The Awards Winners 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| LATIN LEADERS RISE TO THE TOP! Two of Latin America’s most influential airline leaders took the top honours at the Airline Strategy Awards organised by Airline Business magazine, in partnership with executive search firm Spencer Stuart. The top honours went to Enrique Cueto, Chief Executive of Chile’s LAN Airlines who received the Executive Leadership award. The prestigious Airline Business Award was presented to Pedro Heilbron, the Chief Executive of Panama’s Copa Airlines. “The recognition of Enrique and Pedro this year is a massive endorsement of how far Latin America airline leadership has come in the past few years,” says Mark Pilling, Editor of Airline Business. “These CEOs rank alongside the best in the industry. Their results prove it. The operations of their airlines prove it. Being recognised as winners at the Airline Strategy Awards shines a spotlight on their achievements.” The winners, by category, were: Executive Leadership: Enrique Cueto, Chief Executive, LAN Mark Pilling, editor of Airline Business, said: “It is a cliché, but strong, visionary leadership is essential in these tough times. Bold thinking is required and nothing is “off the table”. The Airline Strategy Awards were founded in 2002 to identify and recognise the best in boardroom leadership in this industry. The leaders chosen this year have these qualities in abundance.” Few people have shaped an entire region’s aviation industry like this year’s Airline Business Lifetime Achievement Award winner. When Pedro Heilbron took over as chief executive of Panama’s Copa Airlines in 1988, Latin America was a small market filled with inefficient state-owned airlines and constrained by a harsh regulatory environment. Today, it is a $1.3 billion revenue business. But Heilbron still has plenty to do at Copa and is not about to leave anytime soon. “I like to see things through see things mature,” he says. “From the very beginning I had opportunities to strengthen the airline. Since then there’s always been something happening.” Executive Leadership award winner, Enrique Cueto from LAN, is proud of the Latin American airline industry’s recent achievements, given its chequered history of inefficient loss-making state-owned carriers. He says his selection for this year’s executive leadership – the first time this award has been given to a Latin executive – is more a reflection of what the region has achieved rather than LAN. “This recognition is in some ways for Latin American aviation – not only LAN but TAM, Copa and Gol. We now have four good airlines trading on the New York Stock Exchange and we’re all doing relatively well relative to the [global] industry performance. That was unthinkable 10 years ago,” Cueto says. “We’ve all done a very good job”.
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