Biography | Willie Walsh — The Waterside Atrium Where He Took the BA Chair

People treat the British Airways job as a prize handed to an insider.

In March 2005 the board went outside and named an Irish pilot who had just walked out of a state airline.

Walsh had resigned from Aer Lingus in January 2005 after Dublin refused to privatise the carrier on the timetable he wanted. On 9 March BA announced he would succeed Rod Eddington.

He arrived at Waterside as chief executive-designate, sat through a measured handover, and took the chair on 1 October 2005.

Flight International's Airline Business interviewed him in mid-October, three weeks into the job, in the long glass avenue that runs down the spine of the building. A countdown clock on that avenue still marked the days left in Eddington's programme.

Niels Torp designed Waterside on Harmondsworth Moor, northwest of Heathrow, between the M4 and the M25. The complex opened in 1998 at a published cost of about £200 million and replaced Speedbird House on the airport itself.

This is not a private house.

It is a corporate campus a visitor can locate from Speedbird Way, even if the reception desk will not walk a stranger through the offices.

The work Walsh did from this atrium is the public record. He took BA through the 2008-09 financial crisis, a long cabin-crew dispute, the 2010 Icelandic ash closure of European airspace, and the merger talks that produced International Airlines Group.

Keith Williams succeeded him at BA when IAG began trading in January 2011. Walsh moved only a short distance, to an IAG room on the edge of the same airport, and kept a presence in Madrid.

The building later emptied in the 2020 cost cuts, with senior staff shifted toward Technical Block C on the Heathrow campus. The pin remains Waterside because that is where the 2005 appointment was exercised.

Photo: Nick Warner, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons