The future of flying
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The pandemic has been very hard on commercial aviation, but most experts believe the sector will soon be growing again – fast. The BBC's Theo Leggett takes a look at what new technologies are out there. Sandra Bour Schaeffer, Chief Executive of Airbus Upnext, tells him what the aviation giant is planning for the future. Neil Cloughley, from the much smaller Faradair Aerospace, makes the case for why their hybrid-electric technology is the way forward for flying. On the other hand, Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic says that, two decades after the end of supersonic jet Concorde, it's time for airliners to break the sound barrier once again. But if we want to protect the environment, should we be flying at all? Matt Finch, UK policy director of the Brussels-based lobby group Transport and Environment, says yes - but not quite so often. (Image: the ZEROe blended wing body concept, Credit: Airbus)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Theo Leggart. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.2 | In this program, we'll be looking at the future of flying. |
| 0:08.8 | With environmental pressures growing, new players in the industry are experimenting with greener tech, |
| 0:14.1 | like electric and hybrid planes. |
| 0:16.2 | Let's get people used to using aircraft as they would a bus. |
| 0:19.4 | Let's start putting these aircraft around the world, |
| 0:21.5 | Africa, China. And what about supersonic travel? It was the dream that died, but could new technology |
| 0:28.1 | allow super fast aircraft to become a unifying force? We can have a world in which our kids can |
| 0:33.9 | not just read about other cultures and textbooks and YouTube videos, but actually go and break bread and meet people from every continent. |
| 0:41.4 | So please put your tray table in the upright position, sit back, buckle up, and enjoy the ride on Business Daily from the BBC. An Airbus A380 Super Jumbo lands at London's Heathrow Airport. It's an inspiring site. |
| 1:06.4 | The two-decker four-engine giant is an engineering marvel and was once seen by the company as the future of aviation. |
| 1:13.7 | But it was a commercial failure. |
| 1:16.1 | Only 251 were ever built, and the final one of those was delivered to its new owners last month. |
| 1:22.8 | Airbus clearly got it wrong. |
| 1:24.3 | It thought airlines would need ever bigger aircraft to take more and more |
| 1:28.4 | passengers on highly congested routes between major airports. But what they really wanted was smaller, |
| 1:34.5 | more efficient planes that were cheap to operate. Sandra Borsheffer is chief executive of Airbus |
| 1:40.3 | up next, the part of the aerospace giant dedicated to future technologies. She says |
| 1:45.9 | huge effort now goes into trying to work out which ideas are worth pursuing and which are not. |
| 1:51.2 | We look at it, high risk, high gain basically. High risk means that some of them will not mature |
| 1:58.3 | and some of them seemed originally to be a good idea. |
| 2:02.1 | But learning from them, we see that their application might not be the right one for our future products. |
... |
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