Tony Fernandes - Flying High: My Story: From Air Asia to QPR

A few years ago a friend from my schooldays, Gerry Wigfield, rang out of the blue. Even at the other end of a long-distance phone line I could hear that he was excited.

Tony, my mums found something of yours.

What is it, Gerry?

Ah, thatd be telling. Ill get her to send it to you when youre next in London.

I was staying in Kuala Lumpur for several months on business, so I admit that this conversation soon slipped my mind. A few days after I eventually arrived back in London and settled in my house in Chester Square, the doorbell rang. I padded to answer it dressed in my pyjamas, not really thinking about who or what might be waiting behind the door.

Standing there was our postman holding a parcel about three feet long by a foot high, wrapped in brown paper, with my name neatly printed on a white sticker. As he passed the box over I braced myself for something heavy, but it was surprisingly light. I put it down on a table in the hall, signed for the delivery and shut the door. For some reason the memory of Gerrys call came back to me and I ripped off the packaging.

A few seconds later, standing in a mess of brown paper, I started to well up. I was looking at a battered blue cardboard chest with reinforced leather corners, brass locks and a leather strap at the end. It was my tuck box from my secondary school, Epsom College. I hadnt seen it for about thirty years.

On the lid of the box were three stickers: the badges of West Ham United, Qantas Airways and the Formula One team Williams.

I snapped the locks and lifted the lid. Inside were two C90 cassette tapes: Abbas Arrival and Steely Dans The Royal Scam, as well as a packet of the dried noodles that my mum used to send me from Kuala Lumpur. The contents of the tuck box tipped me over the edge. I was a wreck. Memories of Mum, moving to England and my school life flooded over me.

The tuck box, inside and out, represented all the dreams Id had when I was growing up: I loved sport, I loved music and I loved aeroplanes. What was so overwhelming for me in that moment was realizing that my childhood dreams had become my reality.

Since leaving Epsom, I had headed up a music business, partied with some of the biggest pop stars in the world and brought Malaysian and Asian bands to the global stage.

I had taken over an English football club and been carried on the shoulders of the players on the Wembley pitch after we won promotion.

I had stood on the starting grid at a Grand Prix with my own Formula One car.

I had acquired a tiny airline and transformed it into an international business carrying 70 million passengers a year.

Turning those dreams into reality the journey from putting stickers on my tuck box to opening the door to the postman some thirty years later has been nerve-racking and heartbreaking at times, but packed full of excitement and joy. It also makes for a pretty unlikely and wildly unpredictable story.

But lets start at the beginning, where my early life and school career didnt show any signs of those dreams coming true.

I pushed ten cents into the coin-operated binoculars and scanned the horizon. Nothing. I swivelled the binoculars round to point at the apron, studying the old turbo-prop planes, the MalaysiaSingapore Airlines Fokker F27s and DC-3s, the Air Vietnam Vickers Viscounts and the tiny private Cessnas. I shifted again to look at the hangars beyond the runway, where planes were being worked on by the engineers. I turned back to look at the horizon. Still nothing.

Relax, Anthony, weve got another hour before she lands, said my dad.

We were standing on the viewing platform of Subang Airport, Kuala Lumpur. It was a humid day in July 1969, a few months after my fifth birthday. My dad, Stephen, and I were waiting for my mum to come home from another business trip.

It was the third time he had told me to relax. I nodded. The binocular lenses went dark, so I pushed another coin into the slot and turned my attention back to the apron. We stood side by side and silently looked out together.

Finally, the Fokker F27 came into view, a speck turning into the familiar shape, slowly growing in size and swooping in towards the runway. The moment the plane touched down, my attention switched to the doors. As they opened, I held my breath until I saw Mum appear and walk down the steps. She looked up at the viewing gallery and waved. I ran into the terminal building where I looked through the iron railings into the baggage hall below. As soon as I saw Mum pick up her bag, I set off again, sprinting down the stairs, timing my arrival so that I threw myself into her arms the moment she came through the arrival gate.

The scene sticks with me because airports were always happy places for me. Dad and I would make countless trips from our home in Damansara Heights to Subang to meet Mum, and they all ended with this warm feeling of being reunited with her.

A few years later, Dad and I started making trips to the Weld department store in Kuala Lumpur. It had a huge record department with wooden racks holding albums stacked vertically so that we could flip through the records from front to back. We would go there on a Sunday morning between church (which I hated) and lunch, which we normally had at one of those old colonial restaurants like the Station Hotel or the Coliseum.

On one occasion I was standing on tiptoe on a stool flicking through the albums when I laid eyes on a special record.

Dad, Dad! I jumped down from the stool (we were there so regularly that the staff called it Anthonys Stool) and ran across to him as he looked through the Dean Martin section. In my hand I had an album that I held up to him.

Can we buy it? I asked hopefully.

He nodded. I was hopping with excitement. It was my first record: the Supremes Supremes A Go-Go. Wed heard You Cant Hurry Love on Patrick Teohs radio show the previous weekend and Id been itching to get the album ever since. In the holidays, if I dusted and organized Dads records, I was allowed to play them on our Grundig stereo system. He adored the classics Dean Martin, Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr all the singers from that golden era.

The music I associate with Mum is Chopins Nocturnes. I loved to listen to her playing these beautiful pieces on the upright Yamaha piano in the living room. As well as Chopin, shed play Mozart and Beethoven, and whenever and wherever we moved to, the piano would always have its own corner. Mum arranged for piano and violin teachers to come to the house and teach me but if I was going to learn to play something, I was going to do it on my own or with my mum. Her musical talents and methods definitely rubbed off on me because, like her, I can pick things up by ear and I always preferred to learn like that.

When she put on a record, Mum would choose an artist like Dionne Warwick or Carole King. She had more progressive tastes than my dad but the most influential thing was how much they both loved music. That has always stayed with me.

Another thing that has stayed with me is Dads love of sport. He would watch every single sport shown on television in Malaysia. He followed teams and events with intensity and was a tireless supporter of underdogs whenever there was an uneven contest, he always sided with the least-fancied team or player.