In reality, Sir Maurice did more than just “quite well” when it came to growing Dubai’s airline from scratch 30 years ago.
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