Maurice Flanagan
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Maurice Flanagan, CBE, was the founding CEO of Emirates Airline and is now the Executive Vice-Chairman of The Emirates Group. He was born in 1928 in Leigh, Lancashire, England. In 1955, he married Audrey Bolton, a journalist, with whom he has three children and five grandchildren.
Flanagan attended Liverpool University, where he gained a BA in History and French. He performed his National Service in the RAF as a navigator with the rank of commissioned officer. During an evening outing, he suffered a knee injury that banjaxed a potential career as a football player, which Blackburn Rovers had shown interest in fostering. Abandoning an athletic profession, in 1953, he joined BOAC as a management trainee, subsequently working for the airline in Kenya, Sri Lanka, Peru, Iran, India, and the UK.
In 1969, Flanagan was one of the winners of a TV playwrighting competition run by The Observer newspaper and ITV Saturday Night Theatre, with The Garbler Strategy, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. Kenneth Tynan, one of the competition judges, invited Flanagan to write for The National Theatre, where Tynan was literary advisor. Flanagan chose the more sure route of a promising airline career with which to advance developed skills and support his family, rather than reinvent himself in the uncertain world of the arts. But he was also guided by a feeling for the romance of aviation.
Maurice Flanagan spent 25 years with BOAC and British Airways, until he was seconded from BA’s senior management to DNATA, the organisation appointed by the government of Dubai to run its travel and airport interests.
In 1985, the Dubai government employed Flanagan to launch Emirates Airline. The fledgling airline received $10 million start-up capital that it repaid the following year, due to its immediate, still-burgeoning, success.
In 2000, Maurice Flanagan was awarded a CBE for services to communities in the UAE and to aviation.
Other awards include Flight International magazine's Personality of the Year, membership of the British Travel Industry Hall of Fame, Aviation Legend award by the Centre For Asia Pacific Aviation, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and Honorary Fellow (the Society's highest award), Liveryman of The Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators, and membership of the Executive Committee of the World Travel and Tourism Council.
