Airbus specialists
Video interviews
A market forecaster, an environment lead, a cabin designer and two engineers, on what a manufacturer decides to build.
Five Airbus specialists were filmed for this project, in seven separate interviews. The clips were published as Flash video and no longer play anywhere. What follows is the record of who spoke, what position they held, and the statement each interview was built around.
The group is worth noting for its composition: two engineers working on structures and future aircraft concepts, a market forecaster, an environment lead, and a cabin designer. Between them they covered the parts of the question the essay contributors mostly did not — how an aircraft manufacturer actually decides what to build.
Pascal Huet — Market Strategy, Market Research and Forecasts
“For a company like Airbus it is essential to have visions.”
The interview was titled around the observation that air traffic doubles every fifteen years, and Huet’s explanation of why a manufacturer must think in very long cycles is the most quoted passage: “For example, the A380, which has just begun to fly, was designed in the early 2000s and the production period will probably be 30 to 40 years. And the last aircraft manufactured will be used for another 30 years. So we’re talking about cycles of 70 to 80 years. That is the main reason why it is so important for us to look into the future.”
That arithmetic is the clearest justification anyone in the project gives for asking an eighty-five-year question. It is also, read now, quietly ironic: A380 production ended in 2021 after roughly fourteen years of deliveries, not the thirty to forty he assumed.
Rainer Von-Wrede — Head of Environment, Airbus Engineering
“What we want to achieve — not only in our business, but in our whole existence — is sustainable development.”
Von-Wrede gave two interviews, one on future energy resources and one on environmental challenges. Both sat in the flying is ecological section, alongside the essays from Atte Korhola and Paul Steele.
Ingo Wuggetzer — Head of Cabin Innovation and Design
“In 2093 traveling will be one part of your life, not simply a process for moving from A to B.”
Wuggetzer also gave two interviews, on future cabin design and on travel as a life experience. His statement on business models — that leisure flying might become free, cross-subsidised by retail and advertising, with airlines charging for personalised service — is recorded in the flying is good business section. The mechanism arrived; the free fare did not.
João Frota — Engineer, Future Aircraft Concepts
“In the future, the use of land will become an increasingly important issue. The use of air will solve these problems.”
The interview was framed around the idea that future aircraft are intelligent adapters. Frota’s land-use argument is the same one Christer Haglund and Atte Korhola make elsewhere on the site, arriving here from the aircraft-design side rather than from corporate affairs or environmental science.
Henrik Roesner — Senior Structural Engineer
“At the moment we are facing environmental challenges, but I’m sure we will overcome them.”
Roesner’s interview was titled “Inspired by nature”, and it is the one that had its own page in the original structure. That page is kept here, with what is known about the interview and about the structural research it referred to.
On the missing video
The clips were embedded with a player that required a browser plug-in discontinued in 2020, and the video files themselves were not preserved. Rather than present a dead player, these pages carry the quotations and attributions that the interviews were published with.
What is lost is not trivial. Huet’s forecasting numbers survive because they were transcribed into the page text around the video; the substance of the other six interviews exists only as the single line each was introduced with.