When you look out of the aircraft window on the apron, the people turning your flight around probably work for Menzies. Its chief executive, Hassan El Houry, manages 65,000 of them across 65 countries and joined me for the launch edition of season two of The Inside Brief.
This was days after the security incident on flydubai flight FZ1073, which diverted to Tabuk in Saudi Arabia on September 30 and is now under investigation by UAE authorities. He said the industry's next task is clear.
“Airlines need to reinstall confidence in the general public,” he said. What most people do not know, he explained, is how thoroughly staff are screened.
“After September 11, airports and airlines introduced an array of security measures for passengers,” Mr El Houry said. “While there are security measures for people that work at airports and airlines, they’re not so much in the spotlight like taking off your shoes and your belt.”
That is about to change. “I think what we’ll end up seeing is that a lot of the security measures that are applied to pilots, to cabin crew, to our staff, to airport staff ... will come to the spotlight because it is quite thorough actually.”
Every Menzies employee is background-checked and passes through “the same security measures that a passenger does”.
And no new bill is coming. “All those security measures are already there,” he said. The bigger pressure is cost.
Impact of a deal on the Strait of Hormuz
Jet fuel has risen by 50 per cent or more since the war began, and ticket prices are “two, three, four times more expensive than they were pre-crisis”, Mr El Houry said.
Asked whether fuel prices would fall straight away if a lasting peace reopens the Strait of Hormuz, he replied: “Every time there’s been an aviation crisis, we’ve recovered fairly quickly”.
After September 11, “it was just a year and a half or two years, and aviation recovered”. Covid-19, the longest crisis, took “about three and a half years”, he said.
“When there is some sort of peace and more clarity, I think we’ll recover fairly quickly.”
The reason is demand. “Every airline that I’ve been talking to has been telling us that there isn’t a demand problem," he said. “Passengers are still flying. There’s a cost problem.”
About five billion passengers will fly this year. “Five billion, that’s a record,” Mr El Houry said. Yet airline profits are expected to halve, from $50 billion last year “to about 25 billion this year”.
‘Quitting is permanent’
Mr El Houry learnt about risk early. His privileged childhood in Kuwait ended with the Iraqi invasion in 1990. “We were made refugees literally overnight,” he said.
The family drove to Baghdad, then Amman, and spent two years in Cyprus. “At any moment you can have a black swan event. You can have a binary event from one to zero literally overnight, and you just have to be resilient enough to overcome it.”
Compulsory military service in Lebanon followed. “I would spend 10, 12, 14 hours a day on my feet, and the one idea that kept going through my mind was the pain, the discomfort is temporary, but quitting is permanent.”
His tolerance for complaining today? “It’s very low. It’s very low.”
The fork in the road
Wharton had been his dream since he was 19. It taught him to ask when he does not know. “You have to be humble. You’re not expected to know everything about everything.”
Then came the choice: a New York investment bank, with the draw of “walking down Wall Street every day, going up to the 50th floor”, or Agility in Kuwait. “It wasn’t a cash decision,” he said.
He chose Agility. “It was probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.”
At 28, he was running National Aviation Services, with 200 employees in one country. “Leadership is not a right that you have. You have to earn it.”
Today, the combined business is the largest of its kind in the world, and Mr El Houry has the Gulf in his sights. “We don’t need to IPO,” he said. “The barriers to entry in the region are pretty high, but our resolve is much higher.”
The Inside Brief with Manus Cranny is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other major platforms.
