Apinan, 57, is the second THAI pilot to have been elevated to the CEO position at the airline.

"Pilot or not, it is not important. CEOs of airlines around the world have come from operations, finance, marketing, or even from outside selection," he said in an interview last week.

"It depends on the career path of each person, their job competency and their interest in management. At the end of the day, each airline CEO must understand and practise airline management."

As a veteran insider, Apinan is well accepted by THAI staff, who have become weary of the Transport Ministry's selection of outside CEOs - with their lack of intimate knowledge of the airline industry.

Apinan used to manage 1,200 THAIs pilots, 500 of them captains, and he talked passionately about the carrier's strict pilot training programme.

The new THAI CEO's overriding vision is to strengthen all areas of weakness which could affect the airline's performance, as well as bolstering its ability to weather uncertainties such as rising oil prices, bird flu, and disasters such as the 2004 tsunami.

"We don't want to become the best-service airline or the number-one airline. These are loose terms. We want to be the most secure airline, and our strength must come from within and not externally. We want to be able to grow for the future," Apinan said.

"We have to go back to the basics of efficiency and quality by working on the processes of each unit."

By this, Apinan sees the 1980s as an era of business processing and the 1990s as entailing transforming processes into quality and efficiency, such as the ISO standard. Since 2000, he says businesses have had to compete with speed and therefore managing risk is a vital element of airline management.

Unlike manufacturers that have products and inventories, Apinan said an airline had just one product - but a very high-cost one.

Explaining the uniqueness of the industry as a business, he said that when a flight, for example, missed its departure time, it faced immediate expiry and could be kept as stock. In addition, an airline is a high-cost and low-margin business.

The new CEO is an avid reader of management issues related to the airline industry. He started reading the management textbooks that his wife had six or seven years ago when she was taking a master's degree in public administration political science at Thammasat University.

He then started to delve into the details, as THAI was implementing the ISO9000 certified quality-control project. Since then he has overseen the implementation of certified quality and safety standards set by the International Airline Travel Association.

These activities highlight the importance of processes in determining efficiency and quality, which lie at the heart of business success.

In implementing his vision, Apinan said his chief avenue was to work through each of the airline's three executive vice presidents, who operate as chief financial officer, chief operating officer and chief marketing officer. Good planning, clear objectives and speed of implementation are vital elements of success.

Asked about how he would handle politics - which has often plagued THAI in the past - the new president referred to "Distressed State Airline Syndrome", written by an airline expert.

State airlines have been disappearing and the book outlines ways to deal with politics by plugging the various weaknesses. It provides a formula for managing state airlines for survival. "As a Thai, I want to preserve this national asset," he said.