THERE IS A BIG part of Martin Halstead that knows he’s a businessman, and a much smaller part that knows he is still a teenager. So, as you do when you can’t yet afford Savile Row but want to make an appropriate impression, he had his suit tailored in Hong Kong. Black, a faint pinstripe, nothing wrong with it at all. Except that on Martin, worn with shirt cuffs undone and dangling to his knuckles, you could mistake it for a sixth-form uniform.
I don’t say this to condemn him but because the blend of age-old business convention and faux casual youth (there is never anything casual about undone buttons) is masterly. When you meet Martin you notice that he has a few spots, as one might at 18, but after about two seconds it’s hard to see anything other than his boldness, his brightness and his Jamie Oliveresque conviction that if you believe something is worth doing you should go for it, no matter how many people tell you to stop.
So this week, while Jamie proved that 29-year-old chefs know more about kids’ nutrition than the nanny state, an 18-year-old called Martin Halstead launched an airline. From April 18 there will be two flights a day between Oxford and Cambridge, which, as academics and business people know, happen to be only 65 miles (105km) apart, but are separated by 118 miles of road and an even sillier train journey that goes through London. So for £49 a journey that takes between two-and-a-half and four hours will be possible in 18 minutes’ flying time, or 70 minutes when you add in a free shuttle service that deposits passengers in the city centres.
Martin, precociously wise as he is, gets fed up when business contacts recoil at his boyish appearance, but he also knows that preposterous youth in business equals notoriety, which equals the attention his venture needs. So he goes with it, let’s you know that he’s also pretty cool (“my one concern is coming across as some geeky whizzkid, which I’m not. I don’t sit in a dark room all day, I’m a very sociable person, I’m always up for having a good time”) and makes rather too many jokes about being a playboy (for information, he also says “I’m not a one-night-stand type of bloke”) and wanting an Aston Martin, though he is entirely serious about the latter.
As he is about his business, which happens to be his second — last year he sold his share in the first, which designed and sold flight simulators, and has used the capital from that and a modest inheritance from his grandmother to finance Alpha1 Airways. So where other 18-year-olds are building weighty student loans, Martin has started a business without borrowing any money, has moved back to his Mum’s modest semi, is managing without a salary (a tax-literate decision) and employs 31 staff. He intends to treat them well because, as his observation of the airline run by his role model Sir Richard Branson has proved, that is the key to treating your customers “like absolute gods”.
“My passion is starting things up and nurturing them. I’d like to be comfortable, but it’s not about millions of pounds. I want to make a mark,” Martin says. “There’s something very satisfying about knowing there’s a plane going from one place to another because you’ve told it to. It’s not megalomania, it’s doing it because you’ve come up with the idea.”
We are talking at Oxford airport just outside the city where he grew up in a fiendishly academic family — his mother, Susan, a curator at the British Museum, was a Mastermind finalist when she was 19. Martin was 13 months old when his parents separated — his father, an actor, now runs a theatre company in Dresden — and he grew into a voluble child, fascinated by drawing maps, and supportive of Susan when her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease kicked in.
He traces Alpha1 back to his first flight, at six, when he vowed to become a pilot. “From the minute I stepped on that BA 757 I knew it was something I wanted to do. It was strange because I was petrified of taking off, I absolutely hated it but loved it at the same time. The business of the airport, just being up there — whatever the weather is like down there you’re above it all, you’re always in the sunshine, no one can hurt you apart from yourself. I can’t think of anything better in the world. It’s mad when you consider I was petrified of doing it for three or four years, but that stopped just like that.”
By the age of 13 his talkative nature (he concedes he had “a bit of a gob”), red hair and small stature (he’s since grown) brought him to the attention of school bullies who broke his arm, and he left his comprehensive school for a public school.
“Without wanting to sound arrogant there was something different about me in comparison to a lot of guys and being bullied led me to hate school. Things happened which were unpleasant, but you get through and they make me who I am.”
He left school when he was accepted for pilot training at 17, became the youngest pilot in Europe (he will be first officer on some of his flights), and two months short of his 19th birthday he is in that happy place where obstacles are merely things to be overcome, rather than impediments to his aim. Within hours of the launch of Alpha1 on Monday the demand for the service was so great that his staff were inquiring about leasing 19-seater planes instead of eight-seaters, and Martin is talking to four more airports about additional routes.
These days he has an unquestionably easy and relaxed manner combined with the kind of focus that people with vision share, and the breadth of outlook that is a hallmark of his generation — one of his friends is a homeless man, and he hopes to employ him. By his own admission he is also impatient: “I can’t stay stagnant, I always want to set myself a further goal, not in the sense that I want to be better or prove myself, I just want something to work for.
“In the aviation industry people are either very welcoming or incredibly hostile. There’s an incredible amount of resistance. A day doesn’t go by when you don’t hit some kind of wall and you’ve got to rethink what you’re doing. I was finishing the website at midnight and parts of it weren’t working. Much cursing was heard, as my mother was aware. I feel it’s very important to have people around me to keep my feet on the ground. It would be very easy to get carried away with the attention I’m getting. I’d love to portray some playboy kind of image with my Aston Martin, James Bond . . . Maybe in a couple of weeks’ time. Not now.”
Alpha1 Airways: 0870 423647
www.flyalpha1.com
