Kent fisher boeing biography of christopher

With his short sandy hair, starched white shirt and blue blazer, Kent Fisher doesn't look like much of a soothsayer.

But as vice president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes' "future customer" group, the 37-year-old's job is to peer beyond the financial chaos enveloping the airline industry and predict which carriers will survive, how they will evolve and which Boeing airplanes will meet their needs.

"We're trying to look around the corner," Fisher said in a recent interview.

Rarely have such powers of prognostication been so critical in the aerospace business.

Until 18 months ago, major airlines transformed themselves at the speed of Arctic ice sheets.

Now, sagging under billions of dollars of unsustainable losses, carriers are reinventing themselves with the celerity of schizophrenic dot-coms.

Against that tumultuous backdrop, Fisher's efforts to measure how much a faster jetliner would be