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The next and ninth IATA director general (DG) will be a woman and someone who has never worked at an airline.
This is a wow moment for an association that represents more than 370 airlines and has been led by former airline CEOs for most of its history, all of them male and of European descent.
Saadia Zahidi, who takes up the role Nov. 1, does not fit the mold. She is a Pakistani-Swiss citizen who is managing director at the World Economic Forum (WEF). She has served on the United Nations Secretary-General panel for Women’s Economic Empowerment and the European Space Agency’s High-Level Advisory Group. She is the author of Fifty Million Rising, tracking the rise of working women in the Muslim world.
Zahidi will bring economic and global affairs expertise to her new role. The question is whether having an IATA leader with no airline operations experience is beneficial or risky when the airline industry faces so much turmoil and challenges to its operations. IATA is a dual-role organization. Its many systems and programs that serve airline business and safety needs, like the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) and settlement systems, are handled by IATA staff and don’t require the DG’s direct assistance. The DG is vital in bringing together hundreds of competing airlines to prioritize and support common issues. The DG must know what questions to ask transport ministers, regulators, suppliers and others, and how to field their answers and questions. That could be more challenging for a DG without airline operations experience.
Zahidi will succeed Willie Walsh, someone who is much more typical of the IATA board’s pick for the top job. Walsh is Irish, a pilot, and was CEO at two airlines then at International Airlines Group before becoming IATA DG. He is regarded as something of an industry maverick, but he is still very much of the industry and will remain so. This summer he took on the role of CEO at Indian carrier IndiGo, an IATA member airline, marking the first time a DG has returned to being an airline CEO.
The IATA board, meanwhile, would not have been without potential candidates from within the industry, including several airline CEOs who have recently retired or left their positions.
Yet the board chose to go outside. The likely reasoning is that the board decided it could keep things like IOSA and the settlement systems ticking along with the deep expertise embedded in IATA staff. And in picking the new DG they decidedly wanted someone with a different profile who could put aviation issues into a new and larger context.
WEF is a different animal than IATA. The organization brings various businesses together to think about lots of things. IATA brings competing airlines together to support specific issues facing their businesses. That puts a different context to convening, but the essential skill is the same.
IATA board chair and LATAM Airlines Group CEO Roberto Alvo also pointed to the thinking behind Zahidi’s selection in his welcoming announcement. “Saadia’s appointment comes at a moment of significant change in the international environment. Technology and geopolitics, among others, will reshape the industry in the future and Saadia brings the right skills to effectively articulate what our industry needs to continue connecting people and economies safely, efficiently and sustainably. She’ll bring a fresh perspective to IATA that will grow its support for the airline industry on the foundations of IATA’s well-established technical, financial and data capabilities,” he said.
“A fresh perspective” are key words. The air transport industry, and airlines in particular, have faced unprecedented turmoil over recent years and the crises seem to churn out faster than ever. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made airspace over those regions inaccessible to many airlines, forcing canceled routes or lengthy, fuel-guzzling diversions. COVID shut down global air travel and wrecked airline balance sheets. The ongoing Iran war has led to more airspace closures, massive disruptions to the major Gulf hubs in the region, and unanticipated sky-high jet fuel prices. Yet people keep flying and the industry, by and large, is faring well. At the 2026 Farnborough Airshow, orders for hundreds of new airliners and engines were announced.
IATA chief economist and SVP sustainability Marie Owens Thomsen likes to say the airline industry is resilient but not robust. IATA still forecasts that the world’s airlines will remain profitable in 2026, but their collective profit will be halved from 2025’s assumptions and margins will be single-digit miserable.
On top of that, airlines are battling against the supply chain’s massive production failures, the increasingly questionable—and self-set—timeline of 2050 to become carbon net zero (questionable mostly because of the dire lack of sustainable aviation fuel) and continued inefficient and mismanaged air traffic management systems.
These and more challenges will be on Zahidi’s agenda from November. It could well be the right time for a fresh perspective from the top. But Zahidi may want to keep her seat belt fastened at all times as she takes on her first aviation role; the air transport industry always faces turbulence.
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