Sir Tim has little truck for the “flight-shaming” proponents such as Greta Thunberg, or even officials in the UK Government.
A government “nudge unit” last year referred to the “immoral indulgence” of flying and advocated carbon taxes as a way to decrease the popularity of travelling by plane.
“So what’s more immoral, going out to dinner?” he asks. “We don’t really have to go out to eat. So all the discretionary spending is immoral, because it will have a carbon footprint.
“So whether you’re flying a holiday, whether you’re flying to your second home, or whether you’re flying on business, or you find for the multifarious number of reasons that people travel by air today, to judge them as being immoral, one must look at the glass house that you’re throwing stones at.”
Sir Tim was buoyed by comments made by the Duke of Cambridge, who made his first official visit to the region earlier this month.
“I was talking to Prince William, the week before last – because he is a great environmentalist. He really does bang the drum in a mature, sensible way,” he says. “I said to him: ‘Our problem is that we’re the poster boy for being the bad guys.’
“And he said to me: ‘Tim, what you’ve got to understand is that you are an industry that’s in transition. And your transition is going to take a lot longer than others [compared with] automotive, or power [and] utilities’. And that’s absolutely true.”
After 44 years in the Persian Gulf, and 34 with Emirates, Sir Tim announced plans to step down in 2019 but shelved his retirement plans when Covid struck.
He openly avoids the question. “My plan is to get this all up and running, get the company profitable, get the cash back where it needs to be.”
It remains to be seen whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will extend his tenure even longer.
But Emirates is planning for things to get very ugly, including being forced to avoid Russian airspace.
British Airways was banned on Friday in response to the Government’s prohibition on Russian state airline Aeroflot.
But for Emirates, failure to address this risks bringing large parts of its business to a standstill. “We’ve been preparing [for] this very scenario. We’ve been looking at our US operation to the west coast, which goes right through Russian airspace,” Sir Tim says.
“If push comes to shove, we can still fly but have to go into some European point filled up with fuel. Hopefully he won’t get to that. But when you start aggression, you never know which way this will go, however hard you try.”
Whenever Sir Tim finally bows out from Emirates, “retirement” does not appear to be on the cards. He says it is like he will remain an adviser to the airline and take a more prominent role in some of the Dubai-based charities.
He admits it is easy to trivialise all the hard work put in over the decades. But here is a man who evidently thrives under adversity. “Look, you’ve got to have the balls to do it,” Sir Tim says.
