HEATHROW
DID YOU KNOW ...
HEATHROW HISTORY
1944 - Construction of London Airport ' s runways begins 1946 - London Airport Officially Opens 1955 - Her Majesty The Queen opens the Central Terminal Area and Control Tower 1966 - London Airport renamed ‘ Heathrow ’ 1969 - Terminal 1 opened 1976 - Concorde makes its first passenger flight 1986 - His Royal Highness Prince Charles and Princess Diana inaugurate Terminal 4 1987 - The British Airports Authority is privatised as BAA plc 2003 - Three Concordes make their final touchdown at Heathrow 2007 - A new air traffic control tower is operational – the tallest in the UK 2008 - Terminal 5 officially opened by Her Majesty The Queen 2009 - Major refurbishment of Terminal 4 2014 - New Terminal 2 re-opens 2015 - Terminal 1 closed 2016 - Heathrow celebrates 70th anniversary to our operations teams to support them in removing the costs that we needed to be able to continue operating through the pandemic ,” he says .
It resulted in him being offered the Director of Procurement in 2021 , a role for which Doherty thinks the breadth of his experience across both the capital and operational sides of transportation has positioned him well , as having both pillars of experience gives a better , more holistic outlook on the role .
“ I always knew the benefit of broadening my portfolio . I had relative success at quite a young age in the operational space and knew that to actually really understand the business , you need to understand both the capital and the operational side of the company ,” he says .
The pandemic presented all sectors with genuinely unprecedented challenges , and Doherty believes that the legacy of that time is the biggest single challenge facing all airports : passenger numbers at Heathrow had consistently climbed in the decade leading up to the pandemic , before dropping to 22.1 million in 2020 . This created a situation when scale had to be quickly changed to cope with a 73 % decrease compared to 2019 , while still keeping planes in the sky and passengers happy .
“ Speaking as a Procurement Director , the pandemic is the primary challenge . Aviation took a substantive knock during the pandemic period that we have to take care of over the coming three to four years . It ’ s not just the debt in terms of commerce , it ’ s the debt in terms of having had to make difficult decisions around assets , services , our service proposition , our security proposition ; having had to slow down pieces of work to make them affordable means that we now need to speed them up to make them deliver .”
“ The playbook for the pandemic didn ' t exist . The thing that makes the UK proud
36 January 2023