85-year-old Finnair envisions flying cruise vessels 85 years from now

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Bruno Lucander established an airline called Helsingin Aero on March 1st 1923, 85 years ago.
      Aero got its first plane, a Junkers F13 four months later. If he would have had the time, he might have pondered visions of what the company that he set up, and the whole business, would have been like 85 years later, in the autumn of 2008.
     
The task would have been a challenge. Lucander’s first aircraft was a single-engine plane covered with corrugated metal, which carried four or five passengers from Katajanokka on the southern tip of Helsinki to Tallinn. In the wintertime, the plane took off from the sea ice with skis underneath, and when there was open water, it landed on pontoons.
      Lucander could never have imagined that 85 years later planes of the airline that he set up would be taking off from massive airports with four-engine jets, carrying nearly 300 passengers distances of up to 12,000 kilometres, or that it would employ 10,000 people and that it would carry nine million passengers a year, or that it’s name would be Finnair.
      Lucander was a skillful businessman, but aviation was developing so quickly that predicting it would have been quite impossible.
     
This has not impeded Lucander’s successors. To mark its anniversary, Finnair published not a history, but a future vision - a number of visions of what aviation might be like 85 years in the future.
      The visions, in a book called Departure 2093 - Five visions of future flying and the accompanying drawings make fascinating reading, even for those who do not take the visions too seriously.
      In 2093 aircraft might resemble large cruise ships.
      The Airbus A1700-2400 Cruiser resembles a giant swimming pool, and carries thousands of passengers in small cabins.
      The cabins could be capsules that the passengers themselves fly to the giant aircraft directly from their homes.
      The A600-850 would fly short routes with fewer than 1,000 passengers. The device, resembling an oversized pancake, takes off vertically, so no runway is needed. The flight speed is 4.5 times the speed of sound.
     
Naturally Finnair would offer rides into outer space space in a way described by journalist Heikki Haapavaara in the most astounding part of the future vision.
      All of this is to be made possible by the dizzying development of technology. Emissions problems will be solved already in the next few decades. The industry has promised emission-free operations by 2057.
     
In the book, Finnair admits that envisioning events so far into the future is a hopeless task. It would also have been impossible for Lucander, already considering that progress that has taken place so far in aviation has been anything but linear.
      Progress was very rapid until 1969, when the first wide-body passenger airliner, the Boeing 747, was introduced, the first supersonic passenger plane was developed (Concorde), and when the first lunar mission took place. They were great leaps, after which progress has been slower.
      Both manned lunar space flights and the Concorde have passed into aviation history, without any successors as yet.


Links:
  Finnair press release: Depart with Finnair into the future - 85 years ahead

Helsingin Sanomat