I made my first ever visit to the Farnborough International Airshow last week. It was thrilling, and I am not just referring to the flypasts.
For decades, Farnborough has been a showcase for aerospace’s established order: Airbus and Boeing traded commercial orders, engine makers displayed incremental improvements in efficiency, and defence contractors unveiled the next iteration of familiar platforms. This year’s event told a rather different story. The centre of gravity has shifted. Farnborough is no longer primarily about aircraft. It is about software, autonomy, data and the increasingly blurred line between commercial aerospace and defence. Incredibly, fifty percent of the 1,636 exhibitors were from the defence sector, where civil aerospace dominated in previous years.
In this new environment Hudson Sandler’s defence advisory team is positioned to support across 3 reputational industry challenges; firstly, navigating political and regulatory complexity; secondly, driving product understanding and differentiation; and, thirdly, managing narrative volatility and external scrutiny.
This offer is shaped by a world that has become markedly less predictable and very fast moving. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed assumptions about the character of warfare, while continued instability across the Gulf and the wider Middle East has reinforced the importance of resilience, air defence and long-range precision capabilities. Governments are increasing defence spending not as a cyclical response but as a structural necessity.
The most striking feature of Farnborough was the prominence of technologies that barely registered a decade ago: autonomous systems, AI-enabled software, satellite constellations, electronic warfare, hypersonic and collaborative combat aircraft. The conversations were less about replacing one generation of fighter aircraft with another than about creating connected ecosystems in which crewed platforms work alongside fleets of intelligent, expendable autonomous systems.
That shift creates opportunities for a new generation of companies. The traditional primes remain indispensable, particularly for complex programmes such as the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), missile systems and military aviation. Yet increasingly they are acting as systems integrators, partnering with smaller, venture-backed firms that specialise in artificial intelligence, autonomy, advanced sensors, cyber resilience or propulsion.
Indeed, one of the show’s more revealing developments was institutional rather than technological. Farnborough introduced dedicated spaces for defence SMEs and emerging companies, recognising that innovation increasingly originates outside the traditional industrial hierarchy. I met numerous new players, all entrepreneurial innovators disrupting the established playbooks but all looking for capital and partners to scale and transform.
The winners will be those able to combine the financial strength and industrial capacity of incumbents with the speed, experimentation and digital capabilities of younger firms.
The lesson from Farnborough is that aerospace and defence have entered a new era. Innovation is becoming more widely distributed, capital is flowing towards disruptive technologies, and strategic advantage increasingly depends on speed rather than size.
