Aircraft
The show included displays from major aviation firms showing their latest aircraft. On the first day, the prototype Boeing 707, the "Dash 80", arrived at the airport on its way to becoming an exhibit at the Smithsonian. The same day, BOAC announced its first official order for five Concordes. Douglas Aircraft, Lockheed and Boeing all used the show as a sales platform for their latest designs, the DC-10, L-1011 and 747. Douglas and Lockheed had recently started deliveries, and flew in production versions of their aircraft for the show directly from the assembly line. Numerous military aircraft also arrived, including the C-5 Galaxy.
Airbus Industrie arrived at the show to promote their A300, claiming that the longer-ranged A-300B-4 variant would present strong competition in the U.S. domestic market due to operating costs being 5 to 7% lower than the L-1011 and DC-10 trijets. Noting that the original contract that led to the trivets had called for a twin-engine aircraft, Ken Gordon of Airbus North America claimed that the original specification still needed to be filled. The third engine of the US designs gave them the ETOPS performance needed for trans-Atlantic flights, but were unneeded for flights within North America, which the 300 could meet with lower operational costs. Douglas and Lockheed responded by using the show to pitch two-engine versions of their three-engine designs to compete with the A300.
Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry had been trying to develop a shorter-range airliner they called the "YX" for some time, but had backed away from talks with Boeing after the value of the Yen fluctuated. Lockheed announced that they were going to approach Japan and the government-owned Air Canada to develop a two-engined version of the L-1011 as a way of filling both the "YX" needs as well as for domestic flights within Canada. The "BiStar" was 30 feet (9.1 m) shorter, had new wings and tail, and was powered by two upgraded RB-211-X engines, which Lockheed was already developing for the extended-range L-1011-2.
Douglas, recently purchased by McDonnell, had also been pitching a two-engine version of the DC-10, which combined the body of the -10 with the wings of the -30, along with the upgraded CF6-50 engine. Interest had been tepid when the idea was first floated, but with Lockheed's and Airbus' aggressive moves they once again brought the idea forward. Boeing was coy on the topic of a smaller 747, but suggested they were instead looking at an entirely new design, a "long thin" aircraft similar to a enlarged twin-engine 707. In the end, Japan Air Lines' YX needs were filled with 747-100SR, for "short range", which added passenger capacity at the cost of range. Boeing's "long, thin" design would emerge as the Boeing 757 - it was the only one of the proposed twins to actually ship.
Small designs at the show included several smaller jets, notably the North American debut of the Fokker F.28, several business jets including the IAI Commodore (soon to be known as the Westwind), British Aerospace BAe 125, and the propeller-powered Fairchild Hiller FH-227, Britten-Norman Trislander and DeHavilland Twin Otter.
NASA and the FAA also had a major presence at the show, demonstrating their efforts to lower the noise and pollution of air travel. One major program at that time was the microwave landing system, which would allow aircraft to approach from much wider angles and avoid stacking them up over a single approach vector, spreading out the noise. They also demonstrated new engine technologies and stated that the widely used JT8D fleet would be smoke-free by 1972. A combination of these technologies, along with supercritical wings, composites and artificially stable control systems would improve fuel economy of future airliners by 60%.
Major avionics firms also attended in force. Goodyear brought their STARAN computer, originally developed for missile interception and similar duties, but now being pitched as an air traffic control (ATC) system that would optionally use a computer-generated voice to automatically send traffic advisories to pilots. Plessey was showing their ACR 430 radar for smaller airfields, and with Lockheed they were demonstrating their then-incomplete automated ATC system based on a Lockheed MAC-16 minicomputer.
Read more about this topic: Transpo '72