Christer Haglund, Finnair
Welcome to the flight to 2093
Why a company that orders aircraft a decade before delivery has no choice but to think in decades.
Christer Haglund’s essay is the project’s opening statement, and its argument is narrower than the title suggests. It is not about 2093. It is about why a company that must order equipment a decade before it arrives has no choice but to think in decades.
He starts by conceding the obvious objection. “The most cynical among us say that forecasting is impossible, that one guess is as good as another. Others say that history repeats itself, while still others trust in the predictive power of statistics.” His answer is not that forecasting works, but that the asymmetry matters: “we can influence the future, but we can do nothing about the past.”
The Watson anecdote
The example he reaches for is the one every futures essay reaches for, and he uses it against himself. In 1943 Thomas J. Watson, then president and chief executive of IBM, is said to have estimated that the world needed about five computers. Haglund’s point is not that Watson was foolish. It is that “perhaps it is precisely the impossibility of forecasting that makes the study of the future so alluring”, and that scenarios remain necessary for business and social planning even when they are wrong.
The story is worth flagging as contested. The quotation is widely repeated and poorly sourced, and historians of computing have never located a reliable original. Haglund reports it as it circulated in 2008, hedged with “is said to have”.
Why an airline has to look further than next year
The operational core of the essay is specific. Delivery of a new aircraft can take up to a decade from the placing of the order, so an airline has to decide now what fleet it will need then, and how large. Glancing at tomorrow is not enough when the asset you are buying will still be flying in forty years.
He extends this to how companies get judged. “Investors, too, will increasingly ask companies about the future instead of the past. Yesterday’s numbers won’t tell what tomorrow, let alone the day after tomorrow, will look like.” Finnair had published a ten-year outlook called Vision 2017 the previous year; this project was the same exercise stretched to eighty-five.
One prediction in the essay is genuinely unusual, and it inverts the industry’s economics. At the beginning of the century, he writes, airlines paid landing charges for the right to bring customers to a destination. In future, “it will be those destinations that pay the most to airlines which will receive the most air traffic and passengers.”
That reversal did partly happen, though not by the mechanism he describes. Route subsidies, marketing agreements and airport incentive schemes in which a region pays a carrier to serve it became routine, particularly for low-cost operators and secondary airports. The landing charge did not disappear. It simply stopped being the only direction money flowed.
The defence of aviation
The essay’s last third is an argument for flying as such, and it rests on two numbers. Air transport accounts for roughly two per cent of world carbon dioxide emissions, while an estimated eight per cent of world GDP depends on flying. “It’s hard to think of another global industry that is as efficient.”
Then the land-use point that recurs across the whole project: as population grows, more space is needed for food production, and land cannot be given over indefinitely to moving people around. “In the air, however, there is room to move. With a three kilometer runway, we can travel anywhere in the world, but with the same amount of road or rail we can travel only three kilometers.”
He closes by asking what would happen if flying stopped, and answers that interaction between developed and developing countries would contract sharply, pushing the latter toward choices that weaken sustainable development further.
The two-per-cent-of-emissions figure has been contested since, mainly because carbon dioxide is not aviation’s whole climate effect — a point made elsewhere on this site by Atte Korhola in his own essay, which puts the total possible share of climate-warming emissions nearer ten per cent by 2050. The eight-per-cent GDP figure comes from industry estimates of aviation’s economic footprint and counts tourism and trade enabled by air links, not aviation’s own output.