As news of flight QZ 8501 grew more sombre, AirAsia’s founder and chief executive Tony Fernandes did what comes naturally. He wore his heart on his sleeve.
With a string of social-media messages, and in meetings with relatives of passengers and crew in Indonesia, the man who brought low-cost air travel to South East Asia openly shared the grief of his travellers.
“My heart bleeds for all the relatives of my crew and our passengers,” Fernandes wrote on Twitter on Monday.
It was a tone that reflected the transition of a missing aircraft from mystery to tragedy. By then, all hope had died for the 162 people on board.
A day later, when Indonesian search-and-rescue teams started retrieving bodies and debris from the Java Sea, he tweeted again about his feelings: “My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ 8501. On behalf of AirAsia, my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am.”
The loss of a passenger aircraft is invariably a major event, since fatalities so often number into three figures.
When a disaster occurs over a holiday period such as Christmas, the human instinct to grieve, in solidarity with strangers, is deeper.
Fernandes, the 50-year-old Malaysian tycoon who likes to show a common touch, was at the centre of this collective sympathy. From the earliest moments, once it became obvious something had gone terribly wrong with a routine flight from Indonesia’s second city, Surabaya, to Singapore, he was reaching out to the 950,000 people who follow him on Twitter.
The changes in mood, from one day to the next, and even from one message to another, were striking.
On Boxing Day, before the crash, he had been proudly spreading word of his airline’s role in sending relief supplies to flood-hit areas of eastern Malaysia. He retweeted a message about that day’s game between Queens Park Rangers, the English Premier League football club he owns, against Crystal Palace.
But when one of his planes was reported missing, there was only one focus of his attention.
It has been a wretched year for Malaysian air travel. In July, flight MH 17, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over Ukraine with the loss of 283 passengers and 15 crew. In Moscow, Kiev and beyond, argument rages over who fired the lethal missile.
Four months earlier, flight MH 370, another Boeing 777-200ER from Malaysia Airlines, disappeared while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. No wreckage has been located but the Malaysian government says the plane probably crashed into the southern Indian Ocean, killing all 227 passengers and 12 crew.
The commercial implications of a third major disaster affecting Malaysian aviation in little more than nine months are plain, even if AirAsia is not linked to the government-owned Malaysia Airlines. People become wary about flying, even though studies repeatedly show it to be the safest mode of transport. Share prices can dip.
But perhaps only the most cynical observer would question the sincerity of the sentiments voiced by Fernandes.
He followed his first message, which echoed a formal AirAsia announcement confirming the bare detail of contact with the plane being lost, with a succession of others embracing the relatives’ despair, and promising whatever support could be provided.
There are detractors. Horacio Calderon, describing himself as an expert on the Middle East and terrorism, wanted the AirAsia “chatterbox” to explain whether his “low cost includes saving fuel and less manoeuvrability to pilots”. Another asked about a pre-Christmas sale of shares in his business.
But the responses were overwhelmingly supportive, as the tweets veered from words of hope and prayer to ones of resignation.
Tan Sri Anthony Francis Fernandes, was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1964. His father was a Goan Indian doctor; his mother a businesswoman of mixed Portuguese-Asian origin who introduced Tupperware to Malaysia.
At 12, after seven years in a Kuala Lumpur school he loathed, he was sent to board at Epsom College, an independent school in southern England with a long tradition of educating the sons of doctors. Higher education took him to the London School of Economics, where he gained a degree in accounting.
After working briefly as an auditor with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline, he merged his professional and academic training with a love of music inherited from his mother, becoming the financial controller of Branson’s Virgin record company.
The roles within Branson’s empire may have been in back-of-the-house support capacities. But it’s on the bold, risk-taking British businessman that Fernandes appears to have modelled himself in his adventures in music and aviation.
For nine years from 1992, he was the regional vice president of the Warner Music Group, and remembers “jamming” on the piano with the late American singer Ray Charles. When Time Warner merged with America Online (AOL), he decided it was time to fulfil a long-held ambition to run an airline.
On the advice of top-level contacts, Fernandes opted to buy an existing carrier rather than launch a new one. The then-government-owned AirAsia, which was on the brink of bankruptcy, proved a perfect target. Fernandes mortgaged his home and raided private savings to secure a deal, and set up as an airline proprietor, though the actual purchase price was only a quarter of a United States dollar.
There were only two planes, Boeing 737s, and the debts stood at US$11 million. But it took Fernandes less than a year to break even. Twelve years later, AirAsia flies 40 million people annually on board its 150 aircraft.
"I started with very little money and no experience in the airline industry," Fernandes told the US news magazine Time. "I think a betting man would say there's a fairly good chance he's going to fail. But I didn't want to sit there at 55 and think: 'I wish I'd done that.' I quit my job and flew to London and saw Stelios [Haji-Ioannou] of [the European budget airline] easyJet on TV. It was like the messiah had shown me the way. I thought: 'Right, this is my destiny – I'm going to start an airline'."
The gamble paid off. And with the emergence of AirAsia as a serious transporter, South East Asia had its own budget flight operator. Fernandes shamelessly targeted Singapore Airlines and its “Singapore Girl” advertising ploy, promoting his airline as the “new girl in town”.
Quickly, AirAsia was opening up new routes. His prices suited middle-class pockets – the pockets of people with little history of flying. In the harsh commercial climate that followed the events of September 11, 2001, he was able to exploit low aircraft leasing charges and tap a ready supply of experienced staff who had lost jobs with other airlines.
The strategy heralded a new era of air travel for ordinary Malaysians. And it made Fernandes rich, easing him into his country's list of the 30 wealthiest individuals, according to Forbes Asia, with an estimated net worth of $625m (Dh2.3 billion).
Like so many men of means, Fernandes found high-profile, big-money sport a tempting distraction. He owned a Formula One team, Caterham F1, but sold out earlier this year to a Swiss/Middle Eastern consortium that has since gone into administration and resorted to a “crowdfunding” initiative to stay in the top tier of motor racing.
Fernandes has also branched out into football ownership. His attempts in 2011 to buy the team he supports, West Ham United, failed when the existing owners accused him of wanting “51 per cent of the club for two bob [slang for a pre-decimalisation amount of British currency that was worth one tenth of a pound]”. But as West Ham, newly relegated, contemplated a short spell in a lower division, the pragmatic Fernandes switched allegiance, taking a majority stake in the newly promoted QPR.
Since that deal, QPR have been relegated and promoted again. Fernandes remains a football enthusiast, but has shown signs of having been being bruised by his experiences. In 2013, he told the BBC that he had ploughed £50m of his fortune into the club and felt he had allowed himself to be exploited. “I’ve seen all of the parts that make football quite – maybe immoral is a strong word – but they would sell their grandmother to do something,” he said. “It’s all part of the football ecosystem.”
Also in 2013, Fernandes followed in the footsteps of another charismatic entrepreneur, Sir Alan Sugar, by hosting a Malaysian-made Asian offshoot of the reality TV series The Apprentice, in which ambitious applicants vied for the chance to go into business with him. The Filipino winner, Jonathan Yabut, won a senior job with AirAsia.
Brushes with the darker corners of football, or indeed business, have not dampened the spirit of enterprise that distinguishes the Fernandes ethos. But assuming that his responses to the tragedy of Flight QZ 8501 can be taken at face value, this single setback will have a lasting effect.
“I am absolutely devastated,” he told a news conference in Indonesia, even as bodies were being pulled from the sea. “This is a scar with me for the rest of my life.”