Glamor and ambition in a framework of absolute control. Or: The rise of Emirates as the world’s largest long-haul carrier: Malcolm Campbell asks if Dubai’s Emirates airline “running out of sky,” in an in-depth report for Bloomberg Businessweek. Tracing back the origins of the airline’s founding, Campbell writes about how Emirates “has grown from a two-plane operation at a desert airstrip into a force whose every movement rumbles through global aviation.” He says: “The airline’s growth is inseparable from that of Dubai, with both straining the laws of financial and physical gravity.”

Emirates has become the world’s largest long-haul carrier by never relaxing its grip — on employees, on airplane manufacturers, or on its own ambitions. The scope of Emirates’ reach from Dubai is vast: Two-thirds of the world’s population lives within the radius of an eight-hour flight. While the airline is adamant it never received subsidies since its startup grant, “there’s no question it’s operated in an environment that drives Western airlines mad with envy,” Campbell writes. “For starters, Dubai won the geographic lottery. From a fuel and flight-time perspective, the Persian Gulf is the most efficient place on the planet to connect Europe with Southeast Asia and Australia, and the U.S. with India. Strikes and protests aren’t an issue — unions are banned, and rights to free speech and assembly are severely limited. Corporate and income taxes are nil. And then there are the advantages of being the favored corporation of an absolute ruler whose word is literally law. Unlike Heathrow Airport and Los Angeles International, where the rights of nearby citizens to sleep without jet noise must be respected, Dubai International Airport runs at full speed 24 hours a day, allowing Emirates to optimize connection times for a network that spans from Buenos Aires to Christchurch, New Zealand.”

President Tim Clark, who was been with Emirates since its founding in 1984, has a marked impact on the airline and its performance. His tenure as company president, Campbell writes, “has been defined by bold gestures, and he relishes recounting occasions when a seemingly doomed gamble went his way. He’s claimed credit for silencing naysayers who told him that reviving the Jet Age concept of an onboard bar, in Emirates’ case on the upper deck of the A380, would be an expensive folly that no passenger would bother using. (They very much do.) The same goes for the airborne showers in first class, requiring planes to take off with 2.2 metric tons of water.” However, as most viable routes are already heavily served, Emirates has been forced to go farther afield to keep growing, and Clark concedes that “Emirates’ emergence as a boundary-pushing titan of global aviation was an outcome of an era that may now be at an end.”

The airline is facing a number of new risks. Betting on the growth of what development economists call the Global South — the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America — “the airline is at risk if those emerging markets don’t, in fact, emerge.” Besides the tempered demand and economic prospects, US airlines are likely to challenge the Open Skies agreement that allows unlimited flights between the GCC and the US. US carriers Delta, American, and United, along with several industry unions, are already petitioning the incoming Trump administration to revisit the agreement. “Their argument, that deep-pocketed foreigners are threatening American jobs by flooding the market with subsidized capacity, was once seen in business circles as a long shot—but it happens to resonate precisely with President-elect Donald Trump’s stated view of the world. Similar efforts are afoot in Europe.” Campbell sounds an ominous warning, saying: “In the 70-odd years of large-scale commercial aviation, no airline has managed to stay on top for long. Pan Am was the last word in intercontinental glamor in its day, and its day came to an end.”

You can listen to the story being discussed on Bloomberg radio here (runtime 11:25).