FARNBOROUGH, England — Tim Clark, who runs Gulf carrier Emirates and is an essential and exacting customer of both Airbus and Boeing, is waiting for delivery of more than 200 giant 777Xs with both optimism and worry.
He doesn’t expect to get the first ones until mid-2026, he said in an interview at the Farnborough Air Show. He knows Boeing has a difficult time ahead to fix its manufacturing problems.
And he believes Boeing management needs the company’s front-line workers and their union on its side to get the job done.
“The guys on the shop floor, the engineers, the machinists, they know what to do,” said Clark. “They can get it sorted.”
“Don’t forget the workforce. Make sure they get a good deal. Make sure that you look after them,” he added. “Make sure you recognize the criticality of what they do.”
If that makes Clark sound like a socialist, he’s not. A 74-year-old Englishman, he runs one of the richest airlines in the world from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
He does believe in Boeing’s legacy of engineering and manufacturing prowess, and he wants it restored because he needs it for his business.
Emirates has a giant fleet of 271 big commercial jets, including 118 Airbus superjumbo A380s, and more than 140 Boeing 777s.
The A380 is discontinued after it failed to make money for Airbus. So Clark needs the 777X to renew his fleet. He has placed almost half the total orders for the jet.
He described the Puget Sound region as “the cradle, the crucible,” of Boeing and the workers there as capable of pulling the company from the pit it has fallen into.
“It’s fixable, very fixable,” Clark said.
If the promise of the 777X design is followed through and the plane built well, it will be a triumph; if Boeing delivers the airlines what they need, it will come through, he said.
He said that in the end it will be the union machinists who implement the fixes for Boeing’s quality problems.
“If you’ve got unions that want to contribute and help resolve the problem, which in the end looks after their future as well as the company, that’s where you should go,” he said.
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