The landlord at the pub nearest to the airfield had been running his system long enough that it had stopped feeling like preparation and started feeling like agriculture. Extra staff booked from the Tuesday. Stock pre-ordered against a number he had arrived at empirically over several years. A quiet conversation with the kitchen about extended hours. He activated all of it without fuss, the way a farmer moves when the weather window opens, because the show weekend was as close to a certainty as his calendar contained. I had a pint there the evening before the last edition of that event before it quietly stopped happening, and I remember the particular quality of the conversation, the way he spoke about the weekend coming with the same easy assumption he’d apply to Christmas. It was simply in the structure of the year. And when the event folded, the year had a hole in it that the usual trade could not fill.
I have been thinking about that landlord recently while reading about what has happened to certain small American cities when their air show disappeared, or when the jets failed to arrive, which is a different problem with some of the same consequences.
The American version of this story operates at a scale that requires a moment of adjustment if you have spent most of your airshow life in England. There are towns in the Midwest and the South where the annual air show is not a pleasant addition to the local calendar but a structural economic event, the kind that hotel occupancy figures and restaurant revenues are built around in the same way that a market town might be built around a county agricultural show. The aircraft, specifically the military fast jets, the Blue Angels, the Thunderbirds, the demonstration teams that require a budget line in the Pentagon rather than a booking with a display pilot, are the draw that makes the rest of the economics function. When they do not come, the town does not simply have a quieter weekend. It has a measurable loss.
The budget sequestration in 2013 demonstrated this with some force. When the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds stood down for the majority of the season following the automatic federal spending cuts, the effects on smaller shows were not uniform but they were real. Events that had structured their entire programme around a headline military act found themselves with a gap they could not fill on short notice and, in some cases, could not survive. Some towns had invested in infrastructure, in temporary facilities, in the logistical preparation that a large event requires, and the return on that investment simply did not materialise.
What struck me, following the coverage at the time, was less the financial damage in isolation and more what the damage revealed about how the dependence had been allowed to develop. Nobody had apparently made a formal decision that these towns would become economically reliant on a federal entertainment budget that could be suspended without notice. It had just happened, through a series of individually reasonable decisions made by show organisers, local authorities, and business owners who looked at consecutive years of success and adjusted their plans accordingly. The risk was distributed invisibly across the local economy and nobody owned it until it became a problem.
The British version of this is quieter but I do not think it is fundamentally different in shape. I have watched events fold in this country that had become embedded enough in their surroundings that the local accommodation sector, the food vendors, the car park landowners, and the marshals who came back year after year treating it as part of their summer had all made a version of the same assumption. That it would continue. That it was stable. That the problems it might be quietly accumulating were someone else’s to manage.
When I raised this once with someone involved in running a UK show, in the approximate tone of asking whether the economic connections had ever been formally mapped, the response was essentially that it would sort itself out, that the show had been running for a long time and the relationships were solid. That show has not run for several years. I am not suggesting the conversation caused the outcome. I am suggesting that the confidence was misplaced, and that the misplacement was not accidental. Acknowledging fragility requires admitting that continuity is not guaranteed, and organisations whose existence depends partly on appearing stable are not always well positioned to do that honestly.
The American small city story is dramatic because the scale is dramatic and because sequestration produced a sudden, visible, nationally reported rupture rather than the gradual diminuendo that tends to characterise the British version of the same problem. But the underlying situation is recognisable. An economic relationship that developed opportunistically, without formal acknowledgement of the conditions that made it possible or the events that could end it, built on the assumption that the thing everyone has come to depend on will continue simply because it has always continued.
It does not always continue. Sometimes the jets do not come. Sometimes the event folds quietly in autumn and the pub near the airfield finds, the following summer, that the system it spent decades refining is no longer needed.
The economic case for airshows is real and I am not dismissing it. But it is only ever as stable as the thing that creates it, and the thing that creates it is always more fragile than the economics built around it would suggest.
