Index
Sections of the collection
Five argued sections and three supporting strands, with who wrote what.
Departure 2093 was organised into five argued sections plus three supporting strands. This page indexes all of them, with a note on what each contains and who wrote it.
The five sections
Each section opened with a short position statement and then handed over to longer essays by named outside contributors. They were not written to agree with one another.
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01
Demand as a constant rather than a technology artefact. Christer Haglund on why airlines must forecast, Sirkka Heinonen on eighty-five years of social change, Andrew Hale on safety as a political compromise.
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02
Atte Korhola on land use as the century’s binding constraint, and Paul Steele of IATA auditing the industry’s own environmental targets from an imagined 2093.
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03
Kauko Helavuo on where the concept aircraft came from, and Heikki Haapavaara’s openly fictional account of a Monday-morning commute to orbit.
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04
Flying is a personal experience
The only primary research in the project: interviews with frequent flyers in Hong Kong, Milan and New York, reported by Salla Salokangas and Fredrik Heinonen of Miltton.
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05
Sirpa Juutinen of PricewaterhouseCoopers on responsibility moving inside the business, and Ingo Wuggetzer of Airbus on unbundled fares before anyone called them that.
The concept fleet
Future fleet images holds the five aircraft drawn for the project, each with its specification sheet reproduced as published. They run from a Mach 4.5 supersonic airliner to a three-seat rotor hybrid, and the small one is the only design that came close to happening.
Interviews and the futurist column
Video interviews records the five Airbus specialists who were filmed for the project — a market forecaster, an environment lead, a cabin designer and two engineers — along with the statement each interview was built around. The films themselves used a video format that no longer runs and were not preserved.
The futurist was a rotating guest column that ran alongside the sections. It carried nine essays from a deliberately mixed group, including Will Whitehorn of Virgin Galactic, José Cordeiro of The Millennium Project, a fashion designer and an auditor. It also carried Risto Isomäki’s argument about contrail warming and hydrogen, which is the most durable technical claim in the whole publication.
Reference
Links to the future reproduces the external reading list the project maintained, with a note on which entries still exist. Rather more than half do not.
The full contributor roster, with positions as stated in 2008, is on the main page.
How to read the collection
The sections were written independently and the contradictions between them were left in, which makes reading two adjacent pieces more useful than reading either alone.
Three disagreements are worth following deliberately. On what limits aviation this century, Atte Korhola says land and water rather than carbon, while Paul Steele treats propulsion technology as the whole problem. On what determines safety, Andrew Hale says regulation and political will, against a project consensus that assumes better hardware. And on whether markets resolve sustainability, Sirpa Juutinen’s carefully hedged account sits under a section introduction that promises rather more than she does.
The concept aircraft are best read after Helavuo’s own essay, because every specification follows from the technological assumptions he sets out there — fusion by 2030, hydrogen from cheap electricity, engines working at forty kilometres. Take those away and the numbers stop making sense. That is also why the one concept needing no new physics is the one that arrived.
Dates on these pages are the original publication dates from 2008 to 2011. Where a page assesses how a prediction turned out, that assessment is clearly separated from the material being assessed.