Skift Take
As he retires, Tim Clark will be celebrated as an aviation visionary. He deserves all the credit. But Emirates is slowly losing many of its competitive advantages.
We learned this week Emirates President Tim Clark, a lion of the airline industry, plans to retire next year, 35 years after joining a fledgling carrier based in an aviation backwater. When he goes, an era may end, the culmination of a two-decade period when Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways struck fear into European and U.S. rivals, who whined about what they called unfair competition.
U.S. airlines had hoped the Trump Administration, preaching America First, might take Emirates down, using diplomatic levers to place limits on where the airline might fly. But the Trump Administration declined, perhaps because it didn’t need to. The Gulf carriers are becoming less relevant, not because governments have stepped in, but because market forces have intervened. Emirates is not what it was.
Undoubtedly, Clark, now 70, will retire as a visionary, an innovator who shook up the industry with grand ideas, like showers and bars on airplanes, and an economy class that didn't suck. More importantly, first as head of planning, and later as president, he remade where Emirates flew, leveraging its central global location to connect almost any two cities. There remains no more efficient way to fly between Seattle and Karachi, or from Johannesburg to Hyderabad.
But competitive dynamics change, and the airline Clark will depart next
