Guest column
The futurist
Nine essays from a deliberately mixed group, including the most durable technical claim in the whole publication.
The futurist column ran alongside the five main sections and worked differently from them. Where the sections were fixed, this rotated: a single guest essay held the lead position and the rest moved into an archive. It is where the project’s sharpest technical writing appeared, and also its loosest.
The lead essay for much of the column’s life was Risto Isomäki’s on aviation fuel, and it is the one piece in the whole project that reads as though it could have been written considerably later.
Isomäki on why hydrogen is a trap
Isomäki, a science writer and environmental activist, starts from a position most of the project shares: “By that time, the era of kerosene manufactured from oil will definitely be over.” He then attacks the obvious replacement.
His argument is about contrails rather than about carbon. The white condensation trails left by jet aircraft, he writes, may heat the planet as much as ten times more than the carbon dioxide produced by air traffic. The mechanism he describes is asymmetric: contrails cool the Earth while the sun is shining, but at night the heating effect is much stronger. When they disperse they often form cirrus cloud indistinguishable from natural cover, which keeps warming after the trail itself is gone.
From there the case against hydrogen follows arithmetically. A jet burning hydrogen instead of kerosene produces almost three times more water vapour. Hydrogen also takes more volume than kerosene, so hydrogen aircraft would have to fly higher, keeping their exhaust trails aloft longer. He cites an estimate that contrails from hydrogen-burning aircraft would heat the Earth thirteen times more than those from the aircraft flying in 2008.
His alternatives are unglamorous. Keep roughly the current type of aircraft but design them to fly a couple of kilometres lower when useful, since lowering cruise altitude on evening and night flights enough to prevent contrail formation is the cheapest way to cut the heating effect. Or make kerosene from wood, single-celled algae or other biomass by the Fischer-Tropsch process, or use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and then to kerosene. He also raises long-distance propeller aircraft, which fly lower where a wider range of biofuels works, burn less fuel and produce very few contrails.
How that argument has held up
Very well, and better than the aviation industry’s own position in the same publication. Non-carbon dioxide effects, contrail cirrus foremost among them, became a central topic in aviation climate research, with several major assessments concluding that they contribute more to aviation’s warming effect than its carbon dioxide does.
Contrail avoidance through small altitude adjustments — exactly Isomäki’s cheapest option — became an active operational research programme, tested with real airline flights, because a modest number of flights create most of the persistent contrails.
His scepticism about hydrogen also aged well, though the industry’s hesitation has been driven more by storage volume, infrastructure and cost than by his water-vapour argument. It is worth being careful about his specific multipliers: the ten-times and thirteen-times figures were contested in 2008, and the research since has produced a range rather than a settled number. The direction of his argument is now mainstream. The precision is not.
The rest of the column
The archive collected essays from a deliberately mixed group. Two were aviation professionals; most were not.
- Will Whitehorn, then president of Virgin Galactic, on the future of space travel — arguing that space tourism might lead the development of human ventures into space over the following twenty years.
- José Cordeiro, director at The Millennium Project, contributed twice: on whether there will be enough energy for civilisation in 2093, and on the shift from biological to technological evolution.
- Kimmo Ruotsalainen, marketing director at Finavia, on what airports will look like — pointing at new aircraft under development, heightened security concerns, growing demand for non-stop flights, and above all new communication technology.
- Patrick Gavin, executive vice-president of engineering at Airbus, on the company’s student competitions as a way of shaping aviation.
- Jan Holmberg, chief executive and managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers Oy, asking what will determine a company’s value in 2039, and whether there could be six billion auditors worldwide.
- Lisa Sounio, brand and design expert, on flying and creativity: “Every time the aircraft takes off, I feel freedom and creativity pouring into my brain.”
- Patrik Prusak, fashion designer, on future clothing in fact and fiction, and on the science-fiction assumption that everyone in the future dresses alike.
- Fredrik Heinonen, deputy managing director at Miltton, on the young creative generalist: “I’m troubled. I just turned 35 and feel like a dinosaur.”
What the column was for
Read as a set, these are not aviation essays. Two of the nine are about aircraft at all. The rest use flying as an occasion to write about energy, evolution, clothing, auditing or middle age.
That looseness is the column’s function. The five main sections had to argue the case for flying; the futurist column did not have to argue anything, which is why the one genuinely awkward piece of technical analysis in the project — Isomäki’s, contradicting the industry’s preferred replacement fuel — appeared here rather than in the ecological section where it belonged.