Section 01
Flying is popular
Three contributors on why people will still want to fly, and on what will decide how safely they do it.
The section’s opening claim is blunt, and it is a claim about people rather than about aircraft: “People have always had a natural need to move as well as to discover and experience the world. No virtual phenomenon can replace a genuine experience or relationship with another person.”
That sentence was written in 2008, before video calling was ordinary. It is the argument the whole section rests on: that demand for flying is not a technology artefact that better telepresence will eventually erase, but something closer to a constant. The section then adds a second claim, which is political rather than psychological — “when people move and knowledge flows, wellbeing and affluence increase and the risk of conflict falls.”
Three contributions
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01
Christer Haglund, Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and Corporate Communications at Finnair, on why an airline has to forecast at all — and on Thomas J. Watson’s estimate that the world needed about five computers.
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02
Sirkka Heinonen, professor at the Finland Futures Research Centre, on what changes across eighty-five years and what does not. The longest essay in the project, and the one least about aeroplanes.
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03
Andrew Hale, professor of safety science at Delft University of Technology, arguing that the safety level reached in 2093 will be set by regulation and political pressure rather than by hardware.
Where the three disagree
Haglund writes from inside a company that must commit capital a decade ahead of delivery. His interest in forecasting is operational: an airline ordering aircraft now is implicitly betting on what its fleet should look like when they arrive. Heinonen writes from the opposite end. She is explicit that across eighty-five years the interesting variables are values, ethics and inequality, not airframes, and she leans on Ray Kurzweil’s expectation that after roughly 2040 technological change becomes too fast to extrapolate.
Hale is the dissenting voice, and the most concrete. His essay refuses the premise that safety is a technical trajectory at all. Safety, he argues, is what is left after trade-offs against airspace capacity, bad-weather operation, cost and political pressure. He points out that in 2008 the gap in safety between regions was already large — Europe, North America and Australia averaging better than parts of South America, Africa and Asia — and that the gap between commercial airlines and freight, business, private and marginal aviation was larger still.
His comparison is to flags of convenience in shipping, and to the port state control regime built to counter them. He notes that aviation had begun moving the same way, with the United States and the European Union operating blacklists of airlines barred from landing, and other countries following. He is not optimistic that this scales, because inspection cannot always detect danger and because landing rights are a diplomatic currency.
Reading it in hindsight
The demand argument held. Global air traffic recovered after the 2020 collapse faster than most published forecasts allowed for, which is at least consistent with the section’s claim that the appetite to travel is not easily substituted.
Hale’s argument held too, though not comfortably. Regional safety divergence remained a live issue long after 2008, and the EU list of banned carriers remained in force and in use. His narrower point — that the binding constraint would be governance rather than instrumentation — describes the subsequent decade better than a hardware-led account would.
Heinonen’s essay is the hardest to score, which she would probably consider the point. Some of her specifics are simply of their time: the iPod as a marker of change, “the Sixth Life” as a name for universal access to virtual reality, an assumed collapse of the internet. Her structural claim, that the digital gap would close while the gap between rich and poor would deepen, is not a prediction anyone can settle from an aviation site.