The story of how he transformed Air New Zealand in the late 2000s and early 2010s is well known. Not so well known is the story of how the company transformed him.
The first part of the story had been told many times before: the improbably handsome, shredded-but-caring corporate titan in hi-vis and gloves, on his knees among his customers’ filth, cleaning the toilets of the company’s 747s.
The story showed Rob Fyfe to be a CEO of the people, willing to get his hands dirty in the service of empathy and understanding others, and maybe – if you’re cynical – burnishing his image.
But on this day, for reasons that were not immediately clear, he wanted to talk not about his day in the toilet but about what came out of it. Specifically, he wanted to talk about Butch.
He described Butch as a “gruff, kind of grumpy old bugger – bandana, shaved head, tattoos everywhere”. He formed an unlikely friendship with Butch in the toilets that day and the pair became regular correspondents. He didn’t say what the correspondence entailed, except that Butch would sometimes send him inappropriate jokes and he would write back and tell him not to.
When Butch died of a heart attack, Fyfe rang his son to pass on his condolences.
The son told him that although his father had spoken often about his close relationship with the CEO, he hadn’t believed it, but when he went to clean out his dad’s flat after his death, he discovered the correspondence between the two sellotaped all over his father’s bedroom walls.
By the time Fyfe told this story, more than two hours into our interview, he had already talked at length about many harrowing moments in his life involving disaster, death, trauma and unhealed wounds, but that was the first and only time he cried.
By pure coincidence, our interview took place on November 28, the anniversary of the two worst moments in Air New Zealand’s history: two air disasters that would come to define not just his career and life but would pass into the national consciousness as single words: Erebus and Perpignan.
Exactly 45 years before our interview, then-Air New Zealand CEO Morrie Davis, in the middle of a round at Royal Wellington Golf Club, received a phone call telling him one of the company’s McDonnell Douglas DC-10s had gone missing during a sightseeing flight to Antarctica.
Exactly 29 years after that, then-Air New Zealand CEO Fyfe was in the middle of an early morning gym session when he received a phone call telling him one of the company’s Airbus A320s had gone missing on a test flight in France.
On the same date, nearly three decades apart, two people working in the same job, faced with the same terrible set of circumstances, were about to make a series of decisions that would affect many lives, shape the rest of their own, and define their legacies.
After receiving the phone call telling him about Erebus, Davis had an underling call Maria Collins, wife of pilot in charge Captain Jim Collins. Later, he sent his wife to see her in person. He never had any direct contact with her. He never allowed victims’ families the opportunity to visit the crash site. He never apologised for the crash or the company’s actions. He resigned two years after the crash, the day after Justice Mahon’s famous Royal Commission report accused the company of an “orchestrated litany of lies”. He died in 1995.
After receiving the phone call telling him about Perpignan, Fyfe called the families of all the men who’d died. He accompanied them to the crash site and spent nearly two weeks there with them as crews searched for their loved ones’ bodies. He regularly fronted the media, often in tears. He is still in touch with some of the families today. He received a message from one of them during our conversation. His actions in the wake of the disaster have passed into corporate lore as a case study in empathetic leadership.
But, in 2009, as the first anniversary of Perpignan approached, he felt that whatever the company did to commemorate the accident would be hollow if it didn’t first do something for the families of Erebus.
So he called Maria Collins and asked if she would be willing to help educate him about what had happened during that period. Thirty-nine years after Captain Jim Collins died in the service of Air New Zealand, Fyfe was the first CEO of the company ever to speak to his wife.
Her response was to invite him to dine with her and her four daughters. He describes that night as one of the most harrowing of his life.
The oldest of Jim and Maria’s four daughters had been in her mid-teens at the time of Erebus. While still grieving their father, the girls were bullied at school and had to deal with the public blaming their father for the disaster. No one defended them. Their home was broken into multiple times.
Maria was an Austrian Jew who had escaped the holocaust, lost her husband in horrific circumstances, seen him blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people and become a solo parent to four grieving children and now had to deal with public persecution. There was no support from Air New Zealand. When the company eventually recovered Jim’s belongings from the crash site, they left them on the Collins’ doorstep.
“I came out of there emotionally overwhelmed by her life story,” Fyfe says.
He went to the Air New Zealand board and told them the company had to find a way to act appropriately towards the families of those who had died on Erebus.
He says the board’s reaction was to advise him to leave it alone, saying it had “far more downside than upside”.
They told him that to do so would be to open Pandora’s box, that it wouldn’t solve anything, that it would be potentially damaging not just for the airline but also for the families of the victims.
He didn’t care.
“I was, by that stage, too emotionally invested.”
On November 28, 2009, one year after Perpignan and 40 years after Erebus, Fyfe stood next to then-Prime Minister John Key on the forecourt of Air New Zealand’s headquarters in Fanshawe St and said sorry to those who had lost loved ones or who were affected by the tragedy and for Air New Zealand’s failure to offer them adequate support and compassion.
He tried to get Key to apologise on behalf of the country but says the Prime Minister told him he was unable to do that for legal reasons.
“I’m not sure why their legal jeopardy was any worse than ours, but anyway he did stand beside me on the podium as I made the apology.”
Notably, Fyfe’s apology was not for the accident, for which Air New Zealand has never accepted blame, but for what happened next.
“I’ve got no ability 29 years on to do a better job than the investigators and the Royal Commission to say who was at fault,” Fyfe says now. “But what I can say is that Air New Zealand did not deal appropriately with the victims, the families with the public and with their own staff, actually, through that period. And I wanted to apologise for that and I wanted to acknowledge that the pilots who flew that aircraft were flying that aircraft because they were deemed to be some of New Zealand’s best pilots.”
This interview took place at Fyfe’s Takapuna waterfront mansion, which is in the midst of a major renovation. He was dressed casually in a $1600 Dior T-shirt and $2500 Chanel sneakers, with a $750 Dior tassel bracelet on his wrist.
Fyfe has stayed multiple times at the private Caribbean Island belonging to his friend Sir Richard Branson, who he says desperately wanted him to run his airline when Fyfe left Air New Zealand. (Fyfe: “If I wanted to run an airline, I would have stayed with Air New Zealand.”)
This is all to say he is now rich enough that he’s able to dedicate his life to “trying to figure out how to help others to achieve and realise their potential and their ambitions and their visions for themselves”.
When he applied for the job as CEO at Air New Zealand, he told the board his primary focus would be on the company’s people, believing that if he took care of them, they would take care of the bottom line.
In his first few years in the job, he felt extreme pressure from some parts of the board, who were not supportive of his approach and who he says had not wanted him as CEO.
Nevertheless, by 2008 he was able to convince those same people to spend $15m to put every one of the company’s 11,000 employees through a two-day personal development course put on by The Pacific Institute, a company that uses the tagline: “LIMITLESS INDIVIDUALS BUILD LIMITLESS ORGANISATIONS”.
Titled “Realise Your Potential”, the course required people to do things like create personal affirmations, sing in front of a room full of people and share their feelings. Not all employees were grateful for it. Some were openly hostile; some walked out. Whether or not it changed lives, it was a massive personal risk for the CEO to spend $15m of company money because he believed it would.
He had done the same course in his mid-20s when he was already a senior corporate leader at Post Bank. The strongest memory he retained from the course was this: if children do something bad, you don’t tell them they’re bad; you tell them they’re good. Then you tell them that good people don’t do those kinds of things.
After meeting with Maria Collins, Fyfe instructed Air New Zealand to make contact with every one of the families of the 257 people who died on Erebus. He says he spoke to the majority of them directly.
With help from the Air Force, the company put on several flights to ensure as many family members as possible could visit Erebus. Fyfe went on two of them. Prior to the first, he approached a family member, introduced himself and asked if the man wanted to share his story and what the trip meant to him.
The man told Fyfe he had been 15 at the time of Erebus, an only child, with no other relatives in New Zealand. Having just been orphaned, he had no choice but to find a job. He became a fireman.
“I just had to get on with my life,” he said.
The man said he didn’t bear any grudge against Air New Zealand and that he just wanted to do the trip his parents had been doing when they died. He told Fyfe he saw it as an adventure. He said he was excited. Fyfe says he looked like someone who had never shed a tear in his life.
It was a long day. The group left Christchurch early in the morning, flew to Antarctica, spent five hours on the ice and arrived back late that night.
After they’d landed, Fyfe approached the man again. This time, he says, the man choked up. With tears in his eyes, the man said: “I had no idea how much emotion I’ve been bottling up and what this meant to me. Since I was 15 I just closed that door and had to get on with my life.”
Two-hundred-and-fifty-seven people died on Erebus and the lives of hundreds, or even thousands, of others were changed forever. For years, the narrative about Erebus was all about blame. Fyfe’s actions after Perpignan shifted the narrative to one of care.
You could argue this was self-serving, since much of that blame had been directed at the company he ran, but if that was the case, why had none of the 10 CEOs that preceded him thought to do it?
Burning Man is a week-long gathering in the Nevada desert, which has been variously described as an experiment in alternative living, a community event, a spiritual retreat, a movement and a rejection of capitalism.
Burning Man relies on giving. People give each other food, drinks, clothes, shelter, love, and anything else you can imagine. Money is no use to you at Burning Man. If you need anything, organisers advise, “your best bet is to make friends with your neighbours”.
There are two ways of looking at this: you are dependent on the kindness of strangers, or strangers are dependent on your kindness. Obviously, these two things are not mutually exclusive.
Fyfe’s first visit to Burning Man was in 2015, three years after he left Air New Zealand.
He says: “We live our lives in a world that’s all about take, take, take. It’s all about ‘What can I get for me from the world?’”. But Burning Man turns that inside out.
“There are no brands, no one has labels, no one asks anyone else what they do. They’re not interested in any of that stuff.”
He describes Burning Man as an “emotional detox” and “like spending a week at a health camp”. He tries to go every year. He says he always feels topped up by it: more alert to the needs of others, more aware of how he might help them.
He has enough money to buy everything he could possibly want, but one of the things he wants most is to make an annual pilgrimage to a gathering in the American desert, where money can’t buy anything – a place in which people are defined not by what they have, nor by what they have done, but by what they are willing to do.
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