I'm Sue Partridge and I'm the head of the Wing of Tomorrow program at Airbus.

We're standing next to a wing of tomorrow. I'll tell you what it looks like.

It looks like an aircraft wing with a foldy bit at the end.

That's a very good description. The reason it looks like that is because wings play a really important part in our decarbonisation journey by bringing aerodynamic efficiency and the way

you make a wing more aerodynamically efficient the physics tells us is you make it long and slender

so that's really what drives us to then need to fold the wings the world today has hundreds of thousands

of air fort gates and they're all a fixed dimension.

So if we put an aircraft into service that has really long wings and then it can't fit into

those airport gates, that's just not practical. So we get the aerodynamic efficiency

in flight from the long slender wing and then we get the practicality on the ground by developing

folding wing systems to fold part

of it out of the way in the airports and it looks as though it's just got a hinge and you presumably

press a button if you're at the controls and it's all fine there's a philosophical question though sue which is

I'm old enough to remember when the A380s started. And of course, no airport was fitted for that.

And all the relevant airports spent hundreds, maybe billions of dollars on getting ready for it.

So why don't we just say to everybody, look, we're going to have to have wider wings because that's better for the environment.

So get used to it.

Well, I mean, if you imagine this technology being

applied to a next generation single-arled aircraft, think about how many aircraft there are in our

existing A-320 family. You know, we've got a huge order backlog. We're building them, you know,

month-on-month and increasing the amount of those aircraft in service. It's a numbers game, A380, far smaller quantity of aircraft, far smaller quantity of airports that were ever going to be impacted by that program.

We cannot expect the whole world to adapt its airports. We need to develop a product that adapts to the infrastructure that's there.

...