Back To The Future With The Aviation Industry

by ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

One common theme emerged at AirVenture this year: pride in a firm's aviation history and past accomplishments. The modern-as-tomorrow aviation industry is rediscovering its roots.

This was not the central or largest theme, but certainly many disparate vendors have chosen to focus on this at once. It makes a striking impression to see so many highly successful firms whose focus is usually firmly in the here-and-now have opted to highlight their roots at Airventure '06.

Perhaps we're seeing a ripple effect from the Century of Flight celebrations of 2003. Perhaps this is one of those moments where firms look back and take a deep breath before leaping into the future. Or perhaps there's nothing more profound happening at all, just a lot of companies that each have a proud history to celebrate.

Embraer was promoting its sexy Phenom (rhymes with "venom") light and very-light jets with a handout card-model of Santos-Dumont's pioneering 14 bis. Call it a very, very, very light non-jet, nobody I've met has had the patience to cut it out and assemble it yet. There were also handout cards with a photomontage of the dapper Santos and some of his airships and airplanes.

Santos-Dumont is an interesting character, and not just because of his pioneering aviation accomplishments. Both the Brazilians and the French claim him, a native Brazilian who was equally comfortable in either land, as their own. A lifelong pacifist, he was distressed by the use of aviation in the Great War and returned to his native Brazil, dropping out of public life.

There's nothing multinational, culturally, about the multinational SOCATA, a branch of the very multinational European Aerospace and Defence Systems company (EADS). SOCATA is essentially French, which means it's a bastion of fashionable elegance (which certainly describes the firm's flagship product, the TBM 850, below), and Gallic pride. Introducing an innovative European scholarship for former Young Eagles, SOCATA's Chairman and CEO Stephane Meyer called on the names of the firm's founders, the Saulnier brothers and M. Robert Morane.

Cessna is promoting the fiftieth anniversary of the flagship 172 and 182 series, even as it explores next generation technology which at first will be built alongside, and later, perhaps, replace those venerable airframes. Of course, those fifty years are just the longevity of Cessna product lines; here at Airventure you can find Cessna Airmasters made of wood in the 1930s, and Clyde Cessna built his first plane in 1911.

Even upstart Honda, which has produced only prototypes and promises so far, wants us to know that it's been hard at work for these 20 years (which is certainly true, and given Honda's reputation as a world engineering leader, we have excellent odds of seeing those promises come true).

It's a wondrous place, AirVenture, one of the few where excitement about the present and hope for the future mesh well with reverence for the past. But it's unusual, and somehow uplifting, to see corporations which are supposed to be so calculating and cold-blooded, basking in the glow of their past achievements -- while planning achievements that will give their successors far into the future plenty to be proud about.

FMI: www.airventure.org