GEORGES ELIAS NAJJAR

Emirates engineer, Beirut-born Dubai resident and host who fed every new hire

Georges Najjar landed in Dubai in the summer of 1989 with one suitcase, an engineering degree from the American University of Beirut and a note in his father's handwriting that said only, 'Work honestly, eat properly, call on Sundays.' He obeyed all three for thirty-five years. Born in Beirut in 1966, the son of an engineering professor, he had spent his teenage years studying by candlelight during the civil war, and he often said that anything built in Dubai afterwards felt, by comparison, almost miraculously easy.

He joined Emirates in 1991 as an aircraft maintenance engineer, when the airline was not yet seven years old, and rose over three decades to Senior Manager in Engineering Planning, a quiet specialist whose spreadsheets kept hundreds of flights on time. He was known across the hangars for two things: his refusal to sign off an unsafe job, and the long table in his Jumeirah apartment where every new engineer, whether Indian, Filipino, Egyptian or Irish, was invited for a first Lebanese meal. He mentored young engineers from a dozen countries and kept a framed photograph of every team he had ever led.

He met Carla, a nurse from Zahlé, at a church fundraiser in Dubai in 1995 and married her a year later. They raised two children, Elias and Maya, in a home that smelled of grilled lamb and cardamom coffee, and he never missed a school recital. When his father died in Beirut in June 2020, with the borders closed, he watched the funeral on a livestream in his Dubai living room, and said afterwards that it was the longest hour of his life. Georges died on 30 August 2024, aged fifty-eight, after a brief illness, and was laid to rest beside his father in Bhamdoun. He leaves Carla, Elias, Maya and his sister Rima, as well as colleagues in forty countries who call him family.

“Come and eat. The problem will still be here afterwards, and it will be smaller.”