Roundabout
'THE MAIN VALUE of Farnborough,' the Great Man of Aviation says, 'is that it impresses people with Air Power.'
It does, too. There is a hugeness about it. The noise grips and ham- mers at the dimensions of belly. depth, and has the blue, flashing cleanliness of an aquarium, making the ground a tawdry fair- ground business of tents and trampled ice-cream cartons.
Aircraft rush silently in from either side of the field, roar into a handspring, and curl silently away again. They come in squads of four and seven and nine, the acrobatic squadrons of Fighter Command and the Fleet Air Arm. They have been called a 'ballet of the air,' but that isn't it. It's the Brigade of Guards, if you can imagine the Brigade marching up the wall and across the ceiling.
The shapes are streamlined into symbols of themselves, like designs off contemporary wall- paper. Only an occasional one has an immediate rationality; a Hunter sprouting rockets and tanks and bombs as a council house sprouts TV aerials; the Gnat lightweight fighter looking like some- thing bought as a kit of plastic parts and put to- gether in an evening.
And, of course, it—and everything else on show —is for sate; that alone is the point of Farn- borough. A quarter of a million of the non- aeroplane-buying public may come to be impressed by Air Power, but they don't even cover the cost of keeping the Show open the extra three days for them (so much for any idea of turning Farnborough into an international show—not While the British aircraft industry is still paying for it). But there also come eight thousand men in lightweight suits with kronor and escudos and pesetas and (0 joy!) dollars to spend on Revolu- tionary Ideas. Farnborough is for them.
For them, on terraces above the trampled ice- cream cartons, three long pavilions offer a hundred different lunch and cocktail parties from Which, with inscrutable politeness, they can watch the afternoon's flying. And there (if they have Picked the right party) the sales manager may lean across and suggest 'just a short flip in our machine When the display's over—nothing dramatic, just a ride around. We've hired a bus—meet you at the bottom of the steps at four?'
By four-thirty there is only an occasional heli- copter crawling spiderishly about the sky making fretting noises. The men in lightweight suits poke knowledgeably at tyres and tailplanes and the bus driver stands by, hoping somebody invites him, too. They do. Ten minutes later Farnborough is a toy counter below and everybody is wandering about the cabin listening inscrutably to noise levels. peering inscrutably at the lavatory and going forward, one at a time, to ask an inscrutable
The sky takes on sudden question of the pilots. The bus driver gets the idea and asks a question himself.
Then the toys and the backyard of dingy toys, broken and beheaded from Ministry of Supply
tests, drift back below and everybody says his non-committal thanks to the pilot and sales manager. But the bus driver looks disgustedly at his bus and bursts out : 'I'm not going to travel in one of them things no more. No wings.' And the sales managers wish, for one wild moment, that it was all as simple as that and that he was the one with kronor or escudos or pesetas or (0 joy!) dollars.
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