10 minutes. And before you finally turned on, the pilot would advan- ce all the throttles to max, kee- ping his foot on the brake, and then retard them. And then he would turn on the runway. So you were about 20 minutes just stan- ding. And of course, in those days, there was no air conditioning on aeroplanes. And when you were in Bahrain and all the hot places in the summer, you were drenched. Just completely drenched all the time. Nothing coming out of the air vents. When I got on the 707, they had things like auxiliary power units, unheard of in the ori- ginal aircraft. So the APU came with the jet. And the APU drove all the electrics and the air conditio- ning on the ground : so when you got onto those aeroplanes, in
The journey was much quicker. You got there obviously much, and you didn't have the same number of stops. So the average in those days, the 707 would do about five or six hours. That was the maximum you could do there. But that allowed you to get from London to Beirut without a stop, or London to Cairo without a stop, across the desert. It was a big change. I remember they used to announce, our flight time will be six hours. We used to say: “Six hours? What are we going to do for six hours?” Because it used to be three. Those are the kind of things I remember. Jean-Emmanuel Hay: You were both a witness to and a privileged player in an era when air travel had not been democratised, when flying was still the preserve of a minority.. . TimClark : Well, it was hugely expensive then. Only the relatively well-off could afford the planes, and most of the airlines were in state hands. They were basically an extension of the civil service. So they were run as civil service departments. And BOAC prided itself on being very British : white gloves and silver service, all that kind of thing. Qantas, on the other hand, were very matey and chummy. I remember the crews, how they interacted with me as a boy. But then you got the beginnings of mass travel with the jet age.
Bahrain, it was cool. Because a turnaround then used to take about two hours. And you'd get off the aeroplane, every turna- round, every stop you had to get off. And you'd sit there in these gulf states, on air condition, get onto the aeroplane. The tempe- rature had then gone to about 45 centigrade in the cabin ! My first flight in the jet age, in January 1960, over 60 years ago now, was a real event! So I remember that first flight, I can even remember the food they served me, which was curry and rice. And it was so overcoo- ked, it was crusted. And when we descended, the flight engineer hadn't got the pressure setting. So I had terrible headache. Until a new crew got on and the engineer knew what he was doing, and then it was fine, because in those days they didn't have auto equalization of pressure. As you descend, now you do. So it was all controlled manually.
Jean-Emmanuel Hay: Do you have any nostalgia for those days?
TimClark: No, I have to say, I've planted a lot of what I do with Emirates in that era. And it's very important in the way the pro- duct of Emirates is designed, that it keeps its eye on the way people react to product, what they want : they want everything if they can get it and we can do a lot with our product in the design, innovation too, keep the costs affordable but at the same time push the boat out. Was it imprinted on me in those days because I spent so much time in aeroplanes, what it did do, I was so well verse, even as a kid, in the architecture of cabins: what work, what didn’t work. What struck me on the super constellation was that they had flat beds, in the 50’s. But the first class was at the back of the aeroplane, because the piston engine noise was so loud. When I saw those, as a kid, because I was up in the econo-
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