Times article October 14
Behind a paywall I think so here's the text.
When James Asquith was eight years old, he and his family flew from Gatwick to Orlando on a great big Virgin Atlantic 747. He was excited. He was, in fact, unable to remain in his seat. At some point early in the flight, he unclipped his belt, got up and asked if he could help the cabin crew on their rounds. This was not a common request, but the stewards and stewardesses decided to accommodate this oddly enthusiastic young boy, and so gave him various jobs to do. “I went up and down the plane helping them give out meals and stuff,” he remembers today. By the time they touched down in Florida, the crew were so impressed with his commitment that they all chipped in a few dollars by way of payment, then posed for a group photo with Asquith in the middle. What they perhaps hadn’t noticed was that he had also been helping himself to the cutlery. “I remember taking the little plastic forks and stuff off the plane and hoarding them,” he says, “and thinking, ‘I’ll keep these for when I have an airline one day.’ ”
This was not a sudden whim. Asquith was a child who had become fixated with the idea of running his own airline. “It was the ultimate ambition,” he says, without self-consciousness. He knew exactly what it would be called — “Global Airlines” — and he would absently jot these two words on his school books or turn them over and over in his mind, mouthing them like a mantra as he imagined all the different Global Airlines routes that would crisscross the planet, the Global Airlines livery, the Global Airlines uniforms and the Global Airlines planes themselves, sleek and huge and regal. It was a fantasy. But Asquith was a child, and that’s what childhood is for. At some point reality would hit, as it always eventually does, and he would put away childish things and move on.
Only this never quite happened. Instead, this summer — 26 years after the flight that saw him covertly hoarding cutlery — Asquith completed the purchase of four Airbus A380s, the largest passenger jets ever built. He did this because he has founded an airline, which he has called… well, you can probably guess what it is called. His A380s are, as we speak, being painted in red and gold Global Airlines livery, and from the middle of next year, he anticipates, we will be able to fly with Global on two initial routes: Gatwick to JFK in New York and Gatwick to Los Angeles. This simply represents the opening stage of Asquith’s ambitions. In time there will be more planes, more routes, more passengers. Global Airlines will establish itself in the consumer consciousness as the best way to fly — that indeed is its tagline — and herald a return to the glamour and comfort of a lost “golden age” of air travel. The check-in queues will be short, the glasses of champagne will be tall and the service will be as bright and enthusiastic as it was when he was eight and handing out the meals himself.
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This, at any rate, is the plan. But not everybody is as optimistic as Asquith. Dissenting voices from inside the world of travel and aviation are prone to pointing out that, for reasons we will shortly explore, cracking the airline industry is incredibly hard. And that Asquith, a 34-year-old from Stevenage with no prior experience of running a carrier, is perhaps not the person to disrupt long haul. Asquith doesn’t care. Or at least he says he doesn’t. “A lot of people have turned around and said, ‘This is bull****. This is not going to happen,’ ” he says. “There are some very loud mouths out there.”
How exactly do you launch an airline? And given the risks and uncertainty inherent in the undertaking, why would you launch one anyway? I’m with Asquith at a photographer’s studio in east London, hoping he can answer these questions and, along the way, explain how he intends to transform a childhood dream into a commercial reality. He is tall and slim, has a neatly trimmed black beard and is amiable, good-humoured company. What strikes you particularly, though, is a sincerity — an occasionally geeky sincerity — that goes beyond the soundbite. At one point, he gives an impassioned lecture on the two types of engines that you can fit on an Airbus A380. “And Rolls-Royce is by far the better,” he concludes emphatically, like someone in the pub arguing over football players. A little later he talks about the reams of paperwork it takes to get a plane airborne. “There are very few airline CEOs out there who will understand there’s any difference between a Part 21J and a Part 21G, all that regulatory stuff. A Part 145. Many of them, if you put them on the spot, wouldn’t understand,” he says, speaking faster and faster. “I really only have respect for a handful of CEOs in aviation.”
It may not come as a complete shock to learn that Asquith’s father was a professional pilot. His mother, a PA, was also a keen flyer — his parents met when his dad gave her flying lessons — and his fiancée, Robyn, is a former flight attendant. As a child, his father’s job loomed large in his imagination. He has a vivid memory of being with him in the staff room before a flight up to Edinburgh. “And it was strange, seeing this guy who was just my dad at home. But he was wearing his captain’s uniform, with his epaulettes, and I was like, wow, that’s my dad,” he says, frowning. “It was such a beaming sense of pride. He’s going to fly this machine. And all these people are in his hands.” When, at the age of 12, Asquith discovered that colourblindness would prevent him from being a pilot himself, he was bereft. “I was devastated. Absolutely devastated. I definitely cried.”
His parents sent Asquith and his sister to Haileybury, a private school in Hertfordshire. Though they were not poor, he says, this was still a financial struggle for them. “They did everything they could to keep us in school, taking out loans and stuff like that,” he says. “Other people’s parents would drive amazing cars, BMWs and Mercedes, and we were arriving in a banged-up Skoda.” At one point it seemed as though Asquith and his sister would have to leave the school. So Asquith went up and down offering to wash his neighbours’ cars for a fiver. “I came back with a glass jar with £120 and gave it to my mum. She was crying and said, ‘That’s not really going to do too much.’ ”
He managed to remain at Haileybury. At 15, he began to learn about the financial sector, about investment banking and careers in the City. “And I became kind of obsessed with wanting to do that for a job.” At school, though, his prospects looked bleak. “My mum was getting dragged into meetings with teachers who just saw that I barely did my homework and never contributed in class,” he says, explaining how he was predicted Ds and Fs for his GCSEs. “The outlook was like, ‘This guy is going to be a failure.’ ”
In the event, Asquith spent the run-up to his exams revising on his own and managed to achieve almost all A* results. The headmaster contacted his parents to congratulate them, “And my mum basically told him to go f*** himself,” he says. After A-levels he studied at the London School of Economics before moving into the City to work as an investment banker, first for HSBC, then Deutsche Bank.
As a university student he had caught the “travel bug” and spent months backpacking when he should have been in lectures. He was able to fund this travelling because, while still a student, he did well in stocks and shares. “I made quite a bit of money in the financial crisis of 2008/ 2009. When everyone thought the world was ending I thought, well, I’ll put my savings into buying bank stocks when they were at the lowest and weakest point. So I did all right from that,” he says cheerfully.
During his fledgling career in finance he continued to travel whenever possible. At one point, when he had visited more than 100 countries, a friend observed that he wasn’t that far off from having visited every country in the world. “And so I thought, well, I may as well do the rest of them,” he says. His motivation had genuinely nothing to do with achieving fame or recognition, he claims. Rather, it was simply the challenge of it. “I was just setting myself a big goal that seemed unrealistic, but which I thought I could get to.” So in 2013, at the age of 24, Asquith broke the Guinness world record as the youngest person to travel to all 196 sovereign nations when he arrived in Micronesia. “I remember people saying ‘Wow, that’s amazing. Congratulations.’ But I felt nothing. I thought, well, that’s done. What’s the next thing?”
The next thing was the creation of an app called Holiday Swap, which allows users to swap homes while they travel and which Asquith launched in 2017. The Holiday Swap Group is valued at £330 million and is based in Dubai, where Asquith now lives. Between his travels for pleasure and, more recently, business with Holiday Swap, he says he has flown on 284 different airlines. His Instagram account is basically lots of photos of him discussing the experience of each flight from an industry angle. He has more than one million followers, a fact he seems a little sheepish about. Most of his followers, he says, are probably just people who read about his Guinness world record and “can’t even remember why” they follow him now. He’d advise any ambitious young businessperson to avoid social media altogether. “Some of the garbage comments you see, like, ‘Why don’t you turn your life into an NFT and then you’ll be a trillionaire.’ I think it’s unhealthy,” he says. “I’ve only done one paid post in my life. I’m definitely not an influencer. But hopefully I’m influential in my lane, which is travel and aviation.”
But what Asquith has come to believe, over the course of the countless long-haul flights he has experienced, is that air travel has become an ever more joyless experience. “For the past 20 years everybody has done the same thing, which is have this race to the bottom on price,” he says. “And that’s largely why the quality has continued to reduce. Perks get taken away. You see the US carriers now and their loyalty programmes just get stripped. Year after year it gets worse and worse. Because everyone is drinking the same Kool-Aid. Whereas no one has turned around and said, for every cabin, in every class, we are making the product better while also remaining price competitive.”
This, basically, is Asquith’s whole pitch: Global Airlines will be better than everybody else because they won’t skimp on the things that make flying fun — their A380s will have “communal areas”, first-class passengers will be chauffeured direct to the airport from their homes, they already have a partnership with Laurent-Perrier champagne — but their tickets won’t cost much more than those of their competitors. When Asquith talks about this he is genuinely, if quietly, impassioned. It’s almost as if he is, in his own mind, tackling a moral issue. Which is to say, the general crappiness of long-haul travel and the cynicism of the airline industry as a whole. On more than one occasion he insists he is “not money-driven” and you believe him, not least because airlines are notoriously difficult to make money out of.
But why? Well, for a start, airlines can be fragile, finely tuned things. They are incredibly sensitive to economic flux. They are vulnerable to lots of unpredictable events, from volcanic eruptions to pandemics to terrorism. Getting started is a nightmare of paperwork and, should you start doing well as a new player, established airlines are more than happy to smother you in the cradle by flooding your routes with heavily discounted seats. Plus, you need planes, which are expensive. Asquith recites the old Richard Branson quote: “If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.”
Although actually, he admits, getting the planes isn’t quite as expensive as that. “I used to think you’d need billions. But no. It’s significantly less.”
OK, so, how much exactly then?
“In terms of a number, I’ll just say it’s less than people will think. I’m not going to get into commercial specifics,” he says, but explains that rather than leasing its fleet of four A380s, Global Airlines has bought them outright, and without having to borrow money to do so. It seemed that, thanks to Covid and the resulting huge fall in global passenger numbers, many carriers turned their backs on the double-decker A380s and instead shifted to smaller, more fuel-efficient airliners for their long-haul needs. The result was that many A380s ended up mothballed and out of demand. Which, without wanting to oversimplify things, means that if you want to buy some on the cheap, now is a good time, especially given that global air passenger numbers for this year are expected to hit 4.35 billion, close to the pre-Covid 2019 figure of 4.54 billion flyers. The fact that A380s are massive means that, if you don’t get greedy and cram them with as many seats as they’ll take, they are comfortable. “It’s a phenomenal way to fly,” says Asquith, emphasising each word by tapping his finger on the coffee table between us. “There’s not a passenger out there who says an A380’s not great, if it’s [configured] in the right way.”
There is also, he suggests, an environmental benefit to buying a fleet of superjumbo airliners, in the sense that they’re second-hand and he’s potentially getting another “10 or 15 years out of them. Someone might take the view that, ‘Oh, it’s a gas guzzler with four engines.’ Well, it’s not if you put it on the right route. Not if you fill it to capacity. It’s one of the most efficient planes for the environment.” He says he doesn’t know how many flights he’s taken in his life. “People will say, ‘You’ve flown a lot. What about the environmental footprint?’ I could turn around and answer that, on the flipside, I’ve never once in my life owned a car. But I try not to do that.”
Though Asquith says he’s not money-driven, presumably his investors are. So if the food and service and perks and space on Global Airlines flights are going to be better than all the competition but the price is comparable, then how exactly does he hope to make money? The plan is that by launching an airline that passengers genuinely love, Global Airlines will set itself apart as a brand. “And the main thing in aviation that no airline really has is a brand,” he says. By which he means, with so many airlines competing on price rather than quality, carriers have become an indistinguishable blob in the minds of most travellers. This, however, opens a gap. And if he can establish Global Airlines as something that stands distinctly above the competition in the hearts and minds of jaded travellers, then long-term this will be more valuable than short-term margin-squeezing. Because if you have a brand that passengers value, then the next time things get difficult for the industry as a whole — the next volcanic eruption, the next global contagion — you’ll be far better positioned to cope. “From our point of view, if you have a brand and are doing stuff the right way, that’s one of the things that can support you when the going gets tough.”
In a sense, the Global Airlines brand already has value. Last year, Asquith says, somebody offered to buy the company from him for a sum he first tells me, then changes his mind about putting on the record, but which we can safely describe as many, many millions of pounds. “I could have taken the money and be sitting on an island now,” he says. Instead, he’s “working 7 days a week, doing 18, 20-hour days” to make Global Airlines real.
The worry, prior to meeting him, or when hearing him talk about his childhood obsession with this airline, was that it would turn out that Global was just a plaything: a very expensive train set for a young man who never quite got over his early love of airliners. After an hour or so with Asquith it’s clear thatis not the case. I ask him if he felt a trill of excitement when he woke up and remembered that he had just bought four Airbus A380s. He shakes his head.
“Honestly, no. It’s the boring side of me that’s head down, working. I remember when I saw our first aircraft with ‘Global Airlines’ on the side and thinking, ‘Looks a bit small,’ ” he says, scrunching his face in mild disappointment. “I didn’t even take a moment to think, ‘Wow!’ I just thought, ‘What do I need to do now? What do I need to do to get this in the sky?’ And it’s probably a problem of mine. I should enjoy the moment a bit more. But if I went out for drinks and dinner with friends, I’d just be replying to emails and thinking about what I need to do right now. And it’s not necessarily the healthiest thing to do, but we’ve got something that we’re working towards. And if we stopped, we’d end up on the scrapheap of airlines that haven’t worked.”
I ask if he’ll at least allow himself to relax with a glass of champagne as he looks out the window of the first Global Airlines flight. Again, no. “Absolutely not. And there’ll be no glass of champagne. I’ll be working on that flight,” he says, possibly as cabin crew, just like he did when he was eight and going to Orlando. “Why would I take a seat that a passenger could have?” he asks. His dad, he says, is very excited about everything and keeps coming up with suggestions. “Every time I see him, he has a list of ideas. And obviously we’ve got them all on the agenda already. But I really appreciate it. It’s really sweet of him.”
In fact, his mum and dad still loom large in his thoughts. He has faced a lot of criticism and derision online and even in the aviation media. “But I couldn’t care less about impressing strangers on the internet.” What does bother him is when his parents politely inquire when everything might be ready to go. “And it hurts when even my mum and dad are saying, ‘When are you flying?’ And we have a good idea. But I don’t want to say it yet,” he says, meaning he won’t confirm a specific date and time beyond mid-2024. “And that’s what I want. More than anything, I want to make my parents proud. And then maybe I can smile and celebrate.”