Kauko Helavuo, Studio Kauko Helavuo
My passion – the future of flying
The designer's own account of his method, and the specification list underneath every drawing.
Kauko Helavuo drew the five concept aircraft that became the most reproduced part of this project. His essay explains where they came from, and it is disarmingly unmethodical about it.
It begins with a child in a garden watching birds and wondering how they managed to fly so impressively with such apparent ease. Low-flying small aircraft were “a tremendous thrill for a small boy”. At eleven he was drawing strip cartoons of delta-wing jets in the sky and in space.
On his own account the concepts come from three things: decades of following technology closely, a long career in marketing and visual communications, and then “a considerable amount of lateral thinking, creative imagination and work.” He describes the goal as combining present technology with future solutions, on the grounds that “many innovations are already clearly predictable.”
His definition of the future
The line the project quoted most often is his answer to what the word means to him:
“For me, the definition of the word future is best described as inspirational and challenging. The future creates positive energy and it gives us the freedom to enjoy the world of knowledge and imagination. Furthermore, the future is always a beginning of something new.”
Kauko Helavuo, Studio Kauko Helavuo
That is a designer’s statement, not a forecaster’s, and the essay does not pretend otherwise.
The technical assumptions underneath the drawings
Where it becomes specific, it becomes checkable. Helavuo lists what he believes will direct the future of flying, and the list is the specification behind the five aircraft.
- Fossil fuels abandoned almost entirely by the second half of the century at the latest.
- The keys to successful fusion energy production found by 2030.
- Solar panels diversifying physically, production costs falling, generating capacity growing significantly.
- Cheap electricity used to produce hydrogen from water on a massive scale.
- New engine designs displacing polluting predecessors, capable of operating efficiently and economically at 30 to 40 kilometres altitude and Mach 4 to 8.
- Electric engines on small aircraft.
- A further class of engine generating thrust with no airflow and no combustion, needing only electrical energy.
Read against the concept sheets, the correspondence is exact. The Mach 4.5 cruise and 39,000-metre ceiling of the A600–850 M assume the high-altitude engine. The solar skin on nearly every concept assumes the panel cost curve. The three-seat hybrid assumes the small electric motor.
What came in and what did not
The solar assumptions were, if anything, conservative. Photovoltaic module costs fell faster than almost any 2008 projection, and installed capacity grew by orders of magnitude.
Electric propulsion on small aircraft arrived. Helavuo expected the first versions of his three-seater in the 2020s, and small electric vertical-take-off designs did reach flight testing and certification programmes in that decade — the closest thing in the project to a hit on both technology and date.
Hydrogen from cheap electricity became a real industrial programme rather than a thought experiment, though at a fraction of the scale implied here.
Fusion by 2030 did not happen, and the phrase he chose leaves room: finding the keys is not the same as generating power commercially. Experimental milestones were passed in the early 2020s; grid electricity was not. The Mach 4 to 8 airliner at 40 kilometres remains absent, and the thrust-without- airflow engine remains a speculation.
The honest thing about it
Helavuo is the only contributor who says outright that the visions rest on temperament: “perhaps everything is based on my way of living and thinking and of observing the ever-changing world around me.”
He is also, by the section’s own framing, the reason the concepts are interesting at all. An engineer constrained by what can be certified would not have drawn a 2,400-seat aircraft with a beauty parlour. A specification sheet that commits to a runway length for a Mach 4.5 airliner can be checked, and being checkable is more useful than being cautious.
The five concepts are indexed here, each with the figures as published.