Mike Martin
It's customary in this, the last issue of this show's Flight Daily News, to bid you farewell and look forward to seeing you at the next aerospace gathering.
But this was the show where e-commerce set up shop at the very heart of the aerospace industry. If you were not launching a portal, website or electronic marketplace of some sort, you probably were not at this show.
Where is it all leading? One strand of (dubious) logic is that doing everything electronically reduces the need to travel.
Communications
Telecoms companies long ago started advertising at airports, suggesting to executives that modern communications made most trips redundant. Everything you ever wanted to hear at the end of the redeye.
So now you do business over the net: video-conference calls, purchasing, buying spare parts. You really don't need to go anywhere at all: just do it all from your desk or your bed because the logic says you don't need all those fixed assets like offices: you can do it all from home.
The bottom line is that soon they'll be running the virtual air show, brought to you via the Internet. It will run 365 days a year, 24 hours a day...
Well, .com to all that!
The truth is that we would all miss the exquisite pain of waking up after two hours sleep, with a headache like a brace of Olympus engines on take-off. We love to vault the pain barrier, heading out to the show where we will walk miles, be baked in 38°C temperatures and then be soaked in a tropical downpour.
Best of all is putting together a carefully-crafted stand as the perfect backdrop to the launch, only for a pack of howling journalists to trash the place and then not write about you.
Asian Aerospace is where e-commerce set out to colonise the aerospace industry. It was also where there was clear light after the economic crises of 1997/98. The economic tigers have coming roaring back far sooner than those who talked of a "decade of gloom" ever thought.
But while the upswing is reflected in new orders from airlines in the region, projects to create future airliners in the region - notably in China and Indonesia - are on the back-burner.
Those high-profile projects may have gone for the time being, but there was something else at the show that perhaps gives a surer sign to the future: it is the growing number of joint ventures between American and European companies and Asia-Pacific nations.
They say that size doesn't matter, but it does if you are running air shows. They thought it was cheeky when the organisers of last November's Dubai claimed to run the world's third biggest show (taking the mantle long claimed by Singapore). Not to be outdone, the bosses of Asian Aerospace now claim the Singapore event as the world's second most important show.
Never far from the surface was the exciting prospect of new programmes from Boeing and Airbus Industrie, both largely dependent on interest from Asia-Pacific airlines. The Boeing 777X variants and the Airbus Industrie A3XX aircraft will have to wait for another day for launch.
That day could well be Farnborough, to be held in July this year for the first time. Oh yes, there will be a Farnborough and it sold out long ago.
Despite the arrival of e-everything, people still stubbornly like meeting in the flesh.
The thing to remember about virtual reality is that it is not reality at all.
See you there.com.
Source: Flight Daily News
