You don’t have to look further than Angela Gittens, the director general at Airports Council International, to find one of the greatest inspirational leaders in aviation.
     Angela has been advancing greater women’s rights and opportunities and bettering the airport and airline business for almost longer that anybody can remember.
     Aviation is lucky that she grew up watching airplanes at JFK International Airport.
     It is not hard to imagine that she was always destined to be at the airport, and the levels of her achievement are both wonderful and amazing to think about.
     She has been an airport leader during a career that spans an era when she was the only woman in a top leadership position at any airport.
     Angela was recruited from San Francisco General Hospital and became deputy director of Business and Finance at San Francisco airport on the strength of her ability and solid reputation at both city agencies.
     Later she gained even more respect and greater fame in airport circles as top executive at Atlanta and then Miami International Airport.
     You might expect that Angela encountered some challenges connected to race and gender, but if that were the case, it didn’t slow her down a bit.
     “I am who I am … I can’t control how someone else perceives a person who is black, who is a female,” she says.
     Folks attending the Global Airport Leaders’ Forum (GALF) taking place alongside the Airport Show in Dubai from May 11- 12, 2015, can hear Angela speak on a panel with Raymond Benjamin, secretary general of ICAO, and Hussein Dabbas, regional vice president for the Middle East and North Africa, IATA.
     Almost alone at the top amongst the boys, one can expect Angela to tell it like it is.
http://www.globalairportleadersforum.com
Sabiha/Flossie