Interessant3 #134 | ✈️ How Airbus Took Off, 🗺️ Palestinian Statelessness, 🐋 Right Whales Return
Three Interesting Things for W/C 2025-03-30
Apologies for the delay, it has been an intense week! Enjoy:
✈️ How Airbus Took Off
Born out of postwar politics and continental rivalry, Airbus was once dismissed as a vanity project, it wasn’t supposed to work. A messy cross-European alliance with political baggage and no real market share, it looked doomed from the start. But by listening to airlines, betting early on fuel efficiency and digital fly-by-wire systems, and downplaying its own European identity to win over sceptical US buyers, it pulled off a quiet revolution in aerospace. Unlike Concorde, Quaero or Unidata, Airbus succeeded not by framing itself as European, but by putting engineering and customers first.
The whole article out on
is a real gem, for example, check out this fascinating fact about the Concorde’s economics:Concorde was a marvel of engineering, but even without US obstructionism, it had little prospect of commercial viability. In today’s money, it cost £16 billion to develop, roughly ten times the cost of the Boeing 727, making it the most expensive plane of its age by some margin. Its limited passenger capacity, fuel inefficiency, and expensive maintenance meant that a ticket for a round trip cost in excess of £10,000 adjusted for inflation. The ultra-premium air travel market wasn’t big enough in the 1980s or 1990s to bear the costs of 1960s technology, leading to Concorde’s retirement in 2003.
🗺️ Why Is There No Palestinian State?
In this clear-eyed essay, Hussain Abdul-Hussain examines a question often asked but rarely unpacked: why has Palestinian statehood remained elusive? He argues that while Israeli occupation plays a role, deeper factors lie within the Palestinian political landscape itself - especially a long-standing rejection of partition and peace offers. A concise, challenging perspective that reframes the debate.
🐋 The Right Whales Are Back
An image worth a thousand conservation reports. Southern right whales (Eubalaena australis) were hunted nearly to extinction, dropping from around 120,000 to just a few hundred by the 1920s. But recent research shows a slow resurgence: in places like South Africa, Argentina, and sub-Antarctic New Zealand, whales are returning to long-abandoned calving grounds. Interestingly, female whales pass down migratory routes to their calves, meaning recolonisation depends on restoring lost traditions. It’s a conservation success, and a lens into what it takes to rebuild a species across generations.
Join us next week for three more intriguing topics that challenge the norm and expand your horizons! ✌️
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