Inside the 2022 Brisbane Airshow

In the days leading up to the show, the area received around 100 millimetres of rainfall. To make things worse, a summer of La Niña weather patterns had brought ridiculous amounts of rain to the east coast of Australia. In Brisbane we had already suffered four floods for the season, ranging from minor to catastrophic. As a result, the soil had been saturated and even a small amount of rain could not be absorbed into the ground. Combine that with cool winter temperatures that impeded evaporation and you have the makings of a swamp larger than some small countries.

Another consequence was that many people had other commitments on the new dates and could not attend. In our case, one team member had to come up a day late and take unscheduled time off work, risking losing his day job.

So, two years and one week late, it finally happened, under (mostly) clear blue skies and gentle winds. Perfect conditions for an airshow. What could possibly go wrong?

Getting there

One of the repercussions of the soggy conditions was that our intended campsite, originally a short 50-metre walk from our display stand, had extensive puddles of standing water that refused to go away. As a result, all the campers, including ourselves, had to be relocated to Toogoolawah Showgrounds, some 11 kilometres away. This introduced a raft of logistics problems centred around trying to be in two places at one time.

From the general public’s perspective, there was little to complain about regarding the actual aerial displays. Paul Bennet and his team provided the usual breathtaking performances, backed up by other top-quality displays of aerobatic aircraft, warbirds, and aerobatic warbirds.

However, just getting into the venue on that Saturday caused more than a little angst for a number of attendees. The small town of Esk is normally about a 75-minute drive from Brisbane City. It marks the beginning of the last leg of the journey from Brisbane or the Gold Coast to the 2022 Brisbane Airshow.

The roughly 20-kilometre drive from Esk to the airshow venue at the Watts Bridge Memorial Airfield usually takes less than 20 minutes. One of our team members left Esk just before 10am and finally arrived at our display stand well after 1pm. He reported that many people in the traffic queue had turned around and gone home in disgust.

The reasons for the traffic chaos are unclear, at least to us. But whatever the issues, the same problems did not seem to recur on Sunday, even though crowd numbers were reportedly the same.

Soggy sidelines

The unseasonal rain had other impacts on the show. Airside, the taxiways were quite soft, and the fuel truck got bogged on Friday between the crowd and the runway.
Behind the fence, some of the heavier display aircraft were slowly succumbing to gravity. Almost all the spectator areas were soft, if not soaking wet, and the organisers brought in large amounts of sawdust to help soak this up.

One of the caterers had brought an old Atlantean bus which they used to prepare and serve food. This had sunk up to the chassis and was threatening to become a feature of the airfield for some time.

Cars were getting bogged in the carparks and access roads were badly churned up. Anyone without a 4WD was playing mud bog roulette. It was starting to look more like a music festival.

Technology to the rescue

If you think cash is dead in 2022, think again.

What happens when 10,000 people, each one with a mobile phone, all descend on a usually quiet rural area that normally hosts a few hundred people? The internet dies. Or more specifically, the local mobile phone towers could not handle the sudden and massive increase in bandwidth requirements. As a result, people were having trouble using anything relating to the internet. Coverage would come and go but was far from reliable at any time over the weekend.

In anticipation of these issues, the organisers had ordered backup systems a couple of months prior to the show. However, well after the show has been and gone, their order is still in “provisioning” with the supplier. At the current rate, it may or may not be ready for next year.

The biggest problem resulting from this was that none of the food vendors or exhibitors, including us, could use the EFTPOS facilities. The event had regressed to the 1980s, except that the “click clack” manual imprinters that were used as backups back then when the electronic systems failed were no longer available.

For us, this meant only one solitary EFTPOS sale went through for the whole weekend. While we did make a few cash sales, we lost other sales due to internet failure.

On Sunday, the organisers did try to mitigate the internet problems by asking all attendees to turn off mobile data on their phones. We suspected about 80 per cent of attendees wouldn’t know how to do this and the other 30 per cent wouldn’t care. It did make a little difference, but there were still long periods with no reception for us.

The day after we returned home, we spotted a news article about the exact same problem affecting the town of Bright in Victoria. When an influx of tourists swells the population tenfold, the town virtually shuts down as everything that relies on internet connectivity fails.

We suspect that if we wait for the telcos or the government to fix this problem, we might be waiting a while. In Bright, business owners are creating their own DIY wireless networks. Clearly organisers of large events in rural areas will have to do the same for the foreseeable future. Until that breaks the NBN. Ah, technology.

This issue seems to parallel something we keep hearing about in aviation regarding the reliance on magenta lines or some such.

The backstreet boys

By decree of the organisers, our stand was located in Education Alley. Prior to the show, we thought that this would be great as it would attract anyone wanting to learn more about the finer points of aviation.

MRH90 Taipan multi-role helicopter The ADF has 47 of these fly-by-wire, all-composite troop-carrying machines. With a maximum take-off weight of up to 11 tonnes and a payload of just over four tonnes, it somewhat outshines the Robinson R22 for moving stuff around. These machines were assembled locally by Australian Aerospace from imported materials and commenced in service in 2007 with the Army and Navy. However, with an hourly operating cost reportedly up to $50,000 and a history of operational and performance issues, the decision was made late last year to retire the fleet 10 years ahead of schedule (in 2037) and replace them with UH-60 Black Hawks. Ironically, this was one of the models they replaced in the first place. Sounds fair. We hope AUKUS didn’t have a hand in this one…

In reality, we were in company with an Army/Navy recruitment stand, the RAAF stand (the only apparent purpose was to provide free VR “rides” to punters), Air Cadets, a drone licence training group and Angel Flight. None of these had much affinity with our mission, which is to provide critical information to pilots that is generally not available anywhere else.

Worse still, the constant queue for the RAAF stand forced anyone walking down Education Alley to the far side of the thoroughfare and well away from our stand. And because we were in a “backstreet”, most of the foot traffic bypassed us completely.

The exact same set-up at previous airshows had yielded much better results for us. When measured by the number of entries that we attracted into our free competition to win prizes worth over $540, the last airshow at Evans Head in 2020 (which had its own weather problems) yielded over three times more entries with much smaller crowd numbers.

The rest

We spoke to many exhibitors at the show and there were some common themes. The wet weather had created major problems for almost everyone, as had the internet issues.

Among the flight training organisations, the comments were similar. Some thought that there had been more engagement from the crowd in previous years. Some reported reasonable interest in their stands. However, for most, the conversion into actual business that they had hoped for did not happen.

On the other side of the coin, vendors such as Mach 5 that offered a wide range of merchandise that appealed to most aviation enthusiasts reported booming sales, even with the EFTPOS issues. Most of the food and drink vendors reportedly sold out just as the show concluded, which is the perfect result for them.

The reoccurring theme of the weekend was that there was a queue for everything. In the car, up to two hours to travel six kilometres. Queues to go to the toilet. Queues to get food or drinks. And if you didn’t have cash on you, there was a two-hour queue for the ATM before rejoining the queue for the food van.

But at least you could still see the action up in the air while waiting.

AS350 Squirrel If you are into helicopter flights, you can hitch a ride in a Robinson R44 just about anywhere these days. So, our interest was piqued when we saw a sleek black AS350 Squirrel traversing the skies around the airshow, sharing the joys of aviation with the great unwashed. Definitely not something you see every day (the Squirrel, not the unwashed – they’re everywhere). The friendly guys at Elite Helicopters took us for a ride in the front seat of their pride and joy. Pilot David Teed has been part of the team for about eight years, and it is clear that his enthusiasm has not waned one bit. On Sunday afternoon, this same helicopter was spotted flying backwards while an onboard cameraperson captured scenes for a promotional video to help entice the crowds next year. Elite Helicopters is based at Archerfield near Brisbane and offers a wide range of scenic flights, tours, charters and even flight training.

That’s a wrap

From this exhibitor’s perspective, having a display at the show was expensive, and at times frustrating. COVID-19 and the weather certainly played their part in creating havoc over the past two years. While we thought the location of our stand was sub-optimal, some others in more prominent positions did not gain the sales traction they had hoped for.

Perhaps the economic landscape for aviation has changed since COVID-19 began and some of us need to reset our expectations and approach.

The organisers must have been under immense pressure dealing with the constant deluge of problems outside of their control. That may have resulted in less-than-ideal outcomes.

But possibly the biggest drawback for us, personally, was the type of person attending. We believe the vast majority of the crowd were aviation enthusiasts rather than current or future pilots. That worked well for some exhibitors, but not well for many others. Of those attracted to our stand, less than 20 per cent had any flight hours.

But on the plus side, we did meet some great people, caught up with old friends and got some more exposure around the industry.

And any excuse to get a roaring fire going on a cold night will do us.

One last thing…

From a spectator’s viewpoint, it would be awesome if the guys from the Watts Bridge Memorial Airfield could relocate the runway to the south side of the airfield for next year. This would allow the spectators to view the action without looking directly into the winter sun for two days straight. Perhaps we could arrange a working bee for next weekend?