Flightglobal Achievement Awards

My favourite moment of Farnborough was father of the 747 Joe Sutter stepping up to collect his Lifetime Award at the Flightglobal Achievement Awards, held during the show.

We had some great other winners too. The passengers and crew of Delta 253 won the Aviator of the Year award for their courageous actions in tackling a would-be bomber on board a flight over Detroit on Christmas Day last year. The passenger who first wrestled the terrorist when he saw smoke coming out of his trousers, Dutchman Jasper Schuringa, came over from Amsterdam to pick up the trophy on behalf of everyone on the flight. Well, almost everyone. "Not the guy who tried to kill us," he noted wryly.

Willie Walsh, scourge of the jobsworths and the man trying to put the great back into British Airways, was Leader of the Year. He too turned up to collect his award.

The Innovator of the Year category went to the engineers who came up with the fly-by-wire system for Embraer's Legacy 450/500 business jets - the first time such technology has been deployed on aircraft that size.

And Boeing Engineering Student of the Year Rick Cory recounted how a passion for robotics had set him on a path from high school drop-out, stacking shelves at a DIY store and playing in a band to a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and some ground-breaking research into perch landings using a small UAV.

You can read full details of the awards here.