LOCAL TAKEOFF

An international airshow with thousands of global visitors spending several days in close proximity would seem unlikely and possibly even controversial during a pandemic. The world’s two largest air-shows—held in Farnborough, scheduled for July 2020, and in Paris, due in June 2021—were cancelled. Possibly the biggest achievement, then, of Aero India, the biennial Bengaluru airshow, Asia’s largest, was the fact that it was held as a physical event. However, attendance was less than half of what earlier editions have seen, and the only flight displays and parked aircraft were those of the Indian Air Force. Yet it was a