An Interview with Jon Ostrower, founder & editor-in-chief of “The Air Current”, and Roland Gerhards, CEO at ZAL. Moderated by Lukas Kaestner of Hamburg Aviation.

2020 – a truly incisive year for the aviation industry – is drawing to a close. As a highlight at the end of the year, we’ve had a very special guest at our “ZAL Innovation Talks” series: the founder and editor-in-chief of “The Air Current“, Jon Ostrower. Together with Roland Gerhards, CEO of ZAL GmbH, he dove into some of the currently most exciting topics the aviation industry has to offer.

One was low emission flying. Even though marketing expectations and technical realities don’t always match there, Ostrower is convinced: the decarbonization in aviation is THE most important trend of the future! There are also a lot of other trends that have been emerging over the past years – changes we didn’t expect to see until 2025 and beyond – that are taking hold a lot faster now. Quote Ostrower: “What the pandemic has shown us is that the trends in the pathways that we’re on are really going to be moving so much faster!”

An equally exciting topic was the long-term changes in the health awareness of airline passengers. Both interview partners agreed: Digitization or artificial intelligence will be applied more frequently in the cabin of the future, to contain the spread of viruses and minimize the risk of contagious diseases.

Other talking points of the evening included future developments in regional air traffic and the successor to the Boeing 737 Max. Yet, it wasn’t only the topics or interview partners that made the event international. Over 50% of the audience joined from outside Germany, ranging from the USA to South Africa and faraway Indonesia.

At the end of the event, one more highlight awaited the participants: As a thank-you, ZAL raffled off five subscriptions to “The Air Current” among those present.

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