Defining the ingredients of the ideal airline CEO; now and in 2035

Finding a good CEO is one thing. Finding a good airline CEO is a whole different task: because the airline business is unlike other businesses. Certainly every business is different, but airlines are more different. There are many layers to the airline onion.

First of all, airlines have no serious place in a commercial world. There may be one or two exceptions, often temporary, but for generations the industry has not come close to delivering an acceptable return on invested capital. (The newer airlines, mostly LCCs like Ryanair and easyJet, can be spectacularly and consistently profitable, but they are standout exceptions.)

Airline companies are largely geriatric, sharing common features and impediments: they are long-standing and to a high degree anachronistic - many have existed more than 60 years and they are ridiculously complex aggregations of business activities; thanks to the combination of those two features they are burdened heavily by unions, typically more than a dozen and sometimes more than 20 - professional, craft, technical and manual workers.

They are intensely regulated and always in the media and consumer spotlight (and with its anonymity the social media can be particularly brutal and personal). Out of the public spotlight the 'flag carriers' among them are constrained by often-invisible political responsibilities, even when they are listed companies. Their ownership ranges from wholly government-owned to wholly private, guaranteeing that a 'level playing field' is unachievable, in practice.