Chapter 59
When cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin showed off the mockup of his Vostok spacecraft at the Paris International Air Show in 1965, the first human in outer space became a combatant in an ongoing public relations skirmish between the Soviet Union and the United States at the show that blended the blundering optimism of “The Ugly American” with the futile rivalry of Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy.”
Ever since its inception in 1909, the International Exhibition of Air Navigation, aka the Paris air show, reflected the aviation industry’s seesaw of militarization and popularization. It took until 1930 for civilian aircraft to outnumber military aircraft at the show, but by the 1950s the momentum had swung back as American aerospace companies held sway. But if the vertiginous peaks of Afghanistan could serve as a battlefield for the superpowers, so could the tarmacs of the Paris air show—especially after the Soviet Union made its debut there in 1957, with the 120-seat Tupolev Tu-104 twinjet airliner whose interior trimmings of mahogany, copper, and lace suggested trains of a bygone era. The Boeing Co. countered with the B-47, an early strategic jet bomber that entered service in 1951.
In 1959, the Americans came loaded for the Russian bear with an impressive arsenal that included, for the first time at the show, missiles. Masters of the political chessboard, the Soviets opened their civilian airliners to the public, shrewdly offering a pacific image compared to the Americans’ more pugnacious profile. Stymied by the Russians’ warm public and media reception, the Americans ad-libbed it by allowed the public to see the interior of Air Force One. But the Soviets checkmated the Americans by showing the Tupolev Tu-114, a monster four-engine airliner with counter-rotating propellers.
In 1965, though, the contingent of thirty-eight exhibitors had to compete not so much with rival metal machines but with the closest thing to a lower-case god—the Icarus-like Yuri Gagarin. The cosmonaut stood next to a mockup of the spam-in-a-can Vostok 1 spacecraft, in whose claustrophobic confines he became the first human to voyage into outer space in 1961, and shook the hands of hundreds of admirers while passing out souvenir Vostok 1 pins. Even with competition like the McDonnell Douglas Corp.’s F4 Phantom and the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels, the American pavilion was as quiet and empty as Yankee Stadium in January.
In response, the Americans pulled a Kobayashi Maru that would have made Captain Kirk proud.
Instead of exaggerating the qualities of its exhibitors to offset the charismatic Russian rocketeer, they simply changed the game. The United States jetted in Vice-President Hubert Humphrey on Air Force One with a cargo of astronauts, Edward White and James McDivitt. Just two weeks before, the duo had been floating nearly 200 miles above the Earth in Gemini 4, when White opened the hatch, used the handheld oxygen-jet gun to shove himself out of the capsule, and became the first American to walk in space.
Even though they arrived, cavalry-like, with just 1-1/2 days remaining in the show, the astronauts sucked up all the oxygen in the show, second in the space race so far, perhaps, but light-years ahead in media relations such that the PR battle was as one-sided as a court summons.
Upstaging the Russians, the astronauts and Humphrey (who chaired the National Space Council) felt magnanimous and broke bread with Gagarin in a heavily photographed encounter where the smiles on the participants’ smiles look as stiff as icicles. At the 1967 Paris Air Show, astronauts Michael Collins (later to fly in Apollo 11) and David Scott chugged vodka toasts with cosmonauts Pavel Ivanovich Belyayev and Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov (perhaps the only spaceship designer who ever flew in one of his projects, the Voskhod I, the first space shot whose crew did not don space suits). Two years later in 1969, McDivitt, Scott, and Rusty Schweickart toured the Apollo 8 command module with cosmonauts Vladimir Shatalov and Aleksei Yeliseyev, who in turn treated the Americans to vodka and caviar on a Yak-40 airliner on exhibit at the Soviets’ pavilion.
Eventually, the space race went from the status of a Golden Child to a kid wearing a Make-A-Wish T-shirt, but the U.S.–Soviet skirmishes for the hearts and minds—and checkbooks—of the Paris air show continued without missing a beat.
In 1969 the United States brought in prototypes of the Boeing 747, the world’s first jumbo jet, followed in 1983 by flying the space shuttle Enterprise piggybacked on a 747. In 1991 it brought in Lockheed Martin’s Corp.’s F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter, which drew the stares and oohs normally reserved for new Corvettes and Teslas at auto shows. The Soviets did not retreat, showing off the Sukhoi Su-27 with more moves than the Bolshoi Ballet at the 1989 show—and the ejection seat of a MiG-29, when it crashed vertically into the ground.