Harriers, Mirages and the Russians stop the show
Farnborough must leave organisers of all the tedious everything including the kitchen sink computer trade shows green with envy: in many ways the stands and exhibits are no more exciting than the serried ranks of indistinguishable personal computers that characterise the endless Which Personal Computer User World Shows that seem to merge into each other in a blur but at Farnborough, the whole ambiance is transformed by the flying display, and journalists cheerfully turn out on a Sunday and endure the journey to a location with road and rail links so poor that no-one would choose it for a major international event now. The Mirage 2000 pilots, afterburners glowing like steel furnaces, tear apart the mottled sky. The Harriers perform the latest variations on their stirring aerial ballet – still the best warplane at the show, and it’s British! – this year doing a bombing run on the runway to remind Saddam Hussein just what they can do. The Americans do likewise with their F-16 Falcons and F-18 Hornets – borrowed from the Royal Netherlands and Royal Canadian Air Forces respectively because the US-owned ones are otherwise occupied. And the latter-day heroes, the Soviet pilots, making their second appearance and already a fixture highlight of the show, take their MiG-29s – no fly-by-wire, all done with hydraulics – into vertiginous climbs from which they seem to topple over before regaining control. And stopping the show with the new Antonov An 225, successor to the An 125, which went out with a bang at the 1988 show and returned chastened to its parking space without taking to the air. The new colossus, biggest aircraft in the world, took off on Sunday without incident, and stopped the show just by being there, a megalopolis in the sky. Everyone faces the trek home satisfied, and looks forward to the next Farnborough. But one has to find professional justification for visiting the show, and there’s far more for the computer and communications cognoscenti in the fixed displays than there is ever time to collect. It is professionals only today through to Thursday, the general public is admitted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Plessey steals the static show with its In-Flight Entertainment and Services System
The warplanes may create all the thunder and steal that of everyone else at the show, but it should be forgotten that Farnborough is an Air Show, not simply a military display, and one of the highlights this year has to be the demonstrator for Plessey Avionics’ In-Flight Entertainment and Services System. Having lifted the veil on the concept – colour liquid crystal displays in sizes from 4 to 6.5 depending on the airline’s preference and budget, will transform in-flight entertainment and service – and transform the entire flying experience from the point of view of the passenger, as well as making life a whole lot easier for the operator as it takes the human hassle out of taking orders for Duty Frees and helps to keep passengers occupied during those exasperatingly extended periods when passengers are cocooned on the tarmac in an airliner that can’t take off for one reason or another. The system is going to make a large fortune for the first company or two that gets it into the market, and while it is aware of several competitors racing to catch up, Plessey reckons it still has a one-year lead, and looks for one of three major airlines to sign on the dotted line within weeks. The system could then be in service within two years – and once one airline has it, every other one will have to have it too. The system will likely offer six channels of video – space constraints limit the size of the video generation equipment, but there could be one channel of video games Plessey’s programmers have written some of their own; another for gamblers – the system will operate with a payments card, and all the casino favourites are programmed in; a third for in-flight shopping; a fourth with general entertainment and travelogue – the kind of stuff that goes into the in-flight magaz
ine these days, leaving two for movies – one a first run movie for which a premium price might be charged, the other a free pot-boiler. Exactly what goes into the system will of course be up to the airline, and each will be different. And none of that rubbishy air-piped sound we have to put up with now: this system has compact disk quality digital audio – and one option is likely to be 16 hours of music on a CD-ROM. Equally important from the airline’s point of view is that the system will use a fibre-optic Ethernet, ideally installed during construction of new aircraft but retrofittable to all those now in service – and that will be able to collect vast amounts of telemetry and other data from inaccessible parts of the aircraft, potentially greatly simplifying maintenance procedures and reducing out-of-service time. The demonstrator is charmingly programmed, mainly in Basic, on a Commodore Amiga 3000 under AmigaDOS because of its superior graphics at an affordable price – but no-one expects that it will be the Amiga that is the essential piece of computer equipment in every airliner in the future. The other piece of good news about the system is that, contrary to widespread fears that GEC Plc would regard the whole project as far too frivolous and knock it on the head when it took control of Plessey, the company has in fact been extremely supportive.
It’s RISC all the way at Rediffusion
Flight simulators must be the most advanced, capable – and expensive – video games in the world, and they also have to last a long time – like 20 years. All of which is making it rather difficult for companies like Rediffusion Simulation Ltd in Crawley to maintain their systems and keep them up-to-date there are still R2000-powered simulators in service, and the Rediffusion R2000 uses core memory, dammit! The civil aircraft simulation world pretty much settled on the Systems Engineering Laboratories Concept/32 minicomputers, but having gone through its Gould incarnation and ended up with Encore, worries are growing about how much longer it will be around. As far as Rediffusion is concerned, the answer is RISC and Unix, and software sufficiently portable that it doesn’t matter which RISC – open systems claim another proprietary victim.
