FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1974
1974 - 1385.PDF
••'• •••> >«'1 "" •' >•'* > "/'.' ;,.'•: FIRST REPORT FARNBOROUGH 74 The significant exhibits and events at the opening of the first international display to be staged by the Society of British Aerospace Companies are described in this up-to-the-minute report by the "Flight" editorial team at Farnborough. Illustrations for this, the fastest and most comprehensive report on the Show, are by staff photographers Sights that might have shocked some SBAC club members of bygone years abound at the first Farnborough International air show. Only a dozen of the 50 types of aircraft presented by the manufacturers in the flying display are all-British. At every prospect—inside the two big new exhibition halls, in the equipment and weapons parks and along the chalet avenues—the names of commercial As show week began Concorde opened each day's flying programme, a fast low pass from the west being followed by a touch and go in front of th crowd competitors are boldly placarded: Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Avions Marcel Dassault, Lockheed . . . How did they get in here, the shades of Farnborough club-members past might wonder? The opening curtain is stolen by the Americans, whose SR.71 lands from New York as the President's international guests gather for the flying display. A note passed to Sir Harry Broadhurst and SBAC Director Sir Richard Smeeton simply says: "1 hr 55 min 45 sec". Fifteen hundred pressmen (at least, that is the number invited) have their show-opening story. They have another story too when, in the middle of a superb display of helicopter aerobatics, the Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk crashes by the main runway, and the co-pilot is killed. The good news is the survival of the pilot, and the performance of the RAE rescue services. Apart from the wretchedness of torrential rain on the Sunday and Monday mornings, and the failure of the Hampshire Police to move traffic over the last five miles in less than an hour even on a non-peak day, foreign exhibitors seem well pleased. The French, according to one senior spokesman here, whose Paris Salon is still the biggest international air show, unreservedly describe the organisation as "excellent". In the President's tent it is remarked that a show twice the size has been organised by the same staff. In round figures there are 400 companies from 12 countries exhibiting or represented, including 200 UK and 100 USA; the exhibition area is doubled to a quarter of a million square feet; 20,000 foreign buyers from 120 countries have been invited and 70 different types of aircraft are represented in the static or flying displays. A link between SBAC shows past and present is the car, caravan and tent pitched on grassroots near four light aeroplanes (French Rallyes with G reggies). Compared with the stylish salons of the British Aircraft Corporation in the exhibition. This time BAC's proclamation differs from the old cliche about being Europe's Most Powerful Aerospace Group (or was that Hawker Siddeley?). This year, a few steps from the caravan on the grass, it says: "72-4 per cent of BAC's Record £818,000,000 Order Book is for Export." That seems to say most of it.
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
