Aviation futures, 1923-2093
The future of flying: what aviation could become by 2093
The future of flying, as eleven named specialists described it in 2008 — futures researchers, Airbus engineers, an IATA director and a graphic designer. Their answers, and how they have aged.
Eighty-five years is the span Departure 2093 gave its contributors when it asked them what the future of flying would actually look like. Not a decade, not a product cycle: long enough that almost every assumption behind today’s aviation industry gets to expire. The site opened in November 2008, published by Finnair, which had been flying for eighty-five years at that point and chose to mark the anniversary by looking the same distance forward instead of back.
What came out of it was not a forecast. It was a set of arguments, filed by people who work on different parts of the problem and who plainly disagreed with each other. A futures researcher, an environmental scientist, an IATA director, four Airbus engineers, a graphic designer, a trend analyst and an aviation journalist each answered the same question from their own corner. This site collects those contributions and the five concept aircraft that were drawn to go with them.
Five expert views on the future of flying
The material was organised into five sections, each opening with a short position statement and then handing over to longer essays. The framing was deliberately argumentative rather than neutral: each section asserts something about why people will still fly in 2093. Between them the five sections are the closest thing the project produced to a thesis on the future of flying, and the full section index lists every part of the collection with a note on who wrote what.
- Flying is popular — Christer Haglund of Finnair, futures researcher Sirkka Heinonen of the Finland Futures Research Centre, and Andrew Hale, professor of safety science at Delft University of Technology, on demand and on risk.
- Flying is ecological — Atte Korhola, professor of environmental change at the University of Helsinki, and Paul Steele, then director of aviation environment at IATA, on emissions and on whether the industry’s own targets were credible.
- Flying is an adventure — Kauko Helavuo, who drew the concept fleet, and Heikki Haapavaara, chairman of the Finnish Association of Aviation Journalists, on travel as something other than transport.
- Flying is a personal experience — Salla Salokangas and Fredrik Heinonen of Miltton, reporting what frequent flyers in Hong Kong, Milan and New York said they actually wanted.
- Flying is good business — Sirpa Juutinen of PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ingo Wuggetzer of Airbus, on whether sustainability and profit can be the same line item.
Reading them together is the interesting part, because the five accounts of the future of aviation contradict one another in places. Korhola treats land use as the binding constraint of the next century. Heinonen treats values and choices as the binding constraint. Juutinen assumes a chief executive will do the right thing only once it triples a day’s sales. None of them were asked to reconcile their views.
The future fleet: five concept aircraft
Alongside the essays, graphic designer Kauko Helavuo produced five aircraft concepts, each with a full specification sheet. They range from plausible to frankly speculative, and the specification sheets are worth reading precisely because they commit to numbers.
The A600–850 M is a supersonic long-haul design with a nanoceramic fuselage and a claimed cruise of Mach 4.5. The A600–850 is its short-haul sibling, capable of vertical take-off on eight engines. The A1700–2400 Cruiser carries up to 2,400 passengers in cabins and devotes a remarkable amount of its documentation to parachutes. An aircraft for everyone is the modest one: a three-seat helicopter–aeroplane hybrid the designer expected to appear in the 2020s. The space hotel’s service ship serves an orbital hotel at 500 kilometres, and serves no food.
Set against what actually happened, the concepts read unevenly. Nobody is cruising at Mach 4.5. But electric vertical take-off aircraft in the three-to-five-seat class did arrive roughly on the schedule Helavuo gave them, and commercial suborbital flight did become a real, if small, business. The full set is indexed on the future fleet images page.
Why 2093 rather than a round number
The date is arithmetic, not symbolism. Finnair was founded in 1923 and the project ran in 2008, its eighty-fifth year; projecting the same eighty-five years forward lands on 2093. Sirkka Heinonen makes the point that this is a useful distance precisely because nobody can be held to it. Far enough out, a forecast stops being a commercial claim and becomes a statement about values.
The futurist column ran separately from the five sections and was where the technical arguments got sharpest. Risto Isomäki’s piece on fuel is the one that has aged best: he argued that hydrogen was a trap, because a hydrogen-burning jet produces roughly three times the water vapour of a kerosene one and would need to fly higher, so its contrails would linger. Contrail warming, he wrote, could exceed the carbon dioxide effect of air traffic by an order of magnitude. That claim was contested in 2008 and remains an active research question.
What is collected here, and what it says about aviation
The five section indexes, the individual essays, the concept aircraft with their specification sheets, the video interview summaries from Airbus engineers, and the futurist column — a reasonably complete record of how one group of specialists described the future of flying in 2008, and of how much of the future of aviation they got right. Where the original material was a video that no longer plays anywhere, the page records what was said and who said it rather than presenting a dead player.
One small thing worth noticing on the way in: the poll that ran on the project’s main page asked whether visitors would travel to space if they could afford it. Sixty-seven per cent said yes.