AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes, arriving at the Flight QZ8501 search centre on Dec. 31, tweeted ‘This is my worst nightmare.’Tatan Syuflana/The Associated Press
AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes was ebullient when we spoke in late July – showing the kind of enthusiasm you would expect of a friend and former colleague of Sir Richard Branson.
The Malaysian executive sat in a Kuala Lumpur office emptied by Eid celebrations, and had a cold, but he was still irrepressible. He gleefully mocked those who orchestrated the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, which prompted him to leave Time Warner and build AirAsia. He laughed about the airline's early days and recounted how he and his staff drove to a Carrefour after realizing they didn't have food to sell on their first flight.
Mr. Fernandes had reason to be optimistic. AirAsia was growing spectacularly. It had sparked a revolution in Southeast Asian air travel and was voted the world's best low-cost airline six years in a row, including in 2014. It had a spotless safety record and was ordering record numbers of new aircraft. He was particularly excited about the future of Southeast Asia's rising middle class. A tireless marketer, he interrupted me to insist I call the region ASEAN, for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, home to more than 620 million people.
It is a different Mr. Fernandes one sees these days.
The tragedy of AirAsia Flight 8501 has left him comparatively tight-lipped, though he is still tweeting away. Faced with a towering tropical thunderstorm, AirAsia's modern Airbus A320 crashed into the Java Sea, and there has been unending speculation about the causes – with some faulting AirAsia. Combined with the two disasters that befell Malaysia Airlines in 2014 – the disappearance of Flight MH370 and the downing of Flight MH17 over Ukraine – it has been a tragic year for Southeast Asia, and for Malaysia, AirAsia's home base, in particular.
One thing, though, seems resoundingly clear: AirAsia will keep flying – and so will the rest of Southeast Asia. Even though the tragedy is still unfolding, and it is unclear whether the company is at fault, AirAsia is still a symbol of what's going right in Southeast Asia aviation – and business more broadly – not what's going wrong.
"This is my worst nightmare," Mr. Fernandes wrote on Twitter. "But there is no stopping."
Of course, it's been hard in recent months not to think the skies over Southeast Asia are becoming increasingly unfriendly. My phone conversation with Mr. Fernandes took place shortly after I returned from Malaysia, where I was sent to report on how the country was grappling with the tragic loss of MH17 just months after the disappearance of Flight MH370.
On my way there from Vancouver, I was unnerved to discover my near-empty Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur was a joint one with Malaysia Airlines – the emptiness, perhaps, being a sign of the financial turmoil to come for Malaysia Airlines as potential passengers lost confidence. On my return to Vancouver, I was again waiting in Hong Kong when a TransAsia turboprop crashed while landing in Taiwan – just before we took off and flew over Taiwan ourselves.
Months later, as I criss-crossed Indonesia's vast archipelago, I found myself anxiously checking the crash history of the country's various airlines, many of which are banned from European airspace. What I saw over the past decade wasn't pretty. There were more than a few horrible crashes, and a lot of bumpy landings, with some resulting in written-off aircraft. Lion Air – which I flew on – has had multiple pilots arrested for possessing crystal methamphetamine, and one Lion Air aircraft ended up floating off the coast of Bali, its fuselage broken in two after apparently overshooting the runway. Garuda, the airline that is allowed to fly to Europe and which most business people use, had its CEO jailed in 2008 for his part in the premeditated, mid-air murder of a human-rights activist by an off-duty pilot. It's also lost a few planes of its own.
Much of that is in the past. Despite some continuing concerns – particularly with the regulator – the focus in Indonesia is on safely managing the huge surge in air travel. You can get one-way tickets for a steal in Indonesia, but I don't think I ever took off on time. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, AirAsia subsidiaries spurred competition and lowered fares. And in a region that has two massive archipelago countries – Indonesia and the Philippines – air travel is still far safer than travelling by ferry.
For Malaysia Airlines, which is controlled by a government-owned investment fund, the two disasters only deepened what many felt was mismanagement and decline in the face of change and new competition. It represented the old guard, in a region where tycoons regularly cozy up to governments for favours. AirAsia, on the other hand, represented the bold new face of Southeast Asian business – entrepreneurial, transparent, lighthearted and competitive. Mr. Fernandes, in particular, was proud of being an atypical CEO in Asia and hopeful for a new era. "By democratizing air travel," Mr. Fernandes told me, "we have helped integrate this region that we all call home. We think there's enormous potential here."