Not everyone gets a full-circle career moment like Richard Nuttall, who’s set to take the helm of Taipan Lucio Tan’s Philippine Airlines (PAL) on May 29.

Nuttall returns not as the young adviser brought in during PAL’s first financial crisis in the late 1990s but as a seasoned global veteran and the first foreign president in the airline’s 84-year history.

It’s not like the 59-year-old aviation executive has unfinished business at the Philippine flag carrier.

The airline is profitable and a leaner organization after emerging from bankruptcy during the recent pandemic.

But its stability does not mean smooth skies ahead, as PAL, like many other industry players, navigates fresh headwinds and intensifies competition for passengers and planes.

“This is not a turnaround,” Nuttall, a British national, said in an exclusive interview with InsiderPH.

“I’m inheriting an airline that has done an awful lot of good things,” he said, pointing to three consecutive years of profits and strong on-time performance under outgoing president Stanley Ng.

“It is a relatively young fleet by the standard of legacy carriers, it’s got orders in there and aircraft arriving, which many airlines don’t. It’s got a fantastic crew, it’s got a great reputation for its in-flight product,” he added.

Healthy tension

In the coming weeks, before PAL’s stockholders’ meeting, Nuttall will get up to speed and become more familiar with its people and operations.

He admitted during the interview that he’s feeling the pressure of the high-profile role.

“If you’re not nervous, then you won’t deliver. So, you know, a little bit of healthy tension and pressure is good,” he said.

Richard Nuttall, in an exclusive interview with InsiderPH, said PAL is in a good place with a strong team and recent track record of success. As incoming president, he emphasized continuity and fine-tuning the airline’s progress./Photo by ​Dax Lucas 

PAL gets a new coach 

Like the planes they operate, airlines are intricate systems with thousands of people working together to ensure operations run smoothly and, most of all, safely.

“If you talk to the people that I work with, the thing that I really do is, in this industry, you can’t run an airline as one person. This is an airline with 6,000 people,” Nuttall said.

“There is nobody who can be an expert in engineering, an expert in marketing, an expert in revenue management, a finance whiz,” he said.

“If you look at what I’ve done in the last few airlines where I’ve been, it’s really been about getting the management team together, getting everybody to understand what are the four or five big things that we need to deliver on, and tracking that—and, you know, delivering as a team,” he added.

Crisis-tested leadership 

Nuttall earned an international reputation for airline turnarounds, most recently as CEO of SriLankan Airlines during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he described as his most challenging assignment to date.

Their hands already full navigating the health crisis, Sri Lanka was in the middle of a full-blown economic crisis. 

The national carrier’s plans to purchase new planes were derailed when the government defaulted on loans. Soon after, they ran out of jet fuel. 

“I don't know anybody else who's run a national airline in a country with no jet fuel for two months,” Nuttall said. 

Nuttall wasted no time, quickly directing a team that coordinated with international regulatory bodies to fly in jet fuel from southern India to keep SriLankan Airlines jets operational.

“Our planning team worked with the airport team, and it took about a week the first time. But what it meant was that we gradually got into this, the flight operations team learned what they were doing,” he said. 

“That’s the big message that these things are not done by one person. They’re done by a whole team,” he added. 

Carlos Luis Fernandez

Philippine Airlines incoming COO