Flying High: My Story: From Air Asia to QPR

178 Pages·2018·8.6 MB·English

by  Tony Fernandes

Tony Fernandes

FLYING HIGH
My Story: From AirAsia to QPR
Contents
Prologue: A Tuck Box of Dreams
1 About a Boy
2 Outward Bound
3 The Wilderness Years
4 My Life in Music
5 Daring to Dream
6 Flying High
7 Tragedy Strikes
8 The AirAsia Journey
9 Ground Speed
10 We Are QPR
11 The Beautiful Game
12 Tuning Up
13 Apprentice Adventures
14 Now Everyone Can Fly
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
To the two most wonderful humans I helped create, Stephen and Stephanie.
Continue being the most down to earth and caring people I know. Thanks for
always being there for me.
Prologue: A Tuck Box of Dreams
Soundtrack: ‘Dreams’ by The Corrs
A few years ago a friend from my schooldays, Gerry Wigfield, rang out of the
blue. Even at the other end of a long-distance phone line I could hear that he was
excited.
‘Tony, my mum’s found something of yours.’
‘What is it, Gerry?’
‘Ah, that’d be telling. I’ll get her to send it to you when you’re next in
London.’
I was staying in Kuala Lumpur for several months on business, so I admit that
this conversation soon slipped my mind. A few days after I eventually arrived
back in London and settled in my house in Chester Square, the doorbell rang. I
padded to answer it dressed in my pyjamas, not really thinking about who or
what might be waiting behind the door.
Standing there was our postman holding a parcel about three feet long by a
foot high, wrapped in brown paper, with my name neatly printed on a white
sticker. As he passed the box over I braced myself for something heavy, but it
was surprisingly light. I put it down on a table in the hall, signed for the delivery
and shut the door. For some reason the memory of Gerry’s call came back to me
and I ripped off the packaging.
A few seconds later, standing in a mess of brown paper, I started to well up. I
was looking at a battered blue cardboard chest with reinforced leather corners,
brass locks and a leather strap at the end. It was my tuck box from my secondary
school, Epsom College. I hadn’t seen it for about thirty years.
On the lid of the box were three stickers: the badges of West Ham United,
Qantas Airways and the Formula One team Williams.
I snapped the locks and lifted the lid. Inside were two C90 cassette tapes:
Abba’s Arrival and Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam, as well as a packet of the
dried noodles that my mum used to send me from Kuala Lumpur. The contents
of the tuck box tipped me over the edge. I was a wreck. Memories of Mum,
moving to England and my school life flooded over me.
The tuck box, inside and out, represented all the dreams I’d had when I was
growing up: I loved sport, I loved music and I loved aeroplanes. What was so
overwhelming for me in that moment was realizing that my childhood dreams
had become my reality.
Since leaving Epsom, I had headed up a music business, partied with some of
the biggest pop stars in the world and brought Malaysian and Asian bands to the
global stage.
I had taken over an English football club and been carried on the shoulders of
the players on the Wembley pitch after we won promotion.
I had stood on the starting grid at a Grand Prix with my own Formula One car.
I had acquired a tiny airline and transformed it into an international business
carrying 70 million passengers a year.
Turning those dreams into reality – the journey from putting stickers on my
tuck box to opening the door to the postman some thirty years later – has been
nerve-racking and heartbreaking at times, but packed full of excitement and joy.
It also makes for a pretty unlikely and wildly unpredictable story.
But let’s start at the beginning, where my early life and school career didn’t
show any signs of those dreams coming true.
1. About a Boy
Soundtrack: ‘Georgia on My Mind’ by Ray Charles
I pushed ten cents into the coin-operated binoculars and scanned the horizon.
Nothing. I swivelled the binoculars round to point at the apron, studying the old
turbo-prop planes, the Malaysia–Singapore Airlines’ Fokker F27s and DC-3s,
the Air Vietnam Vickers Viscounts and the tiny private Cessnas. I shifted again
to look at the hangars beyond the runway, where planes were being worked on
by the engineers. I turned back to look at the horizon. Still nothing.
‘Relax, Anthony, we’ve got another hour before she lands,’ said my dad.
We were standing on the viewing platform of Subang Airport, Kuala Lumpur.
It was a humid day in July 1969, a few months after my fifth birthday. My dad,
Stephen, and I were waiting for my mum to come home from another business
trip.
It was the third time he had told me to relax. I nodded. The binocular lenses
went dark, so I pushed another coin into the slot and turned my attention back to
the apron. We stood side by side and silently looked out together.
Finally, the Fokker F27 came into view, a speck turning into the familiar
shape, slowly growing in size and swooping in towards the runway. The moment
the plane touched down, my attention switched to the doors. As they opened, I
held my breath until I saw Mum appear and walk down the steps. She looked up
at the viewing gallery and waved. I ran into the terminal building where I looked
through the iron railings into the baggage hall below. As soon as I saw Mum
pick up her bag, I set off again, sprinting down the stairs, timing my arrival so
that I threw myself into her arms the moment she came through the arrival gate.
The scene sticks with me because airports were always happy places for me.
Dad and I would make countless trips from our home in Damansara Heights to
Subang to meet Mum, and they all ended with this warm feeling of being
reunited with her.
reunited with her.
A few years later, Dad and I started making trips to the Weld department store
in Kuala Lumpur. It had a huge record department with wooden racks holding
albums stacked vertically so that we could flip through the records from front to
back. We would go there on a Sunday morning between church (which I hated)
and lunch, which we normally had at one of those old colonial restaurants like
the Station Hotel or the Coliseum.
On one occasion I was standing on tiptoe on a stool flicking through the
albums when I laid eyes on a special record.
‘Dad, Dad!’ I jumped down from the stool (we were there so regularly that the
staff called it ‘Anthony’s Stool’) and ran across to him as he looked through the
Dean Martin section. In my hand I had an album that I held up to him.
‘Can we buy it?’ I asked hopefully.
He nodded. I was hopping with excitement. It was my first record: the
Supremes’ Supremes A’ Go-Go. We’d heard ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ on Patrick
Teoh’s radio show the previous weekend and I’d been itching to get the album
ever since. In the holidays, if I dusted and organized Dad’s records, I was
allowed to play them on our Grundig stereo system. He adored the classics –
Dean Martin, Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr – all the singers from that
golden era.
The music I associate with Mum is Chopin’s Nocturnes. I loved to listen to
her playing these beautiful pieces on the upright Yamaha piano in the living
room. As well as Chopin, she’d play Mozart and Beethoven, and whenever and
wherever we moved to, the piano would always have its own corner. Mum
arranged for piano and violin teachers to come to the house and teach me but if I
was going to learn to play something, I was going to do it on my own or with my
mum. Her musical talents and methods definitely rubbed off on me because, like
her, I can pick things up by ear and I always preferred to learn like that.
When she put on a record, Mum would choose an artist like Dionne Warwick
or Carole King. She had more progressive tastes than my dad but the most
influential thing was how much they both loved music. That has always stayed
with me.
Another thing that has stayed with me is Dad’s love of sport. He would watch
every single sport shown on television in Malaysia. He followed teams and
events with intensity and was a tireless supporter of underdogs – whenever there
was an uneven contest, he always sided with the least-fancied team or player.
He would take me to sporting events all over the country and together we
watched many matches on the television. I followed Brazil from a young age.
Their teams of the early seventies were unbelievable: Pelé, Rivelino, Jairzinho,
Carlos Alberto. All of them were outstanding players and the 1970 World Cup
side were arguably the best team in history. Dad and I would also watch Star
Soccer, which showed English football games with a six-month delay. For some
reason the games always seemed to feature teams from the Midlands (like West
Brom, Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Aston Villa). It was horrific football –
lumping the ball up to the centre forward, a scrappy midfield with no skill or
tactics, muddy pitches and bone-crunching tackles. It was all about getting rid of
the ball as quickly as possible without a hint of a bigger game plan. There was
none of the elegance or style you got with the other teams I’d watched, like
Brazil. The contrast in the way they played football couldn’t have been more
marked.
Then, one day in 1974, I saw another Star Soccer game and my opinion of
English football changed for ever. The match was Aston Villa against West
Ham. I hadn’t seen the London team before and it was as if I was watching
Brazil, only in the mud and greyness of Birmingham. West Ham played from the
back and they had a plan and a style – passing the ball around to create openings.
Trevor Brooking, Alan Devonshire, Frank Lampard, Pat Holland and, my
favourite, Clyde Best. They had the skill and fluidity of the Brazilian superstars.
I decided there and then that I’d support them.
Although I loved sport, I wasn’t really any good at it initially. At the age of
eight, I bought my first football boots and decided that being a goalkeeper was
the easiest position to establish myself in. As long as I was playing, I was happy.
Then at about ten something changed – suddenly I could play.
For my birthday around that time, my uncle bought me a Philips shortwave
radio. There were no live games on the television so every Saturday night I’d
tune in to the BBC World Service and Paddy Feeny’s Sportsworld. The
programme covered the afternoon’s English First Division matches. Of course,
in those days they all kicked off at 3.00 on Saturday afternoon – there were no
matches on Sundays. The radio had a couple of shortwave bands, medium wave
and FM, and I had to hold it up at all sorts of weird angles to get a reception (the
best place was next to the fridge). I thought, ‘Wow, what a piece of kit.’
Every weekend during the season, that’s what I’d do – Saturday nights were
all about the football from 11.00 p.m. till 2.00 a.m. West Ham rarely featured as
the live game but regular updates meant I could follow them. Plus I got Shoot!
magazine for all the latest news. At the start of each season they included a wall
chart showing each of the leagues and cut-out labels for each of the teams.
Armed with these, I changed the league positions after the results came in every
Saturday night. I had a favourite team in each league as well. Believe it or not,