Biography|Lars Wagner — The North Sea Town Where an Engineer First Met Aircraft

People who meet Lars Wagner as the chief of Airbus commercial aircraft tend to start the file in Toulouse or Munich.

The earlier file opens on the North Sea.

He was born in Cuxhaven on 10 July 1975.

The German biographical register Munzinger records that his father kept sailplanes and powered aircraft, and that the boy met flying that way rather than through a factory gate.

Cuxhaven is a harbour town at the mouth of the Elbe.

The wooden pier called the Alte Liebe is the public deck from which the town has watched ships leave for the German Bight for more than a century.

It is not a private house. It is the civic waterfront of the place that produced him.

After the Abitur at Lichtenberg-Gymnasium on Schulstraße, he did not go straight into a lecture hall.

He went to Bremen to learn how an airframe is actually put together.

That sequence — a North Sea childhood, a trade certificate, then an engineering degree — is the part of the résumé that later corporate notices flatten into one line about an apprenticeship.

The town is still there.

The pier still faces the same water.

Photo: Thomas Dahlstrøm Nielsen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons