The project
Main page
What Departure 2093 set out to do, how it was organised, and everyone who contributed.
Departure 2093 opened in November 2008 with a single question on its main page: what will the world be like in eighty-five years’ time, and how will we fly then? The answer offered was not one answer. “There are no absolute answers,” the introduction said, “but the visions are fascinating.”
The project was published by Finnair in its eighty-fifth year of operation, with Airbus, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the communications agency Miltton named as partners. Its structure was unusually rigid for a corporate publication: five sections, each led by a named outside expert, each free to disagree with the others. The concept aircraft that became the site’s most widely reproduced element were drawn by graphic designer Kauko Helavuo of Studio Kauko Helavuo.
How the material was organised
Each of the five sections opened with a short statement of position and then linked to longer essays. The statements were written to be assertions, not summaries.
- Flying is popular. “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.”
- Flying is ecological. The section opened by naming fuel price and emissions as the two biggest drawbacks to flying in 2008, and then asserted that both “will be history in 50 years”.
- Flying is an adventure. “The purpose of traveling is not always the destination.” Sometimes speed matters; sometimes gliding above a coral reef in an airship matters more.
- Flying is a personal experience. Built on trend interviews with frequent-flying young adults in Hong Kong, Milan and New York.
- Flying is good business. “It is hard to resist profit” — the argument that sustainability arrives through the income statement rather than through conviction.
Two further strands ran alongside the sections. The futurist column carried standalone essays, mostly technical, and rotated its lead article. The video interviews section held filmed conversations with five Airbus specialists.
The poll
A rotating poll sat on the main page. The question recorded in the archive asked visitors whether they would be interested in travelling to space if they could afford it. Sixty-seven per cent answered yes, twenty per cent no, and thirteen per cent were not sure. The sample was self-selecting visitors to an aviation futures microsite, so it says more about who was reading than about public opinion. It is still a striking split for 2008, four years before the first commercial crewed suborbital flights were being seriously scheduled.
Who contributed
The contributor list is worth setting out in full, because the project’s method was to let specialists answer within their own discipline and leave the contradictions visible.
- Christer Haglund — Senior Vice President, Public Affairs and Corporate Communications, Finnair
- Sirkka Heinonen — Professor, Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School of Economics and Business Administration
- Andrew Hale — Professor of Safety Science, Delft University of Technology
- Atte Korhola — Professor of Environmental Change, University of Helsinki
- Paul Steele — Director, Aviation Environment, International Air Transport Association
- Risto Isomäki — science writer and environmental activist
- Kauko Helavuo — graphic designer and photographer, Studio Kauko Helavuo; creator of the future fleet images
- Heikki Haapavaara — journalist, chairman of the Finnish Association of Aviation Journalists
- Sirpa Juutinen — Director, Corporate Social Responsibility Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers Oy
- Salla Salokangas — Account Manager, Consumer and Trends, Miltton
- Fredrik Heinonen — Head of International Operations, Miltton
- Airbus: Pascal Huet (Market Strategy, Market Research and Forecasts), Rainer Von-Wrede (Head of Environment, Airbus Engineering), Ingo Wuggetzer (Head of Cabin Innovation and Design), João Frota (Future Aircraft Concepts), Henrik Roesner (Senior Structural Engineer)
What has and has not aged well
Some of the technical predictions were simply wrong. No airline cruises at Mach 4.5, and the nanoceramic airframe of the A600–850 M does not exist. The zero-emission long-haul aircraft that Paul Steele’s section discussed as a 2057 target is not on anyone’s near-term roadmap.
Other calls look better. Ingo Wuggetzer’s argument that flying would fragment into many business models rather than converge on one has held up well. Helavuo’s small three-seat hybrid, which he expected in the 2020s, is recognisably the electric vertical-take-off class that reached certification programmes in that decade. And the framing that Sirkka Heinonen insisted on — that the constraint is what people choose to value, not what engineers can build — is the part of the project that reads least like 2008.
The material is presented here as it was argued, with attributions intact. Where a filmed interview no longer exists, the page carries the quotation and the speaker’s position rather than a dead player.