Lufthansa Dreamliner Roll-In: Music and Audio Production in the Hangar

On 14 October 2022, Lufthansa’s first Dreamliner stood in Hall 7 at Frankfurt Airport, the former A380 hangar. Around 1,500 guests in Frankfurt, about 700 in Munich, both halls connected by livestream, with Carsten Spohr and Boeing CEO Stan Deal on stage. Eisele Communications, the Lufthansa Group’s general contractor for events, had eight weeks to plan it. For a production of that size, that is extremely short.

The job came to me through Stein Group in Munich, who were responsible for visuals and projection mapping. Together with Giovanni, I wrote the music and sound design for the show, worked on the audio concept and did the mix.

Why a hangar punishes every second of music that doesn’t land

The concept was called Runway. The Dreamliner was the beauty of the evening, so the show was staged like a fashion show: a lit catwalk ran from the hangar door straight across the hall to the aircraft, with grandstands rising on both sides. Huge LED walls hung behind the stands, the catwalk itself glowed, and the fuselage was the largest projection surface in the room.

A hangar, though, is a workshop. It is built for maintaining aircraft, not for two thousand people to understand speech and music. Sheet metal, concrete, enormous volume and a reverb time that helps neither. On top of that came a running order with no slack: a countdown leading guests to their seats, a virtual take-off as the opener, speeches, the symbolic key handover from Boeing to Lufthansa, the crew from the delivery flight from Seattle, several live switches to Munich.

So the real problem was not writing good music. It was writing music that serves a running order that keeps moving until the very end. If the sound lags even briefly on a night like this, the exact moment everyone has been working towards for weeks falls apart.

How a show rundown became an evening with a pulse

Giovanni and I wrote everything ourselves and pulled nothing from a library: the countdown, the transitions between segments, the beds under the presenters and the sound effects for the stage moments. The visual highlight was a line-art mapping across the entire fuselage, in which the faces of guests from both cities appeared. Images like that need a sound that grows with them, not one that just sits underneath.

The hardest point of the evening was a crossfade where a video had to blend into the sound on two levels at once. On paper, it is one line in the rundown. In the hangar, it is the point where picture, music and show direction have to meet on the exact frame, or everyone in the stands sees and hears the seam.

I was on site for the final stretch. A rundown of this size keeps changing until the last rehearsal, and what fit the day before is suddenly too long or too short after a change in direction. So I kept producing in the hangar and fed the new versions straight into the running rehearsal.

That is the difference between delivering music and looking after it. If you only send files, you find out on the night of the event that a transition no longer fits.

The moment that only made it into the script on show day

On the day of the show, the presenter came up with a spontaneous idea: he wanted to get the whole hangar to sing the riff of Seven Nation Army together. A segment that hadn’t existed hours earlier, in a running order planned to the second.

We built it in. That evening, two thousand individuals became one audience for a minute, and that moment was one of the things people remembered afterwards. Moments like that can’t be created in post-production. You can only make them possible by being there when they happen.

What happened on the intercom

Around 2,200 people experienced the evening at both locations at the same time, plus a worldwide livestream. Overall direction and streaming were handled by Chris Cuhls and his team, Eisele Communications led the production, visuals and mapping came from Stein Group, with VOSS+FISCHER as the agency’s strategic partner. The production was entered for the BrandEx Award.

How I knew it had worked wasn’t a number, though. When the difficult crossfade came and landed perfectly, everyone on the intercom cheered. In that moment you hear how much tension sits on a cue like that, and that the whole team had felt it.

My part: music, sound design, mixing and on-site support during rehearsals through to show day. How sound can carry a product launch before the product is even visible is shown in the Bugatti Tourbillon reveal case.

Frequently asked questions about music for corporate events

Why custom music instead of library music for a corporate event? Because the running order of a large event keeps changing until the last rehearsal. Custom music can be cut to every new length without audible transitions. For the Dreamliner roll-in, the countdown, transitions, presenter beds and sound effects were all written from scratch.

How early does the music for an event need to be ready? The first version early, the last version on show day. At Lufthansa, a new segment was added on the day of the show itself. That only works if someone is on site and can keep producing.

Does music work in a hangar or industrial hall? Yes, if it is made for the room. Halls with large volume and long reverb don’t forgive dense arrangements or blurred transitions. The mix has to be made on site or finalised there.

Can music connect two event locations? Yes. At the Dreamliner roll-in, Frankfurt and Munich ran in parallel and were connected by livestream. Music and transitions carried the live switches between the two halls.

Planning an event where the sound has to land to the second?

Music, sound design and on-site support from one source, from concept to the last rehearsal.