Biography|Akbar Al Baker — The Old Doha Runway Where He Took the Airline in 1997

Qatar Airways likes to date itself from 1997.

The company is older than that.

It was organised in November 1993 and flew its first service on 20 January 1994, a wet-leased Boeing 767-200ER out of this field, Doha International Airport, toward Sharjah and Dubai.

Amman, Kuwait, and Cairo followed in the early months, then London, Bombay, and Colombo.

For three years it remained a small regional operation owned in private Qatari hands.

In 1997 the carrier was recapitalised and relaunched as a premium airline.

Akbar Al Baker came across from the Civil Aviation Directorate to take the new chief-executive chair.

The airline's own later profile put the fleet he inherited at four aircraft.

Encyclopedia.com's company history describes the same turn: fewer routes, more cabin product, a hunt for the business-class traffic the first years had missed.

The pin is the old airport, not the new one four kilometres east.

Doha International had opened in 1959 on this plot, replacing Dukhan.

By the mid-1990s it was already tight.

Every scheduled Qatar Airways departure Al Baker authorised until spring 2014 left from here.

The Civil Aviation Directorate that trained him as an accountant sat in the same small aviation state that ran this field.

The Times later named that first civil-aviation post as assistant accountant.

What changed in 1997 was not the runway.

It was the brief: stop being a thin regional brand and build a long-haul house that could stand next to Emirates and British Airways.

The passenger numbers that followed, and the Skytrax titles that followed those, belong to later memories.

This one is the year the job started, on the only international runway Doha then had.

Scheduled commercial traffic left this airport for Hamad International on 27 May 2014.

The field was refurbished and used again for selected World Cup flights in 2022.

A visitor still finds pavement and hangars, not a demolished ruin.

Photo: RoB, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons