The man known to many as ?Mr. British Airways? has today announced he will leave the company this summer after a 41 year career.

Philip Troake has worked his way to the top of the BA operation on the Island after taking a part-time summer job as a student in 1965.

For the last 20 years he has been district manager and last month fulfilled his long term ambition to bring a full seven-day service between London and the Island. ?Now seems like the right time to go,? said Mr. Troake. ?It feels like a watershed. I have delivered on this career and it is time to look for a new challenge. But I have no plans at the moment.?

He intends to stay on Island but beyond that is keeping his options open. He said: ?I have no plans to leave Bermuda. I see there are opportunities here.?

When he leaves BA in June, Mr. Troake?s position will be rolled into the responsibilities of customer services manager Marianne Wilcox.

He is satisfied the new seven-day service between London Gatwick and Bermuda was the right move for the company. Even though it is still too early to make a firm assessment of the success of the daily service, he said forward booking figures were promising.

A decision on whether the daily service will be extended beyond the end of the peak months in October, or fall back to a four or five day service, will be made within the next month or so.

Mr. Troake said the assistance of the team around him ensured the event was a success. It is his colleagues he will miss most when he finally parts with the company. ?I?ve become almost part of the furniture. A lot of the people I now work with were not even born when I started here. But everyone moves on and no one is indispensable. My biggest regret is leaving behind the people here,? he said.

The sales office closed last December as part of ongoing streamlining which is seeing many BA offices around the world shut as more customers become used to booking tickets over the telephone or via the Internet.

This is an area where Bermuda is a particular leader with one of the highest percentage of Internet ?savvy? customers in the North America region.

During his 41 years with BA Mr. Troake has seen plenty of celebrities and world dignitaries pass through the airport and particularly remembers an occasion when South Africa?s last white leader F.W. de Klerk had to leave the no-smoking terminal building in order to enjoy a cigar.

Acknowledging the irony of the situation, Mr. de Klerk, who agreed the ending of apartheid and segregation in South Africa during the early 1990s, walked past with his unlit cigar and joked: ?I?m the oppressed minority.?

Without doubt the arrival of a daily London-Bermuda flight has given Mr. Troake most satisfaction. It is hard to imagine, but in 1991 BA seriously considered pulling out of Bermuda completely.

The company was routing its twice weekly flights to Bermuda and then on to other Caribbean destinations and Tampa in Florida.

At one point it boiled down to a stark choice of ending the Bermuda flight or ending the Tampa service. The company was losing $20 million a year on the route and needed to change its operation.

?It looked like the Bermuda flight was going to close. So I went to London to write a business report that would show how a Bermuda-only service could be profitable,? said Mr. Troake. ?It needed to be written by someone with local knowledge.?

He was sure that the business travellers, who were increasing in number as the Island?s reinsurance industry started to establish itself, would not want to travel back and forth from the UK by taking connecting flights from North America.

?I knew these guys and I knew they would rather jig themselves to our partial schedule to get a direct flight (rather than fly to New York first).?

?I wouldn?t say that I saved the service, but I contributed to it being saved,? he said.

Of the assistance given by Tourism Minister Ewart Brown and his staff, Mr. Troake said: ?There is a real partnership now, more than I can ever remember.?

Away from work Mr. Troake is finishing rebuilding work at his home and professes a love of cooking, beyond that he says: ?I have no plans, but I?m not going out to pasture just yet.?