Biography|Akbar Al Baker — The Chair He Left Here on 5 November

On 23 October 2023 Qatar Airways Group published a press release from Doha.

After twenty-seven years, His Excellency Akbar Al Baker would step down as group chief executive on 5 November.

Engineer Badr Mohammed Al Meer, chief operating officer of Hamad International Airport since June 2014, would take the chair the same day.

Bloomberg and Aviation Week carried the same dates within hours.

The statement listed what the house wanted remembered: a four-aircraft regional carrier turned into a global brand, seven Skytrax World's Best Airline titles by that autumn, and an airport under the same group that had itself taken World's Best Airport.

It also pointed at the 2022 FIFA World Cup year, when the hub and the airline had to move a tournament's worth of traffic through this field.

Al Baker had already left the chair at Qatar Tourism on 22 October.

The pin is Hamad International, the public machine he had opened in 2014 and still ran as airport chief when the airline job ended.

The group head office sits on Airport Road beside the old field, a few kilometres west.

That tower is a workplace, not a museum, and is not used here as a private-residence pin.

What a visitor can walk is the terminal.

The handover did not close a life.

Vodafone Qatar's later board note records him as adviser to the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The airline chair is the chapter that ended on this date, in this aviation state, after a run that began on the older runway next door in 1997.

Photo: Chris Hoare, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons