DAY ONE OF Le Bourget is like being at the biggest Macy’s store you can imagine on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Only it is around 90 degrees, you are fighting a crowd all day long and running to get from one place to the next–all the while perspiring through your coat and tie. At the end of the day you are loaded down with overstuffed heavy duty plastic bags. Only instead of being full of Polo, Prada, Levis and the Gap you are dragging around the world’s biggest pile of aerospace brochures, CDs, calendars, pen sets, lapel badges and magazines.
The combined sums spent by all the firms at the air show producing promotional materials and distributing them to the press and official delegations is probably larger than the budgets of most small countries, and it gets larger all the time. Whereas the average press kit used to contain color brochures and a CD with images of a company’s products, the norm now is to distribute memory sticks and other sophisticated paraphernalia.
A look at the first day’s events shows just how much the business of aerospace has shifted into the commercial sector. The air show has always been thought of as a place where people go to watch fighter jets strut their stuff across the sky–a spectacle of military muscle-flexing that brings out the crowds. But the military business does not seem to be where the action is in the present day.
Of the approximately 100 press conferences and other announcements taking place on the first day, roughly 60 per cent of them are related to commercial aviation. The big deals that are announced at Paris are no longer record sales of fighter jets or military helicopters, but contracts for airliners and business jets. The European Airbus consortium alone announced $46.7 billion worth of orders today. Defense contractors are still well-represented and have a major profile, but the real money is in airliners, commercial satellites, and services–what one large company refers to as “global sustainment”–and the sales are nothing like these type of numbers.
The one country that still is pushing its defense business and not much else is Russia. Le Bourget has always been an event where the Russians try to show a large presence–a holdover from the Soviet period where being at the Paris show was always seen as a sign of prestige and importance. By far the biggest crowd pleaser is the Mikoyan MiG-29OVT that performs the most acrobatic display of any fighter ever made. The defense business remains Russia’s only real money-maker.
At a press conference on day one, the general designer for Mikoyan was discussing MiG’s prospects for a sale on the Indian Air Force’s M-MRCA fighter aircraft tender. The Indian sale is for 126 aircraft plus follow-ons, which could be well over 200 fighters at the end of the program, making it the Powerball lotto jackpot of defense sales. No country has purchased this many aircraft at one time for over 30 years.
When asked what the company’s chances were in India, the MiG official, Vladimir Barkovsky, said that “we work at MiG and not in a casino, so we cannot talk about the chances for success as if we were gambling.” But gambling is exactly what the increased Russian reliance on defense sales to keep their aerospace industry alive is. Defense sales can only sustain them for so long, and without a sizeable piece of the commercial market, Russia will end up a small-time player in the world market. As one Russian colleague told me “Italy used to have a fairly robust aircraft-building industry and look where they are today. This can be our future as well.”
But the real sleeper this year is the announcement by Brazil’s Embraer of its Phenom-series of mini-jets. Small, seating only a few persons, the Phenom models are specifically designed for the executive trying to escape from airline hell or the well-heeled soccer mom who has had enough of the absurd experience of having TSA confiscate your toddler’s sippy cup on grounds of national security.
A day at the show is exhausting and dehydrating, but an eye-opener in terms of how much aerospace means in the modern world–how much it affects much of what we do in daily life and how technology is making our flying machines, better, faster and more efficient.
Tomorrow: What the defense business is like 17 years after the cold war.
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.
