Farnborough, England; Le Airshow
England? Week long airshow? Ok! In the summer of 2004 I had the opportunity to tag along with my Dad to a little airshow/trade show in Farnborough, England. My Dad was doing on business and I got to tag along using his air miles. This event is held every year and switches between Paris and Farnborough, it is the biggest commercial aircraft show in the world. I got a huge kick out of seeing all kinds of aircraft you don’t normally get to see over in the states.
I think out of the whole show I was most impressed with the Eurofighter, the way that thing twists and turns in the air is really unique and interesting to watch. Seeing the Apache put through its paces and do loops and barrel rolls was also pretty wild, heck even seeing the various Airbus’ flown so aggressively at low altitudes was neat. Airplanes are just neat in general who would have thought that a multi ton aircraft could take advantage of a little differential pressure enough to actually fly.
The trade show that was attached to the air show was also very impressive. They had 4 huge tents (if you can call them that) that housed hundreds of vendors from all over the world. From wire suppliers to all the major defense contractors, everyone had a booth. Some of the bigger manufacturers actually had huge temporary buildings. Lots of money being thrown around, thats for sure. I got a huge kick of the russian section, all the ex soviet block manufacturers were setup near each other and as a result there were a lot of Russian business men walking around talking Russian. I’m sure they were just talking business, but it sure seemed like they were scheming all the time. What do I know, I’m just another capitalist pig.
Unfortunately I have more pictures, or had more pictures than I am showing here. Due to a hard drive failure and some weird back up scheme I’ve only managed to save 1/4 of them I’d guess. Oh well, lesson learned; I guess I need to schedule another trip to England and retrieve some more photos.
