Captain's Log:
by Jeremy Hart.
F1 Racing, December 1997 issue.

Passengers waiting for the delayed flight to Vienna are agog - staring at a bloke in a red baseball cap wandering about
under the wing of their late-arriving Boeing 737. From high-powered businesspeople to the poorest of young travellers, all are like children with their noses pressed up against a toyshop window in December as they crane to get a better view of Niki Lauda, their hero, making a last-minute pre-flight checks of the Boeing's underbelly. Most are wondering whether he'll be at the controls on their flight - and hoping he will be. They are not to be disappointed, and most are smiling as they queue to board the Janis Joplin - named, like all Lauda's 20 planes, after his favourite artistes. So am I, because I'm in the cockpit with him.

In his native Austria, Lauda is the Richard Branson of the airline world. A gold leaf flying lady, similar to the one on Virgin Atlantic planes, adorns Janis' McLaren grey-and-red midriff. Confirmation of everyone's childlike giggling in the departure lounge comes when the tannoy crackles into action: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain, Niki Lauda". Cue a dozen or so I-told-you-so rib nudges. "On behalf of Austrian and Lauda, apologies for the delay. I will do my best to fly you as fast as possible to Vienna". Well, if Niki Lauda says it's going to be fast, it's going to be fun. The three-time world champion heaves the Boeing's throttles and does what come naturally...accelerate - hard. "Fifty, one hundred....rotate". Austrian Airlines 452, flown today by its partner, Lauda Air, lifts off from Heathrow. "He a great pilot....a natural", says co-pilot, First Officer Erik Esser, as his celebrated captain powers the Boeing through the grey blanket enveloping southern England. Lauda's feet dance delicately on the Boeing's drilled aluminium pedals, which are uncannily similar to those in the footwells of his championship-giving and almost lifetaking Ferraris.

He reaches 6000ft and decides to let the aircraft's autopilot take over for the easy bit. "I shouldn't be doing this flight, but Austrian asked us to fly it and we were a pilot down, so I had to go", says Lauda. "Flying into London you are nearly always late, but we will try and catch up". Always ultra-competitive, even when he's piloting a bewinged bus. He may have favourite racetracks, but Lauda doesn't have pet airports. In fact, he hates airports. So much so that it's a surprise he ever got into the airline business. Never was there a man who disliked scheduled flight more. "I was fed up flying on scheduled airlines. All that waiting and rubbish", he groans. "In 1976 I got my private pilot's licence. In '77 I got commercial rating and started flying a Citation and Lear. It made racing more bearable, although I still retired in '79 when someone suggested I start an airline".

A stewardness, in jeans and a copy of trademark red Lauda baseball cap, brings Captain Lauda and his one-time boyhood fan, now co-pilot, a coffee. The bright-blue computer screen between Lauda's knees shows we are six miles above Frankfurt. The 95-minute flight is half over. "For two years we ran charters with a pair of Fokkers, but Austrian Airlines had such a grip on the business, I forced to lease off the planes and go back to racing", says Lauda, between check calls to a German flight controller below us. "I guess I hadn't got racing out of my system".

From racing driver to airline proprietor and back to racing again. Lauda was lucky enough to scrape the 1984 world championship by half a point. He returned to Vienna airport, the scene of his failed attempt to get Lauda Air off the ground, a hero. "That year I met a tour operator, Basile Varvaressos, and he offered me a partnership with his tour operator's business. He would supply passengers; I would fly them", said Lauda, who this time was finished with Formula 1. "I went to the government, who were just expecting to greet me as the world champion. I told them that if I didn't get an operator's licence immediately I would get 100,000 Austrian race fans to turn up and protest".

Lauda Air was reborn. Thirteen years on, it flies more than a million passengers everywhere from Manchester and Gatwick to Sydney and Saigon. "You know", says the 48-year-old, "racing was a whole lot easier. It was like a holiday compared with the running of an airline. In racing, you would train, drive 16 races, do a bit of PR. Now I am up every morning at 6:30am, in work by 8am, running a business with 1650 employees and 16 planes. If I had a choice, I would have continued racing until I was 80. It's easier and, now, better paid".

Lauda is still a consultant to Ferrari, although he fails to see eye-to-eye with the team's French magician, Jean Todt. Personalities apart, the Austrian, who won two titles for Maranello, is still under the spell of the Prancing Horse. "I won two world championships and almost lost my life in their cars - so of course it is good to see them doing well again", says Lauda who, because of a recent kidney transplant, has been to only three races this year. He still commentates for RTL in Germany, though. "Next year they will do even better".

As the hundred or so passengers tuck into their muesli, called "Willi Dungl" after Lauda's friend and fitness guru, their captain calls base on the HF radio to warn it of two travellers with tight connections at Vienna. The one thing that Lauda has brought across from Formula 1 to his airline is slick service. I mention the Branson touch. "Branson has a good airline, but he lives on gimmicks", explains Lauda, who has just introduced an in-flight casino on his Boeing 777 to Sydney. "Not a gimmick. It's a money-maker". In the aerial dogfight of the airline industry, Lauda once relied on the magnetism of his surname to get people aboard. No longer. Passengers expect originality as well these days. "People used to fly with us because they thought: 'What the fuck is a racing driver doing running an airline?' Now they come back because they like the food and the service", says Lauda, tucking into his sandwiches, fruit and 'Willi Dungl'. "But if they don't like something about the airline, they come to me. At British Airways you wouldn't know who to complain to".

Loyal customers or not, on 26 May 1991, Lauda's career in the air almost met the same fate as his career behind the wheel. In a crash on take-off from Bangkok, one of his two Boeing 767s nosedived into the Thai jungle, killing 223 passengers. "It was the worst day of my life. When I raced I was responsible only for myself. If I killed myself, that was that - but when people get on my planes they expect to get home that night". His personal grief is only slightly offset by the economic gratitude that his business did not go under. "When it was announced that it was a fault with the plane, they came back". Lauda has no fear of dying in one of his planes. Avoiding risk, not overcoming it, is the way to work at 36,000 feet, where fly-by-wire technology works its magic on the former racer. "The new triple-seven is the most modern plane in the world", says Lauda, who has just returned from a course in learning to fly the 344-seat, 210,000hp (compared with the mere 1200bhp of his old turbocharged McLaren MP4) place in Seattle. "It is more advanced in aeronautical terms than a Grand Prix car is in automotive terms", he says.

For a man who has spent 20 years fighting with the ultimate automotive technology on the limit of adhesion, flying a fully automated airliner is relatively easy. Glorified bus driver is not a description he relishes. "It is not difficult if you are well trained", says Lauda who has flown 11,500 hours on jets. Surprisingly, Lauda has no desire to fly anything faster. Jet fighters or aerobatic planes are out for a man closing in fast on his sixth decade. For Lauda, only space would be his final frontier.
"I flew on Concorde recently - an impressive old shitbox. But I'd really like to go up in the space shuttle, for a quick lap around the world", he beams. Has there ever been, and will there ever be, any other kind of lap for the man they still call Super Rat?

--End of Article--

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