my, I was only a small chap, so a seat didn't worry me in its dimension, I could even stretch out, you know.
Jean-Emmanuel Hay: Can you recall one of your worst memories of air travel?
For the first few years of my life, I grew up in the West Indies and flew on the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser: a spiral staircase led to the dining room on the lower deck! And that was like a sort of imprint on my mind, all the travelling I did. I was interested in it. Quite why? I don't know. But as I entered the professional level of my career in the aviation industry, particularly when I went out to the Middle East, this imprint of how people need to be accommodated in a confined space, and what you can do, surprisingly, and what people haven't done in that, I always kept it in mind. In the early 90s, 30 years after my first flight with the Boeing 707, what I saw in the cabin of the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 when Emirates was looking for it, was almost the same. I didn’t see any difference. So a lot of the thinking with regards to the way air- lines and aircraft are designed on the interiors was driven by engineers who were more concerned about aerodynamics, propulsion, avionics, and all those kinds of things. Not surprisingly, but they kind of thought the cabin could stay back in the 20th cen- tury, or whatever, 19th century ships. So anyway, that's how I got it. It's in my blood. I'm still doing it today. But I guess I'm probably the oldest guy in the business now that has done the most in terms of aviation, initiating changes. But when I saw these first class beds, I thought, wow, people can sleep on these aeroplanes, how wonderful.
TimClark: Well, I have many of those. But you know something? Those memories are very recent. Traveling through airports was something that I was so excited as a boy. I used to say to my parents when I was leaving them after the summer holiday, I'd fly back. They were very sad to see me leave them. But I used to say to them, you know, I'm sorry, so sorry to hear that but I can't wait to get on the aeroplanes again, for another three and a half day epic back to London. But in terms of recent memories, I look at the way people travel through airports, the compression, the mass market that it's become. I'm a great believer in people having the ability and the right and the affor- dability to travel by air because it's in the DNA of us all now. Mankind is, since the Industrial Revolution, has had travel built in because it made it affordable. Eventually, reachable as well. So it's never going to change. Whatever anybody says, don't listen to them. Trust me. I came to Heathrow last night. Normally, because they had this storm Kieran and they put out so much adverse publicity about it that it was going to wipe out the country almost. So when I got to Heathrow, there was nobody there. I said to them all : “You've done a good job. You've scared them all off your aeroplane.” So I came out of London on the normally packed, half empty because nobody had decided to travel. The airfield was perfect. No problem at all. So
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