Mark Cousin
Mark Cousin, a long-time Airbus employee who currently serves as the Head of Demonstrators is an accomplished aeronautics leader with over thirty years of experience pursuing innovative products and delivering on seemingly impossible goals, like the Beluga XL. Mark will lead A³ through the next stage of its evolution.
Past A³ achievements include: Vahana’s first flights, Altiscope’s roadmap for the safe integration of autonomous vehicles into our airspace, Voom’s expansion and successful transition, the Transpose modular cabin demonstration, and new projects in exciting areas like digital manufacturing, blockchain, and autonomous systems.
Each of these represents a unique component of what A3 was originally built to do — help Airbus better understand, explore, and hedge against innovations that are just becoming visible on the horizon.
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, A³’s mission is to disrupt Airbus and the rest of the aerospace industry. The main focus of the organization takes the form of projects, which are developed in an agile environment, in a transparent and open approach and with the end goal of bringing products to market.
Mark takes over the leadership as many projects have matured and have found meaningful engagements within the Airbus ecosystem, and a path to becoming products and services in the real world. Today, A³ is a robust innovation platform, delivering reliably on ambitious goals and timelines and prepared to launch their next batch of projects.
About Mark
Mark graduated from Southampton University in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1986 before joining British Aerospace Regional Aircraft in the Future Projects department. From 1986 to 1994, he worked on a wide variety of Future Projects on regional aircraft, business jets and the predecessor to the Airbus A400M then known as the Future Large Airlifter (FLA). From 1995 to 1998, he worked in Toulouse and Beijing on the AIA100 seater aircraft project +with AVIC of China.
He joined Airbus in 1998, moving to Toulouse in 2000 to head up the Airbus UK Flight Test Support team for the A340-600. In 2003, he was appointed as Head of the A380 Mise au Point (MAP) team providing Engineering support to the Final Assembly Line (FAL) and Flight Test department for the A380. Mark was appointed as Head of Systems Integration Test in the Flight and Integration Test Centre in 2008. He was appointed to the role of Technical Director, Beluga XL in January 2015 to design and build the next generation of outsize air transport aircraft for Airbus based on the A330. In 2017, Mark became Head of Flight Demonstrators.
Mark Cousin was born in Portsmouth, England and graduated from Southampton University in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1986.