Biography|Arnaud Feist — The Solbosch Campus Where He Took the Solvay Diploma

People treat Brussels Airport's long-serving chief as a product of the terminal at Zaventem.

The dated paper trail starts on this Ixelles plateau, at the Université libre de Bruxelles.

A 2011 La Libre profile places Feist's birth in Ixelles in 1966. Contemporary press in 2005 and 2010 put him in his late thirties and early forties, so the exact year is not locked.

What is locked is the school. He trained as an ingénieur commercial at the Solvay school of commerce, then already folded into ULB, and took the diploma in 1989.

The school itself is older than the campus. Ernest Solvay opened it in 1903 in Parc Léopold. Heritage records and the school's own centenary history agree it left that park in 1955 and moved here, to Solbosch.

The glass-and-copper R42 building that now carries the Solvay name on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt was not here yet. ULB inaugurated that block on 23 September 2010, two decades after Feist graduated.

In his years the school sat among the interwar faculty blocks on this plateau — Building A opened for the 1928 academic year — and not in a standalone faculty tower.

La Libre also records a master's in tax law at ULB in 1991, after Belgian military service.

The same profile says that service put him in the meteorological office at Wezembeek-Oppem, drawing weather maps for the RTBF presenter Jules Smet. That line has not been independently confirmed beyond the interview.

The sequence after campus is consistent across French and Dutch Wikipedia, a 2005 Luchtvaartnieuws brief, and the 2011 profile: Coopers & Lybrand as an auditor from 1990 to 1995, a passage at Swift, then a decade at SCA Packaging.

At SCA he rose through consolidation, management control, and mergers, and left in 2005 after a break with a new chief. The next CV went to a headhunter. Two weeks later he was inside an airport.

Stand on Solbosch for the formation, not the destination. The terminal comes later.

Photo: Jndelval, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons