When dashing to the desk on Saturday night is a typical day's work

WILDGEESE: Barry Nolan, Airport services manager, Emirates, Hamburg airport

“I WAS told that a full aircraft with 354 passengers was going to land at my airport in an hour – those are the little challenges you get,” says Barry Nolan of his job heading up airport services for the Emirates airline in Hamburg.

Having been with some of the biggest airlines for more than 20 years, such challenges as that caused by Heathrow Airport’s closure due to snow last winter are in a day’s work for Nolan. “The plane was on the way from Dubai to London and it was diverted to Hamburg because of the snow chaos in the UK,” he says. “I was just about to sit down to dinner on a Saturday night and I had to say, ‘I’ve got to go’.”

In such situations, Nolan is clear about his responsibility to customers. “We’ve got to feed them and hotel them or check them on another service because they shouldn’t be here in the first place . . . when a situation like this happens and you are diverted, we are responsible.”

The Raheny native says you must like dealing with people in his job. “You run into stories where people are on a flight going to a funeral and they are totally distraught . . . you have to be part social worker sometimes.”

He left school in 1981 aged 17, bagging one of the few available jobs as a cashier with the First National Building Society, and then qualified at night as a mainframe computer operator.

While his programming skills got him work at Nielsen Market Research when he moved to Australia three years later, it wasn’t what he wanted. “Locked up in a room with a computer is not my world – customer contact was my strong point.”

His return to Ireland in 1987 saw him put his people skills to the test when he joined a tiny new airline called Ryanair. “At the time, they only had three aircraft and basically everybody learned to do everything.”

The Ryanair culture at the time was “very much like a family”, says Nolan. “The Ryans were very much involved – Cathal flew and Declan was in the office.”

Promoted to duty officer and then station manager at Luton airport, he regards his stint as station manager at Stansted as his “turbulent time” at Ryanair. “I didn’t have a huge amount of managerial experience,” he recalls, particularly not in relation to moving into a greenfield site.

“A lot goes into filling an aircraft and seeing it run down the runway – you’ve got catering, cleaning, all the emigration issues and, in the airport itself, you’ve got to deal with the airport company, customs, handling agents, staff rosters, invoices – it’s a very broad spectrum.”

He says such pressure is usual for him today, but at age 25 it was a lot to take on. “But Ryanair will always be very dear to my heart. It was a great place to learn because you are expected to do whatever has to be done. It set the foundations basically for my career.”

Moving to Munich for love, he set about learning German and got a job with British Airways which, as a handling agent for other airlines, had 55 departures a day. Delegation is the key to dealing with such complexity, says Nolan. “You need to recognise the strengths of the people on your team and use them.”

When 9/11 changed air travel forever, the northsider was on duty. “You just thought, this cannot be happening,” he recalls. The US closed its airspace, BA flights heading across the Atlantic were sent back and those gone too far were diverted to Canada.

“There was this huge situation in places like Halifax or Gander where you had lots of different airlines in the middle of nowhere, and it’s not as if there are lots of hotels to put people up in. It was a very difficult time.”

When BA sold its Deutsche BA arm, downsizing followed, and with itchy feet, Nolan applied for the role of deputy airport manager with Dubai’s national airline, Emirates. After three years with Emirates in Munich, he was promoted to airport manager in Hamburg, overseeing the airline’s new Dubai route.

Setting up that site has seen him drafted in to help the airline with its expansion at Sao Paulo, Toronto, LA, Amsterdam and Khartoum. The airline is to begin daily flights between Dublin and Dubai from January 2012.

While he says the Germans make short work of snow, the country’s famed efficiency could do nothing to tame the volcanic ash that paralysed European airspace last year. “We were closed for five days with the volcano and it was probably five of the most boring days, purely because people just didn’t come to the airport,” he says. “We were expecting chaos but that didn’t happen, people just didn’t come.”

In Germany 20 years next year, Nolan relishes his adopted country and his job with Emirates.

“I love it here, the mentality suits me.” And the German culture has clearly rubbed off on him. “I like things that work well. I’m a doer. You tell me what you want done and I’ll get it done.”