Fresh Air: The inside story of the Gold Coast Pacific Airshow

Spare a thought, then, for perhaps the unluckiest businessman in the world, Kevin Elliott – owner and operator of the world’s largest airshow. “I spent 14 years building my company and half a day dismantling it,” he tells me today. The American played his hand as best he could, shrewdly shifting his business to remote operations back when many thought the pandemic would blow over in a week or so. Still, he estimates his staff base shrivelled from 60 to just 17. “I remember breaking down in tears in front of my staff, crying uncontrollably. It was one of the worst days of my life.”

Fast-forward to 2023, and Elliott has not only revived his Pacific Airshow in California – the biggest event of the year in the state, attracting up to 3 million visitors – but exported it to the Gold Coast, too. The event is a monster success because it rethinks the concept of an airshow. Rather than forcing punters to trek out to a sweltering runway in the middle of nowhere, its home is the beach. Instead of targeting avgeeks, it’s shamelessly set up to appeal to families and young adults. “We’re taking the airshow to the people, so it’s a totally different mindset,” he says.

It’s hard to know exactly how many people attended the first iteration at Surfers Paradise in August, but organisers believe up to 300,000 caught the action. That doesn’t just include those who bought tickets, but locals and visitors who crowded onto one of the hundreds of skyscraper balconies, parked their boats off the coast or snuck along to watch further down the sand. It was a boon for a city trying to muscle attention away from Australia’s major state capitals. Elliott cannily timed it to occur both at a point in the year when tourism is traditionally poor and when the chances of sunshine are at their highest.

“We’ve taken a weekend that was ordinarily just ordinary and turned it into one better than Christmas on the Gold Coast,” Elliott coos. “It’s now the number one time of the year in terms of occupancy and bookings, not only from an availability standpoint but from a short-term rental rate.” He goes even further, believing the Pacific Airshow is the largest event the Gold Coast has ever seen in terms of benefits to the local economy. “Don’t ask me, ask Angie Bell, the MP! Every one of those restaurants was chock-full.”

The airshow works because its USP relies on being more than just an airshow, embracing pop culture, entertainment, and live music. The actual flying itself doesn’t stop. Literally. From 10am to 3pm there are constant displays without a break, narrated by an MC who chats to pilots mid-air so they can describe the manoeuvres they’re about to attempt. It’s the little details I noticed – the on-trend branding and graphics show up the 1970s logos and cringey rock music blared out over the Tannoys at every other airshow in Australia. It’s a point put quite candidly by Deanna Nott, who headed up the event’s comms and was the first contractor signed to launch the airshow locally.

“Australian aviation, I feel, has always been focused on much older people,” she says. “That’s my take because I’ve done a lot of interviews with people, and normally, I’m speaking to those who are either the same age as me or much, much older. Military veterans, for example, or those with a long-time interest in GA. But at the Pacific Airshow, I had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of kids.”

It all comes at a time when aerospace – perhaps the most exciting sector in the country – is struggling with a chronic lack of recruits, from captains and first officers to engineers and cabin crew. Whisper it, but rumours swirl that the ADF is struggling to hunt down the next generation of fighter pilots. “We’re reaching hundreds of thousands of people who would never have otherwise thought to go to a traditional airshow,” she adds. “My dream for this is that this event will inspire the next generation of young people who would never have considered a career in the military or aviation.”

But none of this was as easy as it seemed to beachgoers staring up at the skies. The pandemic-spluttering launch of this year’s Queensland event mirrors the troubled inception of the original show in the US. The Breitling Huntington Beach Airshow, as it was known in 2016, had nothing to do with its adopted father, Elliott, but was instead the idea of New Yorker Mike McCabe, who was searching for a unique location for an airshow that could combine a long, spacious beach with reliable weather. When a staff member mentioned the stretch of sand in Southeast LA, McCabe recruited local resident and airshow director Ken Ashmore (a man still with the event, and now fondly referred to as The Godfather).

The two men spent years haggling with the local council to obtain permission to fly over the sea, but when they got the green light, it came with a caveat – the pair were forced to take all the liability on themselves. The result was a show that attracted 500,000 visitors in its first year but chalked up losses Elliott estimates hit close to a million dollars. “They took a risk and ended up being very proficient at what happens in the sky, but not knowing much about what happens in terms of event execution,” he puts it delicately.

Their unlikely saviour was born and raised in Huntington Beach and a lifelong aviation enthusiast. “My passion comes from my childhood,” says Elliott. “Growing up, my hobby was building and flying remote-controlled aeroplanes. That’s what I loved to do and what I did every single waking hour my parents would allow me. I would be in the garage, building aircraft, flying them, breaking them down and rebuilding them again.” Years later, he heard about the first show and sat on the beach with his wife to check it out.

“I thought this was incredible,” he gushes. “There’s never been more people on the beach.” But he also noticed a lack of hospitality, and Elliott didn’t even pay for a ticket to watch it. “I thought, ‘I should reach out and see if I can help in any way.’ I told my wife, ‘You’re supposed to combine the things you love, right?’” The following year, he got involved as an investor and, in 2018, took over the event in full.

Elliott was just the man to transform its fortunes. His business, Code Four, is less a traditional events company but more what he would describe as a full-service, experiential creative agency. In other words, its focus is on not just logistics, but how content can appeal to a modern, young audience. And because most of his existing projects are paid for by clients, he knows a thing or two about making every cent go far. Taking over just four months before that year’s launch, he took his scalpel to every aspect of the airshow that wasn’t working.

“I reimagined the whole ground game and the strategy behind how to monetise an event that’s essentially free to look up and watch,” he explains. “You need to create a value proposition: build a beautiful precinct, a whole experience, and make it about more than just the air show. At least aspirationally, that’s what we’re doing.” Elliott also changed the name. As Breitling pulled out as a headline sponsor, he rebranded it to the Great Pacific Airshow and then simply the Pacific Airshow. “The rest is history.”

The Pacific Airshow grew and grew, until, in 2020, Elliott was forced to shut the whole project down as airshows became the ultimate super-spreading nightmare. In those dark days, Code Four’s threadbare staff shifted to designing and producing what he calls “COVID compliance solutions”. It was unglamorous work, but it allowed the airshow team to stay together while the business and sports clients dried up. “It was the worst-case scenario, but we always knew it would come back. One of the things I stressed was the hardest part was going to be the recovery, when the clients returned and decided they want to turn the key back on. We can’t just go from zero to 100, especially when it takes a certain amount of people and manpower to execute something like that.”

Yet, in the thick of the pandemic, Elliott still had one eye on international expansion. In early 2021, Code Four’s marketing manager tracked down Nott and pinged her a speculative email. “It came out of nowhere,” she says in a giddy rush. “I was reading it and thought, ‘It’s got to be a scam.’ I started Googling, and, as you can imagine, I just went crazy!” Nott was a canny hire and an almost perfect replica of Elliott Down Under. The team identified her perfect background in aviation, defence and communications but probably didn’t know, then, of her obsession with the area. “I have lived in virtually every state and territory in Australia, but the Gold Coast is the place I hold a very deep affection for. My mum and dad bought their first holiday home here in 1977. I suppose I’m Gold Coast blue blood if you’d like.”

While technically hired to oversee the comms strategy, you get the impression Nott took it upon herself to go further. As the first contractor, she was also the first pair of boots on the ground, helping to create a local team to bring knowledge of the Goldie to fit in with Elliott’s grand ambitions of recreating a Californian cool vibe. “Kevin made a point of not just exporting his US team to the Gold Coast but building a hybrid.”

It wasn’t just Nott who was a smart pick. The Gold Coast was perhaps the only city in Australia capable of pulling it off. It wasn’t just the 42km straight beach but the skyscraper-laden city metres from the sand. It helped that the airspace has a rare, Goldilocks quality – big enough to service the performers but not too busy to shut down the city. “You don’t have that opportunity in Bondi,” Nott points out. The council eyed a boon for business and nodded through the plans with ease.

With so much riding on the success of the first-year event – and rain having the potential to ruin many of the performances – how worried were they about the weather? “I’m a Catholic,” says Nott. “And Kevin and I constantly told each other how we prayed to Baby Jesus! I don’t know if you saw pictures of the launch event [in 2022], but we had 35 media and 50 VIP guests at our unveiling, with two Hornets performing a flypast. And it was torrential rain. The politicians and the mayor were soaked to the bone, and it was freezing cold. In the weeks leading up to the event, there were some very … unsatisfactory weather days. But everything, including the almanack, said the dates we selected would be ideal.”

With the event over, the pair are now focusing on what comes next. The event is already signed off to run annually for at least the next four years, but the beach is big enough to cope with a major expansion in their ambitions. The precinct, Elliott reveals, will probably be twice as big and push back into the street. He’s potentially looking at double-level hospitality and even a music festival. “We did that here in Huntington Beach in 2021. We called it the Afterburner Musical Festival, and it ran in conjunction with pyrotechnics and a night air and drone show.” He won’t rule out a trade show element incorporating the space industry, too.

There is, though, one question I have to ask Elliott. Airshows are the riskiest investment a business can make, even without a pandemic bubbling under the surface. I put it to him that there are easier ways to make a living. What on earth possessed him?

“I love that question. It’s the best question,” he laughs. “The old joke is how do you make a million dollars in the air show business? You’ve got to start with 5 million.” He’d do it, he insists, even if he didn’t make a dime. “Aviation is a powerful metaphor for living your passion and displaying human excellence. Whether you want to be a pilot or just the best you can be, you can’t help but feel inspired watching these people do what they do.”