L3Harris Technologies will not attend the Paris Air Show later this month, making it the second large defense firm to sit out the biennial event largely focused on commercial aviation.
Instead of hosting meetings in a corporate chalet on the flight line at the Le Bourget Airport north of Paris, L3Harris executives will instead focus on company operations stateside.
“Nobody’s sold a darn thing [at] the Paris Air Show for 40 years—or at least I haven’t. So we’re not going there,” L3Harris CEO Chris Kubasik said Thursday at a Bernstein investors conference in New York. “We’re going to do program reviews. We’re going to visit our sites. We’re going to meet with our employees.”
L3Harris joins Northrop Grumman, which hasn’t hasn’t paid to have a large corporate chalet at Paris or the Farnborough Air Show—the alternating-year sister airshow outside of London—since 2012. Northrop had a corporate chalet at the 2018 Farnborough Air Show that was paid for by Orbital-ATK, which the company acquired that same year. Some Northrop executives still attend the air shows, but in much smaller numbers.
The decision to scale back attendance at international air shows represents a shift in the way modern defense companies conduct business in a world where face-to-face meetings have been replaced by video conferences and electronic communications. But many companies still view the air shows as important to attend, since executives can conduct hundreds of meetings with suppliers and customers in just a few days.
Kubasik, who became CEO of the defense-heavy firm formed by the merger of L3 Technologies and Harris Corp. in 2021 and chairman in 2022, said he wants executives more focused on the company’s performance.
“Everything every executive does is focused on performance, meeting their commitments to their customers, the financial commitments to Wall Street, and the commitments to our workforce,” he said.
Like most companies, L3Harris has experienced pandemic-related supply chain issues in recent years. At the same time, the Biden administration is in the midst of reviewing whether to allow L3Harris to purchase Aerojet Rocketdyne.
The European airshows, along with similar shows in Dubai and Singapore, are considered must-attend events for many in the defense industry. In addition to the private chalets, they feature massive exhibit halls where companies tout different products.
Over the past decade, defense companies have chosen to focus more on air shows and arms shows in the Middle East and Asia, as U.S. allies and partners buy weapons to counter regional threats. But the two most-attended European air shows have been predominantly focused on commercial aviation, with Boeing and Airbus battling to see who announces more airliner orders. But in recent years there has been a noticeable pivot to defense coinciding with Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine, which has since turned into a 15-month-long war with no end in sight.
Pentagon leaders often attend the shows and meet with CEOs. The shows are also popular with governors and congressional leaders looking to attract business to their home state.
Large companies typically spend millions of dollars purchasing, decorating, and catering chalets and travel expenses for dozens—if not hundreds—of executives and support staff for the events. Many CEOs fly to the air shows on company-owned business jets on Sunday and return to the states Tuesday night.
The 2020 Farnborough Air Show and 2021 Paris Air Show were completely canceled because of the pandemic. Farnborough resumed last year, but this is the first time defense and commercial aviation executives will meet in Le Bourget since 2019.
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