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Raymond Webster a West Coaster extraordinaire
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BiographyFrill-free high flyer Raymond Webster lived in Marlborough St Greymouth. He was the son of Fred and Sybil Webster
Ray began working in Greymouth in a little radio repair shop called Robert Francis
Through the National airline N.A.C he gained an engineering degree and then went on to Air NZ which was by then the National carrier. He was a whizz at engineering at Harewood in Christchurch with engine maintenance before moving further afield. (Information supplied to me by his childhood friend Malcolm Howell)
From Wikipedia
The reverberations of September 11 yesterday claimed another airline when Canada's second largest airline grounded its fleet and stopped trading. This follows Monday's collapse of Belgium's Sabena and Swissair's demise last month.
Tens of thousands of airline employees across Europe and the US are losing their jobs, and BA - which is headed for a loss of more than £700m this year - is working on a review to come up with a radical new "size and shape".
So it is something of a surprise to find the chief executive of a British airline enjoying a relaxed morning working from home. Ray Webster, the New Zealander who has piloted EasyJet from a two-route London-Scotland service to a by-word for low-cost European travel, reckons his business has never looked better.
Business Today: sign up for a morning shot of financial news
While other airlines have seen passenger numbers fall by 30% and their share prices shot to pieces, Luton-based EasyJet, which floated last year, is flying high. Its shares, which crashed 40% in the week after the atrocity, are back above September 11 levels, and the airline's passengers - 90% of whom book on the internet - are back online.
"In Europe we are a long way from ground zero," says Webster. "And here we have been used to terrorism for 30 years.
People are hardened to it. They accept it as a fact of life."
The EasyJet chief executive, who has spent his entire career in commercial airlines, working alongside the airline's founder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, since the no-frills carrier's earliest days in 1996, has always maintained that "if the price is right, people will still travel". He admits it has been a relief to prove it in recent weeks.
EasyJet is also mopping up extra business from corporate customers - the sort who would normally fly BA, but whose recession-wary employers have suddenly become more cost-conscious. They used to make up 50% of passengers "but I am sure it is more than that now".
The EasyJet experience is echoed by Ryanair, its low-cost rival. Both have just announced a big jump in profit - a word that the more traditional airlines operating in Europe will be unfamiliar with. "Even before September 11 there were 14 flag carriers in Europe and 14 lossmakers in their European operations," says Webster.
The terror attacks, he believes, will now change the face of European, and ultimately global, civil aviation. Webster envisages a new world order of international branded airlines serving long haul routes, with short haul regional travel being dominated by low-cost operators.
"Since the dreadful events of September 11, the traditional airlines have been galvanised," he says. "They just can't keep making losses on their European operations. There is an opportunity for us to replace and displace them and we are well positioned."
So well positioned, in fact, that EasyJet has just managed to raise £93m, which will strengthen its balance sheet and allow it to buy up bargain second hand planes. It is a position Webster is grateful to be in. With 27 years' experience in traditional airlines, he does not envy the task ahead of BA boss and fellow antipodean Rod Eddington.
"He has a lonely job," says Webster. "He has to have a vision, and a blunt knife. He can blame everything on September 11 and should get all the bad news out of the way now. It is no good tampering at the edges with a scalpel. It needs a hatchet or a chainsaw."
Up to half the British flag carrier's European operations, he reckons, should be axed. Then, he predicts, there will be further rationalisation. "Air France, BA and Lufthansa are the likely survivors. All of the second tier will become part of the other three and they will become regional operators. In the next 10 years there will be world brands, international branded groups, like Avis in rental cars."
It is a big vision for a man born and brought up in a small working class town of Greymouth in New Zealand's South Island.
Webster, now a Porsche-driving 55-year-old, was a 1950s equivalent of the present-day teenage nethead. "When I was very young - probably seven or eight - I started to get an interest in electronics, and by the time I was 15 I was repairing radios in a local shop," he says.
"I wasn't interested in school. I spent all my time wiring things up and blowing things up. I used to make gunpowder. It never occurred to me to go to university and I did dreadfully in my school certificate. I had to do it again.
"I was very focused on doing something in the electronics field, but New Zealand is a small country and the only real options were the post office or the air force - and they turned me down because I was colour blind. So I applied to a commercial airline, the National Aircraft Corporation, and they took me on for a five-year apprenticeship."
After coming top of his group for three years he won a sponsorship to join Smiths Industries in Cheltenham for a year, working on systems for Tornados and Jaguars.
Back in New Zealand he won another sponsorship, to university, and emerged with a first class honours degree in engineering. He then moved into design and topped up his education again with a master's degree in air transport engineering at Cranfield. By 1982, and after NAC had merged with New Zealand's long haul airline, he was heading Air New Zealand's entire aircraft maintenance and engineering operations.
"I was only about 33," he recalls, "and it was a big job, with a workforce of 1,200. But the best thing about it was that I was in Christchurch and the rest of the management were in Auckland. So no one butted in or stuck their noses into what I was doing."
After five years - "I get bored, want to keep moving and don't want to do anything for more than five years" - Webster decided it was time for new challenges, and the technical expert decided that meant learning more about the "academic side of management and the theory to support it, about global politics and global financial systems."
So off he went back to school again - this time to Stanford to do an MSc. The experience, he says, changed his life. "It did something to my confidence. I had always been a loner. But the course was seven days a week for a year, and I realised that there I was, with all these outstanding people, and I could interact with them. I realised I wasn't constrained by my little technical field."
It also ended his marriage, which he explains like a textbook management decision made after weighing up all the pros and cons. "I'd been married for 15 years and it was clear it wasn't working. We married young and my wife didn't go with me to Stanford. There was a void created. It gave me time to think things through. I decided there was no point in continuing." The US also introduced him to a rather different approach to business. "I was enthralled by their high-energy, can-do attitude," he says. "It was invigorating to work in."
So when Air NZ sent him to head the airline's US business, based in Los Angeles, he was in his element. "It was a fun time," he says. "I met a lot of people and did a lot of partying".
He also concluded that many American workers are rather better at talking the talk than walking the walk. "New Zealanders and the English are naturally reserved. They have a natural preference to understate and overdeliver. Americans, on the other hand, tend to overstate and underdeliver. The people are very gung-ho, but they can't do what they say."
One day, out of the blue, came an urgent "come back quick" call from New Zealand. The Australian and New Zealand authorities had decided to deregulate and operate an open skies policy. Webster was given the job of coming up with a winning strategy for this new era for Air NZ. It was not an easy decision. His new wife, Bridgitte - a French management consultant he met during his year at Stanford who now works in the City - was not over-impressed with the idea of living down under. A management meeting between the two business degree-wielding businesspeople resolved the situation:
"I urged her to do it for three years, and promised that then we would review the situation." His strategy for Air NZ was to set up a low-cost airline, modelled on South West Airlines in the US, the grand daddy of no-frills operators. The key to success, he says, was that the backer should have "bags of money, so competitors can't force you out, and a lot of capacity, so that you can swamp the market".
At the final moment, the Australians got cold feet and abandoned the deregulation plans. "There was a political scandal between the two countries, but for me it was a big disappointment. The more time I put into the low-cost concept, the more I was convinced it was the way of the future and could not fail."
The strategy was abandoned and Air NZ instead bought Ansett, the domestic Australian airline. A new strategy was also required for the Webster domestic situation. "My three years was running out. If the opportunity to start a low-cost airline had occurred I might have been able to negotiate an extension, but the opportunity went. Bridgitte and I used to have day long 'planning sessions' in a cafe by the harbour and I suggested we go to the US or France.
"Then one of the consultants I had used called up to say that there was this crazy Greek guy advertising for an MD. I couldn't imagine that a twenty something Greek shipowner could be serious about running a low-cost airline, but eventually I wrote to him and then telephoned. His response was 'What would someone from New Zealand know about running a low-cost airline in Europe?' But he asked me to come over - and pay my own way to get over here. It was the first time I had ever had to buy my own ticket."
It was January 1996 and Webster took the first available flight so that he could take a trip on the new airline - which was three months old - before his first meeting with EasyJet's founder, Stelios Haji-Iaonnou. "I told him it wasn't bad. He'd got the basics right but it wasn't executed well. After 20 minutes I had the job and I started a month later."
The Webster household relocated to the heart of Hampstead village in central London - selected because it is a 35-minute commute for both parties. "But I get driven and she gets the tube," he says.
Low-cost EasyJet has made Webster highly wealthy. He has just cashed in a quarter of his £10m of shares. His five-year boredom threshold has elapsed - "I started the clock again at flotation" - but Webster won't hang around for his gold watch. "I can't see myself ever stopping," he says. "I like to read a book for an hour, but then I like to get up and do something."
The CV
Born: July 1946. Greymouth on the West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand
Education: Canterbury University, New Zealand MSc Cranfield Institute of Technology MSc Stanford Business School
Career: National Aircraft Corporation, NZ Air New Zealand EasyJet
Family: Married. Two daughters. One grandchild
Leisure: Skiing, golf, pilot's licence (lapsed)Contributor Brian McIntyre
Ray began working in Greymouth in a little radio repair shop called Robert Francis
Through the National airline N.A.C he gained an engineering degree and then went on to Air NZ which was by then the National carrier. He was a whizz at engineering at Harewood in Christchurch with engine maintenance before moving further afield. (Information supplied to me by his childhood friend Malcolm Howell)
From Wikipedia
The reverberations of September 11 yesterday claimed another airline when Canada's second largest airline grounded its fleet and stopped trading. This follows Monday's collapse of Belgium's Sabena and Swissair's demise last month.
Tens of thousands of airline employees across Europe and the US are losing their jobs, and BA - which is headed for a loss of more than £700m this year - is working on a review to come up with a radical new "size and shape".
So it is something of a surprise to find the chief executive of a British airline enjoying a relaxed morning working from home. Ray Webster, the New Zealander who has piloted EasyJet from a two-route London-Scotland service to a by-word for low-cost European travel, reckons his business has never looked better.
Business Today: sign up for a morning shot of financial news
While other airlines have seen passenger numbers fall by 30% and their share prices shot to pieces, Luton-based EasyJet, which floated last year, is flying high. Its shares, which crashed 40% in the week after the atrocity, are back above September 11 levels, and the airline's passengers - 90% of whom book on the internet - are back online.
"In Europe we are a long way from ground zero," says Webster. "And here we have been used to terrorism for 30 years.
People are hardened to it. They accept it as a fact of life."
The EasyJet chief executive, who has spent his entire career in commercial airlines, working alongside the airline's founder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, since the no-frills carrier's earliest days in 1996, has always maintained that "if the price is right, people will still travel". He admits it has been a relief to prove it in recent weeks.
EasyJet is also mopping up extra business from corporate customers - the sort who would normally fly BA, but whose recession-wary employers have suddenly become more cost-conscious. They used to make up 50% of passengers "but I am sure it is more than that now".
The EasyJet experience is echoed by Ryanair, its low-cost rival. Both have just announced a big jump in profit - a word that the more traditional airlines operating in Europe will be unfamiliar with. "Even before September 11 there were 14 flag carriers in Europe and 14 lossmakers in their European operations," says Webster.
The terror attacks, he believes, will now change the face of European, and ultimately global, civil aviation. Webster envisages a new world order of international branded airlines serving long haul routes, with short haul regional travel being dominated by low-cost operators.
"Since the dreadful events of September 11, the traditional airlines have been galvanised," he says. "They just can't keep making losses on their European operations. There is an opportunity for us to replace and displace them and we are well positioned."
So well positioned, in fact, that EasyJet has just managed to raise £93m, which will strengthen its balance sheet and allow it to buy up bargain second hand planes. It is a position Webster is grateful to be in. With 27 years' experience in traditional airlines, he does not envy the task ahead of BA boss and fellow antipodean Rod Eddington.
"He has a lonely job," says Webster. "He has to have a vision, and a blunt knife. He can blame everything on September 11 and should get all the bad news out of the way now. It is no good tampering at the edges with a scalpel. It needs a hatchet or a chainsaw."
Up to half the British flag carrier's European operations, he reckons, should be axed. Then, he predicts, there will be further rationalisation. "Air France, BA and Lufthansa are the likely survivors. All of the second tier will become part of the other three and they will become regional operators. In the next 10 years there will be world brands, international branded groups, like Avis in rental cars."
It is a big vision for a man born and brought up in a small working class town of Greymouth in New Zealand's South Island.
Webster, now a Porsche-driving 55-year-old, was a 1950s equivalent of the present-day teenage nethead. "When I was very young - probably seven or eight - I started to get an interest in electronics, and by the time I was 15 I was repairing radios in a local shop," he says.
"I wasn't interested in school. I spent all my time wiring things up and blowing things up. I used to make gunpowder. It never occurred to me to go to university and I did dreadfully in my school certificate. I had to do it again.
"I was very focused on doing something in the electronics field, but New Zealand is a small country and the only real options were the post office or the air force - and they turned me down because I was colour blind. So I applied to a commercial airline, the National Aircraft Corporation, and they took me on for a five-year apprenticeship."
After coming top of his group for three years he won a sponsorship to join Smiths Industries in Cheltenham for a year, working on systems for Tornados and Jaguars.
Back in New Zealand he won another sponsorship, to university, and emerged with a first class honours degree in engineering. He then moved into design and topped up his education again with a master's degree in air transport engineering at Cranfield. By 1982, and after NAC had merged with New Zealand's long haul airline, he was heading Air New Zealand's entire aircraft maintenance and engineering operations.
"I was only about 33," he recalls, "and it was a big job, with a workforce of 1,200. But the best thing about it was that I was in Christchurch and the rest of the management were in Auckland. So no one butted in or stuck their noses into what I was doing."
After five years - "I get bored, want to keep moving and don't want to do anything for more than five years" - Webster decided it was time for new challenges, and the technical expert decided that meant learning more about the "academic side of management and the theory to support it, about global politics and global financial systems."
So off he went back to school again - this time to Stanford to do an MSc. The experience, he says, changed his life. "It did something to my confidence. I had always been a loner. But the course was seven days a week for a year, and I realised that there I was, with all these outstanding people, and I could interact with them. I realised I wasn't constrained by my little technical field."
It also ended his marriage, which he explains like a textbook management decision made after weighing up all the pros and cons. "I'd been married for 15 years and it was clear it wasn't working. We married young and my wife didn't go with me to Stanford. There was a void created. It gave me time to think things through. I decided there was no point in continuing." The US also introduced him to a rather different approach to business. "I was enthralled by their high-energy, can-do attitude," he says. "It was invigorating to work in."
So when Air NZ sent him to head the airline's US business, based in Los Angeles, he was in his element. "It was a fun time," he says. "I met a lot of people and did a lot of partying".
He also concluded that many American workers are rather better at talking the talk than walking the walk. "New Zealanders and the English are naturally reserved. They have a natural preference to understate and overdeliver. Americans, on the other hand, tend to overstate and underdeliver. The people are very gung-ho, but they can't do what they say."
One day, out of the blue, came an urgent "come back quick" call from New Zealand. The Australian and New Zealand authorities had decided to deregulate and operate an open skies policy. Webster was given the job of coming up with a winning strategy for this new era for Air NZ. It was not an easy decision. His new wife, Bridgitte - a French management consultant he met during his year at Stanford who now works in the City - was not over-impressed with the idea of living down under. A management meeting between the two business degree-wielding businesspeople resolved the situation:
"I urged her to do it for three years, and promised that then we would review the situation." His strategy for Air NZ was to set up a low-cost airline, modelled on South West Airlines in the US, the grand daddy of no-frills operators. The key to success, he says, was that the backer should have "bags of money, so competitors can't force you out, and a lot of capacity, so that you can swamp the market".
At the final moment, the Australians got cold feet and abandoned the deregulation plans. "There was a political scandal between the two countries, but for me it was a big disappointment. The more time I put into the low-cost concept, the more I was convinced it was the way of the future and could not fail."
The strategy was abandoned and Air NZ instead bought Ansett, the domestic Australian airline. A new strategy was also required for the Webster domestic situation. "My three years was running out. If the opportunity to start a low-cost airline had occurred I might have been able to negotiate an extension, but the opportunity went. Bridgitte and I used to have day long 'planning sessions' in a cafe by the harbour and I suggested we go to the US or France.
"Then one of the consultants I had used called up to say that there was this crazy Greek guy advertising for an MD. I couldn't imagine that a twenty something Greek shipowner could be serious about running a low-cost airline, but eventually I wrote to him and then telephoned. His response was 'What would someone from New Zealand know about running a low-cost airline in Europe?' But he asked me to come over - and pay my own way to get over here. It was the first time I had ever had to buy my own ticket."
It was January 1996 and Webster took the first available flight so that he could take a trip on the new airline - which was three months old - before his first meeting with EasyJet's founder, Stelios Haji-Iaonnou. "I told him it wasn't bad. He'd got the basics right but it wasn't executed well. After 20 minutes I had the job and I started a month later."
The Webster household relocated to the heart of Hampstead village in central London - selected because it is a 35-minute commute for both parties. "But I get driven and she gets the tube," he says.
Low-cost EasyJet has made Webster highly wealthy. He has just cashed in a quarter of his £10m of shares. His five-year boredom threshold has elapsed - "I started the clock again at flotation" - but Webster won't hang around for his gold watch. "I can't see myself ever stopping," he says. "I like to read a book for an hour, but then I like to get up and do something."
The CV
Born: July 1946. Greymouth on the West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand
Education: Canterbury University, New Zealand MSc Cranfield Institute of Technology MSc Stanford Business School
Career: National Aircraft Corporation, NZ Air New Zealand EasyJet
Family: Married. Two daughters. One grandchild
Leisure: Skiing, golf, pilot's licence (lapsed)Contributor Brian McIntyre
Significant Places
Towns lived inGreymouthSchools attendedGreymouth Technical High School
Related to (people)
ParentFred and Sybil Webster
Category Information
Category TagPeople
West Coast New Zealand History (27th Feb 2018). Raymond Webster a West Coaster extraordinaire. In Website West Coast New Zealand History. Retrieved 5th Apr 2026 06:38, from https://westcoast.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/22985