The last time I walked the static display at Farnborough with any real freedom was probably 2014, and even then I am being generous with the word freedom. There was a Typhoon parked close enough to touch, which I did not do because a man in a lanyard the size of a small flag was watching from eight feet away with the expression of someone who has been told to treat every member of the public as a potential liability. I circled the aircraft twice, tried to look at the undercarriage bay, and eventually gave up and went to find a cup of tea that cost four pounds and tasted of the cup.
I went back two years ago. Press pass, proper access, the kind of invitation that is supposed to get you past the lanyard infrastructure and into the parts of the show where things actually happen. What I found was not an airshow with a trade element attached to it. It was a trade event with an airshow used as ambient decoration.
Farnborough Airshow has been drifting in this direction for at least fifteen years, and the people who run it have been describing the drift as evolution, which is the word institutions use when they have made a choice they would rather not defend directly. The flying display remains, and on its own terms it is often genuinely impressive. But the flying display now exists primarily to give the delegates in the chalets something to glance at between meetings, and if you arrive at Farnborough expecting the experience to resemble anything you have had at Biggin Hill or Fairford or on a quiet Saturday morning at Redhill with damp grass underfoot and a Tiger Moth taxiing thirty feet from where you are standing, you will find the dissonance jarring.
What struck me, walking the trade halls and the hospitality structures in 2022, was how completely the physical space had been reorganised around corporate encounter rather than aircraft. The companies with the largest presences, and I mean presences measured in square footage that would accommodate a provincial theatre, were not there to show you what they build. TCS, which is a technology services company whose connection to aviation is largely contractual, had a structure that I initially mistook for a sponsored pavilion. Lockheed Martin’s footprint was large enough to be visible from the approach road, and what was inside it was not, primarily, aircraft. It was meeting rooms, presentation screens, catering infrastructure, and the specific kind of carpet that only exists in corporate hospitality. Somewhere outside, a fifth-generation fighter was doing a display sequence that nobody in the Lockheed building appeared to be watching.
I do not object to defence companies doing business at Farnborough. That is, in the most literal sense, what the event was created for. The 1948 show was a trade exhibition with flying attached, and nobody has ever seriously pretended otherwise. What I object to is the way that the commercial infrastructure has expanded to the point where the event has quietly stopped being accessible to the kind of person who actually cares about aircraft, while continuing to market itself using the language and imagery of an airshow. The public days at Farnborough are real, but they feel increasingly like a concession, a gesture toward the historical identity of the event that the organisers maintain because removing it entirely would require an honest conversation they have decided not to have.
The moment that crystallised this for me was not in a trade hall. It was outside one, in the narrow corridor of public access between two hospitality structures, where I watched a family, parents and two children, stop in front of a scale model of the F-35 displayed on a promotional plinth. The children were interested. The parents were looking at a site map trying to find the viewing area. A woman in a branded jacket asked if she could help and I watched the father explain that they had come for the flying and were not sure where to stand. She redirected them with the slightly puzzled efficiency of someone who genuinely had not considered that a person might arrive at Farnborough primarily to watch aircraft.
The irony is that the flying display itself, on the day I attended, was excellent. A Typhoon solo that used the airspace properly and a civil demonstration that was more interesting than it had any right to be. But it was taking place above an event that had effectively ceased to be organised around it.
Redhill will never be Farnborough and has no ambition to be. On a summer morning at Redhill the aircraft are there because the people running the aerodrome care about aircraft, and the people who turn up care about aircraft, and the rope between you and the flightline is a practical boundary rather than a statement about access and corporate priority. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing.
Farnborough is not an airshow that has a trade fair problem. It is a trade fair that has stopped being honest about what it is, and the public days are becoming the proof of that rather than the defence against it.
