Aviation Week Exective Vice President Kenneth E. Gazzola Publishing Director Gil Wolin Editor-in-Chief John Morris Online Editor Jessica Salerno Managing Editor Barry Rosenberg News Editor Rich Piellisch Chief Art Director Raymond F. Ringston Writers Fred George Paul Richfield David Rimmer Rob Hewson Paul Jackson Bill Sweetman Mike Vines Copy Editor Mike Jerram Photographer Paul Brou Art Director Kirk Fetzer News Assistant Mara Morris

ABOUT SHOWNEWS
A Little Bit of Show News History

Who's the Best Show Magazine of All?
Aviation week's Show News, Of Course!

When it comes to who's been around longest, the show daily publication in your hand can boast the longest lineage of all.

Aviation Week's Show News tops the list as the most experienced, most internationally-published of them all, often with 100-plus glossy pages packed with full-color photos, news and personal views on key issues from leading aerospace personalities.

But it wasn't always like that.

Show News goes back at least 35 years, touching (or being touched by) many of the best-known aerospace journalists of the last three decades-including the NBAA's very own Jack Olcott, who can claim several years at its helm.

Who better to tell the story than John Fricker, who was there as the business-aviation-based Reading Show spawned the first international ancestor of Show News, and who to this very day remains a key member of the magazine's illustrious international staff:

"Daily air show newsletters were started at Reading in the mid-1960s by the late Robert B. Parke and Ed Muhlfeld, respectively editor and publisher of Flying magazine, then owned by the Ziff-Davis Group. As London editor of Flying from 1961, I helped set up the first European show daily at Paris in either 1967 or 1969. My personal records for Salon de l'Aeronautique daily coverage go back only to June 1971, although my first attendance was in 1949 and I haven't missed a Paris air show since.

"Staff requirements were not extensive at that time, since the daily newsletters were only three or four single-sided sheets, typewritten on stencils and run-off on a duplicating machine for a circulation of just a few hundred copies. I remember having to sleep in Flying's hospitality suite in the Paris Meurice Hotel, which meant being unable to go to bed until the last guests weaved their uncertain way home in the wee small hours." (It's not like that now-ed.)

"In 1972 Ziff-Davis produced the first Hannover Airshow Show Daily, with no fewer than six issues," recalls Fricker. "Hotel shortages in Hannover resulted in many visitors, including ourselves, having to stay with German families in surrounding villages, which was nothing if not educational. But where else, except at Fairchild Republic's biennial barbecue, could you get your steaks grilled and served by legendary WWII fighter ace General Adolf Galland?"

What would later become Show News subsequently moved from Ziff-Davis in the 1980s to newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch, and then to present owners McGraw-Hill Aviation Week. The domestic U.S. show and convention coverage continued, mainly at NBAA and Heli-Expo. But Farnborough proved a pivotal point. Over to Fricker:

"With Bob Parke I was involved in the mid-1970s in negotiations with the SBAC to publish at Farnborough. The (xenophobic) SBAC would allow an American show publication only if offset by a similar British daily. This introduced the first element of competition into the field."

At that time the SBAC could stomach only all-British aircraft for the show, later grudgingly allowing some with foreign powerplants and finally opening the gates to all when it realized that fog in The Channel (or the Atlantic) no longer meant "Continent cut off."

John W. (Jack) Olcott, then Editor of Z-D's Business & Commercial Aviation magazine and now NBAA president, took over responsibility for Show News, successively followed by James Gilbert, Robert Searles and from 1994 John Morris, the present incumbent.

Says Fricker: "Links with the first international Show News are happily still maintained by myself as the sole remaining original team member, on the full show issues at Farnborough, Paris and Singapore. Under John Morris's tutelage, issues are published at many other aerospace shows throughout the world including Singapore, Berlin (ILA), Chile (FIDAE), China, and Dubai, with ventures into South Korea and Malaysia. Some are bilingual-you can't imagine the foreign language printing complications-but publication is assured by a small, dedicated and highly professional production and distribution team.

"Desk-top publishing and digital images are a far cry from the early typewritten-and-duplicated newsletters. Yet despite its enormous growth, Show News still reaches the main local hotels by breakfast, and appears on all the stands by opening time.