“Let’s be bold,” says Mark Drusch

On 31 January, when Qatar Airways formally announced the appointment of Mark Drusch as the Chief Officer Cargo “effective immediately”, Drusch was already into his third week in the new job. He took charge on January 14 at the world’s biggest cargo carrier.

Drusch, with over 25 years in senior airline management roles, joined Qatar Airways in December 2019 and led the development and implementation of the company’s revenue strategy as well as managing strategic alliances with key partner airlines.

Appointment of Drusch looked like an internal choice of a senior leader from the passenger business to head the top cargo job that remained vacant since August 2023 after Guillaume Halleux left the Doha-headquartered global carrier to join Swissport as its chief commercial officer in Zurich. Drusch had left Qatar Airways for a very brief period and came back to take up a role which he described as “exciting”.

“I had gone only for a couple of months,” Drusch told The STAT Trade Times, adding, “this opportunity literally came out of the blue, very quickly and it was exciting”. He was then considering two other options but decided to leave them to come back to Doha and take up the top cargo job. “I've always loved working here [Doha]. It's been so much fun. It's a great team of people. My former team members are now, sort of, my colleagues. They're good people because I've been with them. Now I get to do something brand new and work for such a great operational-ready organization. I love the challenge of learning something new, and then finding a way to make it even better.”

Drusch has over 42 years of professional experience of which 25 years have been in aviation directly or indirectly. But he had no experience working in the cargo business; therefore, his appointment is seen as a smart decision by Qatar Airways to shake up things to make the cargo business future-ready and digital like its passenger business. He is known for his astuteness. In his previous roles, he identified and implemented new market and revenue opportunities; restructured and transformed operations to achieve higher profitability; and integrated management teams to maximize results and minimize cross-company inefficiencies. In the 15 years Drusch served as senior vice president at Delta Air Lines and Continental Airlines, he led transformations in commercial airline strategy and execution, revenue management, route planning, scheduling, alliances, loyalty, distribution, regional carriers, and catering.

And this is precisely the reason why he is hired for the top cargo job at Qatar Airways. “At the risk of sounding egotistical, I think, one of the reasons why I was selected for this role is because I know very well the passenger side of the business. Now there’s a great way to link those with cargo,’ he said.

“There are very few top executives that go from passenger to cargo. If you bring a person who spent most of his life in passenger side and put him in cargo; you're going to cross pollinate with what you know from the passenger side while learning the cargo business. Then build something that you can see from both sides. That’s something most people don't have.”

As a matter-of-fact, Drusch is not a complete stranger to cargo. A few months after he joined Qatar Airways, the Covid pandemic hit the world and the aviation industry came to an abrupt halt. Not the cargo business. He recollected his experience of working with Halleux and his team creating what he called the “golden triangle” in the initial period of the world-wide lockdown to ensure cash flow at Qatar Airways.

"If you bring a person who spent most of his life in passenger side and put him in cargo; you're going to cross pollinate with what you know from the passenger side while learning the cargo business. Then build something that you can see from both sides. That’s something most people don't have.”

“We did not know what was going to happen. With the backing of the former group CEO [Akbar Al Baker] we decided we were going to take a completely different track. We were going to fight and we were going to focus on cargo supporting the network.”

According to him, the “golden triangle” was about cargo, revenue management (headed by Drusch) and corporate planning. “We literally met every morning. We reviewed previous day’s results to plan the next day’s flying. We literally scheduled the airline every single day. And, that incredible integration was really the key to our success during Covid.”

Perhaps, the brief period that allowed Drusch to go deeply into the execution of the “golden triangle” strategy is turning out to be very useful now to create a new vision for Qatar Airways Cargo. “Having been in the airline industry for 20 years prior, primarily with the US carriers, I had never ever, seen the kind of hand-in-glove coordination cargo and passenger airlines had during Covid. And I think it made all of us aware, both in cargo and passenger that we were missing a great value and the synergy we can create,” Drusch explained.

“Take something that's really working well and do it even better. It's not a turnaround. But it is about how do we continue to push ourselves to be better for our customers, better for our employees and better for the bottom line?”

It is this “hand-in-glove coordination” and “cross pollination of knowledge” that Dusch wants to roll out and implement as he moves ahead in the new role.

“So part of what I want to bring here is to take our coordination and knowledge to a new level. There is a good coordination right now. I want to take it to an even higher level because there's so much that we both can help each other. It is more than just the actual flights. It is how we provide customers big picture things that include cargo and passenger opportunities.”

Drusch, who reports to Qatar Airways chief commercial officer (Thierry Antinori), said the brief to him was really simple. “Take something that's really working well and do it even better. It's not a turnaround. But it is about how do we continue to push ourselves to be better for our customers, better for our employees and better for the bottom line?”

Drusch was generous in his comments about what Halleux created and the fantastic cargo team he built. “I was able to work with them to some degree over the last few years. I knew the team, so it's not a turnaround, it's not a fix-up but a great foundation to start with,” he reiterated.

When asked about his top priorities, Drusch identified a few of them.

“The number one and the most important priority is safety. Safety of our employees and safety of our customers,” said Drusch, who grew up in an airline family. His father was a pilot and his brother is an American Airlines pilot.

His second priority is his team. “How do we take this team of people and elevate them. I'm being elevated by coming in and learning cargo. I want everybody to be elevated while I'm here so that we all become better business people; we understand the customer better and are ready to anticipate what's coming down the road.”

Drusch has set a goal for himself individually. “Improve profitability. Full stop,” he said. “We know how cargo goes up and down. I want to find a way to modify and mitigate some of those deep drops we have by finding clever ways of working.”

Building partnerships and alliances are his next important priority. “I want to make sure we spend more time developing alliances with key partners. Coming from the passenger side, I spent a lot of time building really strong partnerships. They bring a lot of value to both parties. So I want to do that.” Drush has been responsible for building partnerships with Iberia, British Airways (the IAG Group) and LATAM.

“We know how cargo goes up and down. I want to find a way to try to modify and mitigate some of those deep drops we have by finding clever ways of working.”

Drusch is not thinking about partnerships just with airlines alone but also with freight forwards and other primary customers. Such partnerships, he thinks, will help them “better integrate cargo into the big airline in total”. “Because I see opportunities there,” he added. He believes that alliances provide great value to the customers and shareholders at very little capital expenditure, which, he thinks, is positive. “Because anytime an airline can create more value with little capex, that means you can price the product much more efficiently. So I think the alliances are a great opportunity.”

Technology is another priority followed by digitalisation and sustainability. Drusch said he met the Boeing team in the very first week of his role as the Chief Officer Cargo. He recommended them to design the next generation of Boeing production freighter, the B777-8F, keeping in mind the specific needs of Qatar Airways Cargo. “They had to redesign it for us to suit our needs — to be able to capture those last couple of ULD positions. I was very clear to the Boeing team that this airplane [B777-8F) is built and ready for the future.”

Drusch was not suggesting changes to engines or airframe. “I'm talking about what we are building into it from a software perspective; I want to make sure all of that is able to evolve. Because you buy airplanes and these are assets you buy for long term, 25 years minimum. Five years from now, I don't want what we put into that airplane to be stuck; because we found that there's something new to do; but we can't do it. Because airplane was very narrowly defined in terms of being able to adapt to new technologies; I want to make sure we're using technology very aggressively wherever we can,” Drusch elaborated.

In January 2022 Qatar Airways placed a firm order with Boeing for 34 of its B777-8 freighters with an option for 16 more.

On digitalisation, a key priority for Drusch at Qatar Airways Cargo, he is very blunt. “Behind the fact that this industry hasn't brought enough efficiencies to its customers, to its partners in digitization, and quite honestly, what we do in this part of the business is decades behind what the passenger airline did.”

“Because anytime an airline can create more value with little capex, that means you can price the product much more efficiently. So I think the alliances are a great opportunity.”

He accepts that there are differences. “The passenger part of the industry is much, much farther ahead than the cargo side. You can't just lift and place passenger digitization to cargo, but you can use the concepts and modify so that it is applicable to cargo. I have been going through those with my team. But despite all those differences, you can work through them. It's not trying to change natural laws of physics; it is just investing more time in finding solutions to those,” he explained.

Drusch, based on his initial assessment of things that he has seen in his first three weeks in the job, thinks cargo can do a much better job of data analytics. “In the passenger division we slice and dice things to the nth degree to understand where markets are going and what we can do. Pump up markets, accelerate growth or stimulate growth.” He is looking to do something like that in cargo.

“I don't think the cargo industry gets to that same level of data and analytics. I want Qatar Airways Cargo to do that. I always tell people data sets you free. By understanding your data, you can create great insights, which allows you to create value either through fixing things, something that isn't working, or finding out something you didn't realize and then leveraging that.”

“The passenger part of the industry is much, much farther ahead than the cargo side. You can't just lift and place passenger digitization to cargo, but you can use the concepts and modify so that it is applicable to cargo.”

Sustainability is one of Drusch’s top priorities. “Everybody is behind it. Now there is a real desire and goal to achieve all these sustainability goals. The problem is nobody knows how to do it. Suppliers aren't ready. You don't have enough supply and the cost is very expensive,” revealed Drusch.

In fact, he was part of the meeting of the top leadership at Qatar Airways in the very first week he took charge to discuss ways to achieve sustainability goals. “There aren’t good answers to the different pockets of problems we have. But we must try.” Drusch believes that going forward “sustainability will grow in importance”.

When asked about what his message to the industry was, Drusch said, “Let’s be bold. Let's really think about how do we achieve the next evolutionary step stage. Let's not say we can't do this. Let's not be held back by our history. Let's really be bold and say, okay, where do we go next? Where do we think bigger and better? How do we partner better more than we have in the past?

It is time to build a bold air cargo industry.