Paris Air Show

Caution: Airplane geekiness follows!

The Paris Air Show is, and has been since the first one in 1909(!), THE airshow; nothing is as big or as good. Airplane manufacturers all show their latest and greatest, and Airbus and Boeing fly their latest at the Paris Air Show. I’ve wanted to see it since I first knew about it, and that would have been some forty years ago. Today, thanks to our friend Gilles, I was able to be there. For a plane-loving geek like me, it was great!

The day started badly, though: at about five in the morning, we were awakened by a horrendous, and I do mean horrendous lightning storm. For ninety minutes, we had brilliant flashes of lightning, followed immediately by deafening crashes of thunder, and deluges of rain. “Well,” thought I, “This is going to make the air show problematical.” But Gilles and I persevered, as the forecast was for the weather to clear some and become hot – mid-80s hot.

We took the train to the le Bourget stop (the airshow is at the le Bourget airfield, where Lindberg landed after his solo transatlantic flight in 1927), and, as we got off the train, the skies opened up again. Fortunately we had umbrellas so we forged ahead to the shuttle bus and headed for the field. Then, just as we stepped off the bus at the entrance to the airfield, the sky lit up with a flash of lightning, and the clouds opened with a downpour. We found shelter and waited it out, but there were hundreds of people in lines to get in, many in business suits, who were standing in the open and getting soaked to the skin.

Anyway, we finally got through the lines, received our entrance badges and made our way in. After wanting to do this for so long, I was at the Paris Air Show:

Wet.

We first went into one of the exhibit halls, just to see the extent of this place. There simply is NO way to describe how big it is, but here are pictures I took from one spot, forming a panaorama. This shows maybe a hundredth of one of the smaller of the exhibition halls.

I suppose I could find somewhere how many aviation-related companies were present, but it has to be in the thousands, anywhere from Airbus and Boeing to companies making tiny airplane parts. (Ok, I just looked it up: 2,244 exhibitors. There were 126 airplanes on display.) Amazing.

Many companies display their aircraft on the flight line. I apologize for the quality of these pictures; it was a very bright day by now, with lots of glare, and my poor old point-and-shoot camera had a hard time dealing with it. Heck, I had a hard time dealing with it! Anyway, here are some flight-line pictures:

One highlight of the flying demonstrations was by a French fighter, the Dassault Rafale; the things that pilot did were amazing. But the real highlight was the British Airways Airbus A380, doing steep climbs, turns and dives right over the airfield, all under a thousand feet or so; this flying demo was just amazing.

An hour later, the Boeing 787 took off, with this pretty spectacular climb from the runway (note the landing gear still coming up):

Dreamliner take-off

After that start, the Dreamliner flew a more sedate show than the A380 – don’t know why. Still, it was pretty amazing to see, and there were several 787s on the flight line, so we were able to see it close up. We also stood right under the tail of the British Airways A380; geeze, that airplane is BIG!

Le Bourget has a museum of flight, so there are some older airplanes there. In the midst of all these sleek modern aircraft was this Lockheed Super Constellation, designed in the early 1940s (the co-pilot on the first flight of the prototype was Eddie Allen, later President of Boeing) and flown until jet aircraft pushed it into obsolescence in the early 1960s. Maybe it’s just me and my love of old airliners, but I think the Connie still looks beautiful, even when (maybe especially when) it’s surrounded by modern airplanes.

After the Dreamliner demo flight, Gilles and I were pretty tired. This place is definitely sensory overload for us airplane geeks! So we headed for the train station and home. As a fitting end, the train went through what may be the worst storm squall I’ve ever seen: rain so hard you couldn’t see two hundred yards, so dark all the lights were on (though it was five hours before sunset), lightning and thunder all around us. When we got to the train station at Bois le Roi, where Mary picked us up, she said she had never seen rain so hard as that storm brought.

Many, many thanks to Gilles for getting the Air Show tickets (it’s by invitation only until Friday, so he had to do quite a lot to get them) and for taking me there, guiding me through the train stations – always an adventure – and around the air show. It meant a great deal to me to be able to attend the Paris Air Show, after wanting to do this for so many years. Merci beaucoup, Gilles.