The air show, elsewhere

The take-away from this year’s Farnborough International Air Show may well be that the biggest news at the show did not come from the show.

Boeing officials announced orders or commitments for 201 commercial airplanes valued at more than $40.2 billion. Airbus set a company Farnborough sales record with commitments or orders for 496 aircraft worth $75 billion. Similarly, Bombardier and Embraer boosted order books – even if the value was merely in the single-digit billions of dollars. Engine manufacturers benefited as well. GE Aviation and its joint venture companies, including CFM International, tallied more than $36 billion in orders and commitments, and Rolls-Royce’s Trent 7000 engine was named as the exclusive powerplant for Airbus’s just-introduced A330neo.

The 2014 show was to mark the international debut of the multi-nation, multi-role F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, with four F-35B models demonstrating their short take-off, vertical landing capability. But the fifth-generation fighter jet was present only in mock-up form – the actual fleet was grounded in late June after an engine came apart while a jet was preparing for take-off in Florida. While the absence of the jet was a disappointment to show attendees, the incident does not appear to threaten the aircraft’s already delayed entrance into service.

No similar problems have been found on the other 98 engines in service. Responding to a barrage of questions at a packed press conference, Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan, USAF, program executive officer for the F-35 joint program office, explained that the problematic engine suffered a blisk failure in the third-stage fan section, due to unexpected frictional heating that resulted in micro-cracking that led to disk disintegration.

By mid-week, the F-35s were allowed to attend the show, but there was no way to get the team to Farnborough in time for the event’s final days. By that time, the focus of attendees had been redirected to the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine, with the loss of 298 lives. According to reports, pro-Russian separatists downed the passenger jetliner with a radar-guided Buk SA-17 surface-to-air missile, mistakenly believing it to be a Ukrainian military transport.

While this tragedy so far has not diminished the demand for international air travel, the disaster points out the potential fragility of the commercial aircraft market. Regional conflicts could chill demand across certain routes, especially those in the emerging Middle East market, causing a deferment or cancellation of aircraft orders. At the very least, rerouting airliners around geopolitical hot-spots can create higher fuel costs for airlines, ultimately impacting ticket prices and demand for seats, and eventually, planes. Despite the proximity of defense solutions and commercial aircraft vendors at the same show, the irony was that the sky is no place for these two markets to intersect. – Eric

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