Farnborough 2008

Schiebel S100 Camcopter

Said to attract a remarkable 250,000 visitors, this year’s Farnborough Airshow is the the 60th anniversary of the event, so it’s not quite as venerable as the RAF, which celebrated its 90th birthday this this year.

The show’s a bit far for most folk this side of the border to trundle along to, and with the ever improving standards of life that we enjoy nowadays, the cost of travelling there means if you haven’t gone now, you’re probably not likely to.

Fortunately, the BBC has put together a nice little montage of shots taken at the show, which you can see by clicking here, and avoid the trip.

The Schiebel S100 Camcopter caught my eye (and not because of the Beeb’s slightly alarming typo that described is as the S100 Campcopter), armed with a Lightweight Multi-role Missile (LMM). I don’t know the current specifications for the S100, but older data indicated that it could fly an autonomous mission, with operator intervention if required, three years ago, and was capable of staying aloft for over six hours with a 25 kilogramme payload, and dash to a target at over 100 knots, and now it has a missile.

While it may be more than a year or two ago, your scribe recalls the days when just getting radio-controlled helicopters into the air and back down was an achievement (although the skilled could make them dance, and fly inverted, even cutting grass with the main rotors to demonstrate their skill), and not too many years before that, simply achieving controllable flight with such a model was doubted by some.

How things change.