THE TRADE SHOW: ALAIN DE BOTTON finds plenty to muse about at the seemingly mundane Le Bourget air show in Paris It did not seem inappropriate to dance, especially when the speakers began throbbing to Abba's 'Super Trooper'
'DURING A TIME when I was finding it hard to write anything and often spent whole days on my bed wondering about the point of my work, I received a phone call from a Slovenian newspaper, which I had never heard of until then, asking if I might want to travel to Paris on their behalf in order to write an article about the airshow at Le Bourget airport, a major biennial event in the aerospace calendar, where manufacturers gather before the world's airlines and airforces and try to interest them in wheels, radars, missiles and cabin curtains.
The editor hoped that I might be able to convey to his readers, some 100,000 people in Ljubljana and its surrounding hills, what he termed "the ecstasies of flight" and encouraged me to keep an eye out for any technological breakthroughs which might be poised to transform aviation ("Showers in the sky?" he suggested by way of an example).
Though he apologised for a meagre fee and accommodation in a budget hotel overlooking a motorway into Paris, he added that he had passes to many important press conferences, including one at which a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saif Al Nahyan, was scheduled to announce an order for 22 A380s, with which he planned to cement his emirate into a pre-eminent place on the duty-free map of the globe.
Because the fair was, at least in its first couple of days, tightly restricted to aerospace professionals and the press, it had an atmosphere of calm and easy conviviality, of the kind one might find between guests at a wedding. It was not uncommon to chat to people in the queue for bottled water or, above the sound of a G550 spyplane pirouetting around the skies of the Ile-de-France, to strike up a conversation with a stranger eating a pain au chocolat on an adjoining seat, thereby opening one's eyes to new horizons, for example, to the tenor of life as a colonel in the airforce of Gabon.
Although the goods on sale were uncommonly expensive, customers shopping for aircraft equipment were presumed not to be impervious to the techniques of the high street and hence to the appeal of a former Miss Sweden dressed in a catsuit, or the lure of a raffle for a free weekend at Euro Disney.
At lunchtime, many companies cleared space on their stands to serve up food from their regions, in the hope that a prospective buyer who had decided against a mid-air refuelling tanker from Galicia might glance more favourably upon it in the wake of some slices of dry-cured ham.
Pathos naturally gathered around some of the less frequented stands. It was evident that in no part of the aerospace industry could one be certain of escaping from ruinous competition.
There seemed to be no item in the world that five alternative manufacturers had not already simultaneously embarked upon producing. Nevertheless, the bankrupt nature of a business was not always a sufficient argument against it.
The displays manned by Russia and its sister states tackled their difficulties with greater vigour. Aeronautical purchases which further west would have required compliance with drawn-out bureaucratic regulations were here sanguinely waved through. It was possible to make an immediate downpayment on a missile system or a Soviet-era satellite, items frequently promoted with the help of short films, perhaps representing a manager's first efforts at cinematography, and which showed machines blasting into the air to the accompaniment of a muscular American-inflected commentary.
At the stand of the world's second-largest engine manufacturer, I spent some minutes observing an unusually attractive young saleswoman with shoulder-length chestnut hair, dressed in a beige suit, who was biting the nail of her left index finger and crossing her slender legs whilst leaning against a large fan blade. She was not the first of her type I had seen that day, but something about her appearance left me thoughtful. I had until then believed that the vendors' frequent and deliberate reliance on feminine appeal was merely a vulgar stratagem intended to win over airline executives, through an implicit suggestion that a purchase might bring them closer to intimacy with a sales agent.
Now I began to see the matter differently: it seemed obvious that no order, however lucrative, would actually render these women available to buyers, so their presence on the stands took on a more poignant and commercially effective dimension. Their real function was to serve as a reminder of the unavailability of beauty to an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged and harried-looking base of customers. The women were goading the men to lay aside all romantic ambitions and to focus instead on their business and technological agendas. Rather than seductresses, they were in truth spurs to sublimation, and symbols of everything that the buyers would be better off if they forgot about in order to concentrate on the thousands of pieces of precisely engineered equipment arranged around the halls.
For my part, led on by the priorities of the Slovenian newspaper, I went to a few press conferences. There was almost always an initial problem with the microphone. Men sat at tables decorated with the flags of their respective companies and announced deals before handfuls of journalists.
It was often difficult to discover what the significance of these agreements might be, for they were framed in a language of acronyms that repelled the curiosity of minds nourished on the undemanding fare of the ordinary press. I read in Flight Daily News that UPS had chosen ADS-B for their next generation avionics, while Aviation International reported that Klimov was putting a VK800 against the P&WC PT6.
The obscurity of these events, on which depended the livelihoods of many in factories across continents, only served to underline the marginality of the stories normally found in the daily paper, which has no option but to focus on murders, divorces and films, for its readers cannot be expected to follow in detail any of the real developments which unfold obscurely in the realms of science and economics and on which our future depends.
Many countries had sent military delegations to survey and order new equipment. On the way to the fair from the hotel, it was not uncommon to encounter a high-ranking member of one of the world's poorer airforces sitting on a commuter train, his row of medals hinting at martial achievements far removed from the routines of his fellow passengers bound for the office.
Towards the close of the fair's final afternoon session, I learnt that Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saif Al Nahyan had cancelled his visit due to the illness of a favourite falcon, and would instead put out a press release outlining the main points of his $22 billion purchase.
Wishing to delay for as long as possible my return to an empty hotel room, I wandered through the Airbus stand, inspecting see-through model fuselages of yet-to-be-built aeroplanes, admiring the meticulous rows of miniature seats arranged inside and reflecting on the ambitious plans in the works for the future of business class. Now that most of the delegates had left, cleaning crews arrived and set about wiping fingerprints off engines and rearranging brochures on countertops.
I should not have worried about my evening, for when I got back to my hotel, I discovered that a closing-night celebration was in progress.
Realising that the majority of their guests were connected to the fair, the management had seen an opportunity to raise additional revenue by throwing a party at the bar.
The hotel did not seem to have been housing anyone in a position either to buy or sell a plane: such dignitaries were more likely to have booked into the Crillon in central Paris.
By contrast, this place was the preferred lodging for those known within the industry as Tier 3 or 4 suppliers, people involved in the manufacture of smaller and less sophisticated parts of aircraft, or indeed, even further from the end product, in the fabrication of the tools required to form these parts.
Despite the fact that the occasion marked the end of a few days of hard work, many of the partygoers were feeling anxious, whether about orders, stock levels, Civil Aviation Authority regulations or the skittish exchange rate of the dollar.
There was particular distress at the news that Northrop Grumman was planning to revamp its procurement process.
I was struck by what seemed like a profound realisation that the airshow was only one of hundreds of industry-specific events taking place at that moment around the world, filling airport concourses with delegates, providing custom for the makers of rolling suitcases, giving life to motorway-side motels and supporting careers in the pornographic film industry. There were conventions devoted to seaside condos and dental equipment, waste management and pharmaceuticals, weddings and caravans.
A disco ball started spinning, and along with it, Abba. Because it had been a long day and it was unlikely that any of us would ever meet again, it did not seem inappropriate to dance, especially when the speakers began throbbing to Super Trouper, a song whose obscure lyrics hinted at an international liaison facilitated by the very planes that had inspired our gathering.
The delegates danced to forget the anxieties of salesmanship and to shake off the nervous anticipation generated by industry gossip. With the help of the disco ball, we managed to restore ourselves to the imperfect present, as constituted by a dimly lit bar next to a motorway somewhere in the midst of an industrial cityscape of factories and convention centres. We held one another's moist palms and swayed across the tiled floor, gaining relief through our shared humanity - our stomachs bloated, our waistlines expanding, our digestions unhealthy, our sleep interrupted, our expenses fiddled - creatures who occasionally looked up at the stars but remained essentially and defiantly earthbound.
Extracted from
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
by Alain De Botton, published by Hamish Hamilton at £18.99. Copyright © Alain De Botton 2009. www.penguin.co.uk
