Al Baker, The Blockade Breaker

Were it not for the feisty Akbar Al Baker, CEO of Qatar Airways, the Gulf kingdom of Qatar would have starved to death. What is it that makes this aviation honcho tick?

In July last year, we had in a cover story on the Qatar Airways CEO where we said: ”One can wager a million bucks that if it had been anyone other than Akbar Al Baker, QR would not be straddling the airways as it continues to — through a narrow corridor out of Bahrain — after an unprecedented blockade by its neighbours.” It was as if a huge meteor had come crashing on the tiny Gulf kingdom with the imposition of trade and transport barriers by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in June.

Six months down, Al Baker has only proven that when it comes to drive and focus he is in a class of his own. The closure of Saudi Arabian, Bahraini and UAE and Egyptian airspace was meant to choke the most visible symbol of the Qatari rise — Akbar Al Baker’s five star airline. It did, but the man is fighting back as only he can.

Did it impact the airline? You bet it did. After a cocky first three months that was full of bravado, Al Baker is now more sanguine and realistic: "Never ever after Second World War a civilised world imposed such blockade against any country,” he said and admitted that it had ‘adversely’ impacted the airline.

QR is likely to post its first-ever annual loss, thanks to the blockade and Al Baker who had bravely initially spoken of ‘minimal pain’ admitted in an interview to Bloomberg in November 2017 that the blockade had been painful.

“It is painful because there are many routes that slide as much as 2.5 hours longer, and there are routes that are narrow-body routes where we had to convert to wide-body in order to carry enough fuel to go the longer distance,” he said. The bottom line: Qatar Air has lost almost 11 percent of its network and 20 percent of revenue.