Paris, France
The City of Lights is several times more expensive than it was back in the late eighties, it is even more overrun with pickpockets, but a 12-year reign by one of the more contrarian European heads of state has come to an end. Everyone asks now if France can restore its former glory, patch up its relations with Washington, and address the social dislocations that cause increasing strains with its Muslim population.
But most of these developments pale in comparison to how much the Le Bourget air show has changed since I first saw it twenty years ago. Called simply “the Paris Air Show” by most of those who attend it, the biennial aerospace extravaganza (officially, the Salon international de l’aéronautique et de l’espace de Paris-Le Bourget) symbolizes the long, distinguished history of aviation in France by being held at the same Le Bourget aerodrome where Charles Lindbergh landed after his 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis.
(There is a small brass plaque set flush with the surface of the tarmac that is inlaid on the far end of the huge aerodrome–marking the spot where Lindbergh first stepped out of his aircraft and onto French soil. Good luck finding it. France has always considered itself to be the birthplace of modern aviation and they have never recovered from the multiple embarrassments that the first man to fly a dirigible from the Parc Saint Cloud and circle around the Eiffel tower in less than 30 minutes in 1901 was a Brazilian–Alberto Santos-Dumont–and that the first aeroplane flight and the first solo flight across the Atlantic were accomplished by Americans–the Wright Brothers and Lindbergh. So this plaque is not properly sign-posted as a landmark. You practically have to stumble across it.)
The contrasts with Le Bourget of the late 1980s are startling. In 1989, the then-Soviet Union was opening up to the West. For only the second time since the 1930s a Soviet fighter aircraft appeared at an international air show. It was the debut appearance abroad for the Sukhoi Su-27. The crowd was expecting something out of this world, and they were not disappointed.
The Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker.
Sukhoi test pilot Viktor Pugachev put the aircraft through a series of acrobatic twists and turns that seemed to defy gravity. Flight routines like his famous “Cobra Maneuver” and the “Tail Slide” that then-Mikoyan test pilot Anatoliy Kvochur made famous in the MiG-29 have become almost blasé in the present day. Watch this year’s flight by the MiG-29OVT thrust vectoring testbed aircraft and you can see the difference.
Kvochur also became well-known in a way that he would rather not have at the 1989 show by crashing his MiG-29 fighter following the low-speed, high angle-of-attack portion of his flight routine. It was the first crash of a Soviet aircraft at Paris since the Tupolev Tu-144 “Concordski” went down at the 1973 show. That year the Soviets indignantly packed up and went home, but in 1989 they stayed to the end and tried to put a positive spin on the reasons for the crash. They knew there was also a crash of their own way of life coming, and they couldn’t just walk away from either one of them and pretend that they did not exist.
Which is one of the major changes of the past 20 years. The Russians in 1989 were secretive, still afraid to have contact with Westerners, still under the Soviet regime, and still not sure how they would survive as the USSR’s economic and political system crumbled. They also did not seem to grasp how they were about to become competitors in the marketplace with the West instead of enemies facing each other across the fields of Central Europe. But they could see the changes coming.
Today, Russian firms have recovered from the near collapse of the Soviet defense industrial base in the 1990s and have learned how to be slick, techno-talking promoters of their flying machines. They have a set of new-age products that may not be as sophisticated as their U.S. or European analogues but many times offer better value for economy-minded purchasers. Russia’s RSK-MiG is holding its own today in a huge fighter aircraft buy that the Indian Air Force is in the process of deciding how to compete. If the Russians win they will have made the biggest export sale of any military aircraft in over 30 years.
Perhaps more important, the Russians have learned how to perform one task of which they long seemed incapable–cooperate and pull together as a team on some efforts. “Thank God we are rid of this disease we had in the early 1990s,” says one Russian, “when everyone wanted to be the president of his own company–and each company had only 2-3 employees.”
But, aside from the Russians evolving from Cold Warriors and into marketplace mercenaries, the entire aerospace business has changed, and it is reflected in who and what shows up at Le Bourget and why.
Twenty years ago almost no one had a mobile phone, communications were mostly land line and the occasional telex. Big companies like Boeing and Lockheed had fax machines back at their company headquarters, but you could count them on the fingers of one hand and the connection speeds were maddeningly slow. There was no Internet, and the slick, PC-based presentations handed out like lollipops on CD-ROM disks by large aerospace companies today were all but science fiction then.
Today everyone has at least one mobile. Mobile use is so dense at Le Bourget that it sometimes requires half a dozen or more tries to make a call because the networks are all overloaded. Anyone with a laptop that has a Wi-Fi card on board can pick up and receive messages, send video images, email photos of a competitor’s product back to the lab, etc. If you have Skype you can even make an international call for free without paying the typical European, mobile-operator highway robbery rates of $1.35 per minute.
In one sense, business at Le Bourget is like it is anywhere else in the digital age, but it is how the dynamics of the aerospace business have altered because of that technology that is so noticeable. Twenty years ago, big-time executives came to the air show because the low-priced, speed-of-light communications we have now did not exist. The show was the one place where they could get together, get away from the office and phone, and cut deals with each other. And they usually came out of the show with a new program or a new business prospect to explore.
Today those deals are done in video conferencing and over inexpensive international phone lines weeks or months beforehand. The top men from major companies come to the air show not to negotiate a deal with a potential partner, but to announce a contract that was signed weeks before. Announcing it at a place like Le Bourget assures maximum exposure and impresses the maximum number of potential customers.
But, technology has done more than just change the PR side of the air show world. The aerospace pyramid has become inverted. Throughout most of the Cold War, defense technology was always more advanced than anything in the commercial sector. And military innovation there might produce a spin-off into the civil sector.
Today it is a “spin-in” from the commercial sector to the defense side of the business. In the military world, the acronym “COTS” is heard a lot–short for “Commercial-Off-the-Shelf.” It is an acknowledgement that much of the advanced electronics, computing power, electro-optical systems, highly accurate sensors, and so many of the other technologies that make a fighter planes the ultimate killing machine had their genesis in a commercial program. This is not surprising in that most countries are now replacing fleets of old fighters with smaller numbers of new ones and replacing old airliners with larger numbers of new ones.
The money, interest, and growth is more in the commercial aerospace sector–epitomized by the battle between the two new airliners–the Airbus A380 double-decker and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. France’s Dassault, which produced the iconic Mirage fighter and the modern-day Rafale, no longer has any of the former models in production and only builds 1.5 of the latter each month. What keeps the company successful and growing is its business jet division.
The Airbus A380 can seat as many as 853 economy-class passengers.
Finally, Le Bourget today shows that aerospace has becoming a globalized, interconnected business. American, European, and Asia firms are no longer separate fiefdoms competing with each other. They now cooperate on and build pieces of each other’s programs. The newest and biggest fighter, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lighting II–the “Joint Strike Fighter”–has almost a dozen nations and all of their industrial firms participating on this program for what may turn out to be the most highly produced jet fighter in history.
Which may be one of the only positive stories to tell in today’s world. At a time when differences between nations seem to be becoming more pronounced and Cold War antagonisms seem to be re-emerging, aerospace appears to be one of the few forces that is acting to bring nations together rather than forcing them apart. It is an infant, 21st-century version of the world Gene Roddenbery envisioned in his Star Trek universe–where man’s tendency to destroy himself was overcome by the drive to explore the unknown.
All of which adds to the allure of the event. Unlike France itself, Le Bourget does not have to worry about restoring its former glory. This world’s biggest air show never lost it in the first place. It is what all the other shows in the world aspire to be but never come close to rivaling.
Reuben F. Johnson, a contributor to THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD‘s Paris Air Show blog, is a defense and aerospace technology writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD and several U.S. and European defense publications. This year will mark 20 years of his attending the Paris and other international air shows.
