The first time Vanessa Hudson walked through Qantas’ newly redesigned Airbus A380 interior, she wasn’t in the same postcode of an actual aeroplane. Hudson, who’s now the chief executive officer of Australia’s largest airline, wasn’t even in the same year as the plane she was exploring. She was a 20-minute cab ride from Qantas’ Sydney airport campus, inside the Surry Hills office of David Caon, the industrial designer behind the airline’s look and feel, both in the air and in its passenger lounges.

And, like some multidimensional Matryoshka doll, Hudson wasn’t fully in Caon’s office, either. Her head was inside a virtual reality headset, which in turn put her brain inside that Airbus A380, walking up and down a digital simulacrum of the aisles as they would appear in the real world years later. It was 2018. Alan Joyce was still Qantas CEO, and Hudson chief customer officer.