Morts Musings

Coming as it does during a period when many of the world’s major economies are still crawling their ways out of recession there have been question marks about how successful the 2009 Dubai Airshow would be in terms of generating sales for it’s exhibitors.

However, as the show progresses it would appear that it’s not all doom and gloom for the aviation industry. It seems that this year’s big winner will most likely be the military hardware sector, and it’s no surprise that companies which produce military aircraft are lining up to take part in the show, one consultancy recently estimated that Middle Eastern spending on military aircraft would top £100bn by 2014.
Amid all the clamour and competition it’s nice to see a British company, BAE, managing to grab it’s share of the sales. It would appear that so far they’re having a pretty good show, as part of the consortium which makes the Eurofighter Typhoon they’ll no doubt have been buoyed up by how much interest the jet fighter has generated from Gulf States during the airshow.

BAE have also generated quite a bit of buzz with the annoucement that their unmanned Mantis aircraft completed it’s maiden test flight recently. This is particularly significant since the Mantis is the first ever fully autonomous, twin-engined UAV. It hasn’t all been military hardware for BAE though, their Avro Business Jet has also proved popular; not only has it been selected by the governments of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as their VIP aircraft, it’s also won orders from the British firm Infinite Engineering Services.

Another big piece of news from the show is the annoucement by the UAE’s national carrier, Etihad, of a £750m investment package to enhance their operations across the board; no doubt they’ve got a few quid to splash around after all the flights to Dubai which they sold to those attending the airshow.

So, maybe the doom mongers are wrong; some sections of the civilian aviation industry might still be looking a little flat but overall it’s obviously far from penniless, and military spending never seems to go out of fashion. Overall it looks like the speculation that the Airshow would be a complete and utter flop may have been a little premature.