The Future

The Future

As the founders of Dutch aviation, idealist Albert Plesman and opportunist Anthony Fokker, are inextricably bound together. They cannot live with each other or without. Nevertheless, during the Interwar Period when the world is heading towards a new war, they join forces to set up civil aviation in the Netherlands.

November 1918 – October 1919

Albert Plesman, Flight-lieutenant of the army ‘Aviation Department’, has a big dream: to introduce modern civil aviation to the Netherlands. Plesman is married to Suze, a woman from a wealthy, upper class family. At a party thrown by Suze’s parents, Plesman meets Frits Fentener van Vlissingen, an industrial entrepreneur. Van Vlissingen is keen to hear Plesman’s proposal to organise a grand aviation exhibition to awaken the Netherlands after World War I. When Plesman quits his job with the army to work on his project of passion for free, his wife Suze is concerned. For Plesman the time of the airplane being perceived as a weapon of destruction is over, flying can bring people together, literally and figuratively, and that will ultimately guarantee world peace.

Meanwhile, the pilot, aircraft builder and millionaire, Anthony Fokker, has a comfortable life in Germany, where he has amassed a small fortune with his airplane factory during the First World War. With the help of the young Hermann Göring, Fokker smuggles 350 trucks of Fokker aircrafts out of the country via the embassy, before they fall into the hands of the allies. To save his fortune and himself, he goes back to the Netherlands where he and his finacee Tetta move in with his parents in Haarlem. 

Plesman and Fokker initially meet at the First Aviation Exhibition in Amsterdam (ELTA). Plesman instantly questions Fokker’s reliability when it turns out that the planes he is showcasing as new models for civil aviation, are in fact the smuggled German fighter planes. The ELTA is nonetheless a success and the founding of the KLM follows shortly thereafter, heralding the beginning of a twenty-year conflict.