Flying High, My Story by Tony Fernandes

Author:Tony Fernandes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241970195
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

7. Tragedy Strikes

Soundtrack: ‘Tears Falling Down on Me’ by Carole King

The phone rang at 8.25 a.m. on 28 December 2014. I was standing in the bathroom of my home in Kuala Lumpur preparing for a day out with my children, Steph and Stephen. We’d had a lovely Christmas and I’d promised a shopping trip to round off the holidays.

I picked the phone up.

‘Tony, it’s Bo.’

My heart started to race. Bo Lingam only ever calls if something is seriously wrong.

‘An AirAsia Indonesia Airbus has disappeared from the radar …’

‘What? When? Where was it flying to?’

‘Tony, all I’ve got so far is that it was flying to Singapore from Surabaya, it took off at 5.35 a.m. and the last contact was 6.18 a.m. I just got the call from Adrian.’

Adrian Jenkins, as I mentioned before, is my group director of Flight Operations and one of our most experienced pilots. He had called Bo to alert him to the potential problem. They were both on their way to our offices at the airport.

My reaction was physical: my mouth went dry, my stomach flipped and I reached out to the wall to support myself. I knew this wasn’t a training exercise – something in my gut, my blood, somewhere, knew this was a real emergency.

We quickly agreed that I should join them at KLIA. I got in the car and called Din, who was, at it happened, in Singapore. He went straight to the airport to liaise with the authorities and to see what he could do. If our worst fears were realized there would be a lot of families arriving at the airport soon and he would have to help coordinate our response.

As I drove, the sense of dread built. It had been a tragic year for aviation in the region. In March, MH370 – an MAS flight en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing – had gone down without a trace; 239 souls had perished. Then in July an MAS flight had been downed over eastern Ukraine while flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The death toll was 298. We at AirAsia had felt those losses as keenly as everyone else in the region and had offered whatever help we could to MAS at the time.

There had been false alarms for AirAsia before – once I was going into a meeting with the Prime Minister when Bo called me and said that we’d lost contact with a plane in Indonesia. I had those same physical symptoms but had to carry on with the meeting. About halfway through, the PM asked me whether I was OK and I could only mumble, ‘Yes, fine,’ just wanting the meeting to end – despite the fact that we’d been waiting months for it. When I could finally escape, I called Bo back and it was a false alarm – a training routine that the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) instigated randomly. I was so angry I wanted to start chucking things out of the window.

Another time I was in London and someone sent out a press release saying that we’d lost a plane.

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