Biography | Willie Walsh — The Airport Where a Pilot Took the Flag Carrier in a Crash Year

People remember October 2001 as the month when airlines failed.

Swissair and Sabena were already gone or going. Aer Lingus looked next.

Walsh became chief executive of the Irish flag carrier on 18 October 2001, five weeks after the attacks in New York and Washington had emptied the North Atlantic.

He had been chief operating officer. The previous chief executive, Michael Foley, had left earlier that summer after a board subcommittee upheld harassment complaints. An outside candidate, Ned Sullivan, declined the chair in the days after 11 September.

The board turned to the pilot already inside the building.

On 19 October Walsh put a survival plan on the table: more than 2,000 posts cut from a workforce of roughly 6,000, a two-year wage freeze, a 25 percent cut in the schedule, and a move toward the low-fare model that Ryanair had already made ordinary on Irish routes.

RTE reported the 2,026 figure the same day.

Cash was the clock. Contemporary accounts put the airline's remaining money in the region of IR£185 million, enough, on the old spending rate, to last into the new year and not much beyond it.

The 1940 terminal at Dublin Airport is the public face of that campus.

Desmond FitzGerald's International Style block still stands on the airfield, later used as offices and gates after the 1972 Terminal 1 took the main passenger load. Aer Lingus's corporate offices have always sat on this ground, even as the exact building changed.

Walsh was 39.

The Irish Times and later profiles noted that he turned 40 a week after the appointment, and that the papers said he had aged a decade in seven days.

The plan worked in the narrow sense that mattered. Air Transport World recorded a swing from a 2001 loss of 149.7 million to a 16.8 million profit the following year.

That result, not a consultancy CV, is what British Airways hired four years later.

Photo: Dublin Airport Authority, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons