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'Teflon Willie' survives the turbulence over Terminal 5
Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Affairs Editor16 May 2008
In his flying career at Aer Lingus Willie Walsh can recall only two hairy moments when engine failures put his skills and training to the test. Fortunately both had happy endings.
As a business leader he is already building up more than his fair share of cockpit emergencies.
The Terminal 5 disaster was as painfully public an example of corporate failure as any captain of industry could ever imagine having to go through.
Yet the diminutive, closecropped Irishman has survived, with his board and his biggest shareholders fully behind him, earning him the nickname Teflon Willie. Despite his successes - record profits, sorting out a potentially disastrous pension black hole, restoring the dividend - he has not established as easy a rapport with staff as his more relaxed Australian predecessor Sir Rod Eddington did.
Mr Walsh, 46, arrived at BA in October 2005 carrying a reputation as a hardnegotiating fixer.
He had steered Aer Lingus skillfully through the turbulence that threatened the financial viability of the whole industry after 9/11.
Mr Walsh reinvented the Irish flag carrier as a profitable no-frills airline after slashing costs by 30 per cent and shedding a third of staff. However, the step up to BA, arguably the world's highest profile airline, brought a whole new set of challenges that his hard man image did not seem best equipped to handle. He was accused of mishandling a minor dispute over staff wearing religious emblems.
Mr Walsh is one of only a tiny minority of airline bosses to have spent part of his career at the sharp end of a plane.
He joined Aer Lingus as a cadet pilot in 1979 before working his way up through the ranks.
In 1998, he became chief executive of Futura, the company's chartered airline in Spain, then was named Aer Lingus chief finance officer in 2000, before being promoted to chief executive in 2001.
