Aviation International News senior correspondent Ian Goold has been involved in aerospace since 1964 and in aviation media for more than 40 years. He enjoyed a 20-year career at Flight International magazine, where he was latterly air-transport editor before turning freelance in 1993. A winner of the European Regions Airline Association Hank McGonagle award for excellence in aerospace journalism and a Royal Aeronautical Society Aerospace Journalist of the Year global&nbsp;award, he has edited or contributed to aerospace and aviation magazines, special publications, and websites in Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Ian entered aerospace as an apprentice at the British Aircraft Corporation at Brooklands (Weybridge), where he worked on production and final assembly lines of the Vickers Super VC10, and BAC One-Eleven , and manufacture of Concorde major sub-assemblies. He subsequently graduated from the BAC Design Training School to work in the airframe structures drawing office (including design of international future projects, such as the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft) before joining Flight International in 1973. Apart from years of reading aircraft magazines and books, his first direct contact with aviation media had come during the early 1970s when he was involved at Brooklands with the Weybridge Man-powered Aircraft Group, which designed and built the tenth aircraft to fly under purely human power. As an aviation journalist, he has worked at more than&nbsp; 50 of the major biennial&nbsp;global and regional international aerospace industry shows at Le Bourget, Farnborough, Singapore, and Dubai (having missed attending only one "Farnborough" since 1960), plus innumerable NBAA, HAI, (U.S.) AOPA, and EBACE Conventions and ERA Assemblies. His favourite aircraft is the Hawker Hunter, of which – as a schoolboy – he heard hundreds make their first flights from Dunsfold, where also on September 24, 2013, he saw the penultimate landing of the VC10 (happily involving an example of which he had witnessed the maiden takeoff in 1970) a day before the last example made the design's final flight (unless, of course....).

Senior correspondent

Ian Goold

Having taken the initiative in UAE commercial aviation, Dubai has a higher airline and airport profile than that of capital city Abu Dhabi and the other emirates. Research group Oxford Economics (OE) predicts that the importance of Dubai’s aviation sector will grow over the next ten years.
Announcing study results jointly with local carrier Emirates Airline, it expects the aviation sector to contribute $44.5 billion to the emirate’s gross domestic product (or 32 percent of the whole) and to provide 372,900 jobs (or about 22 percent of total employment) by 2020 (up from the current 125,000 civil aviation jobs). That compares with the current $22 billion (28 percent of GDP) and 250,000 jobs (19 percent of all). OE calculates Dubai visitors’ expenditure supports more than 130,000 jobs and contributes $7.9 billion to local GDP.
In the past five years, non-domestic passenger numbers at Dubai International Airport have grown from 2005’s 24.8 million to 47.2 million in 2010. The 60-page report–“Explaining Dubai’s aviation model”–concludes that the local industry’s success stems from:
<ul>
<li>government awareness of aviation’s economic importance;</li>
<li>a consensus-based approach to investment;</li>
<li>Dubai’s "open skies" airline route policy;</li>
<li>a focus on growth and efficiently linking underserved markets; and</li>
<li>Dubai’s location between Africa, Asia and Europe and within eight hours’ flying time of two-thirds of the world’s population.</li>
</ul>

Dubai Set to Soar Say Oxford Experts

Research group Oxford Economics (OE) predicts that the importance of Dubai’s aviation sector will grow over the next ten years.

2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit

Dubai Airshow 2011

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