After 25 years, she still ‘runs like a teen’
Thanks to her zest for life and work, Brown is not showing any signs of slowing down.
After 25 years at OR Tambo International Airport, Felicia Brown still “runs around like a teenager”, getting the job done.
Her Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) trajectory has seen her rise from information assistant at the airport information desk, to being an airline services agent at the help desk, to a supervisor in the same line, and now the head of department in operations coordination.
What keeps her going with vigour year after year, according to Felicia, is keeping focus on the one common element running through all of the roles she’s had, namely keeping passengers satisfied.
Thanks to her zest for life and work, Brown is not showing any signs of slowing down and considers herself to still be growing with ACSA, despite the long stretch she has already paved with the company.
She boasts an impeccable work ethic with not a single warning to her name, a record she wants to maintain right to the end of her career.
Apart from having a figurative blast over the years, avoiding an actual blast ended up being part of her successful long run in the airport environment.
She vividly remembers the shock and uncertainty caused by the bomb blast at the then Jan Smuts International Airport in 1994.
“It was crazy. I heard and felt a massive explosion and the next thing parts of the ceiling started coming off in the room I was in,” she recalled.
A car bomb, planted by the AWB, went off on election day in 1994, April 27. The blast left the concourse outside the airport’s International Departures terminal damaged along with a number of parked vehicles on the concourse. Several people were injured.
