An Australian leaves home and builds a career at Munich's airport.
Ross Crichton used to enjoy a picture-postcard view of the Alps from his seventh-floor window at the Munich Airport Center—that is, before a new parking ramp was erected between his office and the lovely Bavarian landscape. But the 41-year-old Australian transplant isn’t complaining—the parking ramp is just one of the signs that he and the rest of Munich Airport’s marketing team are doing their jobs well. As the Manager of Traffic Development for the Asia Pacific and Southern Europe regions, this Sydney native has been responsible for bringing new airlines—thus new passengers—to the Bavarian capital for over five years. The ramp was one of the first parts to be completed on Munich Airport’s new Terminal 2, which will be up and running by 2003.Ironically, the view onto the construction site reminds him of his first year in Germany. “My first contact with the language was actually ‘Baustelle Bayerisch’ [‘building-site Bavarian’],” he notes, given that when he first decided to reside here permanently, back in September 1983, he was living off a Sydney savings account and had to do manual labor. “It isn’t one of the better forms of the language, but it is colorful!”
And while a working Australian in Germany is about as common as a kangaroo in the Black Forest—unlike the many Yanks and Brits populating Germany, our cousins from “Down Under” don’t seem to stick around—Crichton claims that this may be due to “Australia’s mythology, where it’s the lucky country and ‘everything is okay, mate,’ and life is good and the sun shines and there are lots of jobs and beaches. I don’t think that many Australians ever really envisage or imagine that they could live anywhere else.”
Crichton, however, says he loved Europe from day one. He came for the obligatory European rucksack tour in 1982, became fascinated by European history and met the German girl who was later to become his first wife. The two married and headed to Sydney, via India, to live for three years. There, Crichton received a marketing degree at a Sydney business college.
Soon enough, however, Crichton found himself unexpectedly homesick for Germany, and it was his second trip to the country that put him in touch with the aviation industry. After completing a Traffic Development internship, he was asked to stay on in the training center when the new Munich Airport officially opened for business, in 1992. “I instructed people in traffic, in customer service, held English courses. What didn’t I do?” Owing to Crichton’s former high-profile job as trainer, today, when the marketing man takes his daily walk, he is greeted throughout the terminal by his former students.
“I still like airports,” Crichton says, even after more than ten years in the business. “They’re groovy. You see people who are laughing, crying or kissing, arguing, impatient, frustrated—you see the whole range of emotions in one kilometer of building.” And the airport as a microcosm of human emotion has, especially following the terrorist events of September 11, become all the more true. As someone who has been doing marketing for a major international airport since 1996, Crichton affirms that the industry has been shaken to its very core. “My job will not get easier,” he says. “As the attacks were happening live on television, [the commentators] were saying it was comparable to the Gulf War. The changes that are now being imposed on us make the Gulf War look like a ‘Regionalliga.’”
Crichton is convinced that the industry will bounce back, and foresees it looking very different one year from now. Getting passengers interested in flying again will be difficult, but, according to Crichton, who routinely pops in to Kuala Lumpur for business meetings and returns overnight to Munich, people will start flying again. And he still loves the job: “When you stand on Kowloon and look across at the Hong Kong skyline and think, ‘wow, this is one of the great sites in the world,’” he says, “well, this is a nice bonus to any work day.”
