Later this morning I’ll hop on a train for my biennial pilgrimage to the Paris Air Show. Thanks to the tunnel beneath the Channel connecting the UK to the mainland of Europe, and the speedy Eurostar train, it is not a long or arduous journey–not least because it no longer involves having to endure one of London’s accursed airports. But in terms of the task that faces me–editing AIN’s show daily publications–it is the final leg of a very long journey. I’ve spent three quarters of my working life with AIN and before that I was on the air show circuit with other less august publications. For the past dozen or so years, I’ve had the enormous privilege of editing AIN’s show dailies.
Even in the age of instant, read-and-forget digital news, AIN takes these print publications for shows incredibly seriously (this is how our business started back in 1972). Of course we aspire to covering all the top news in real time via our digital outlets, but our readers tell us there is still real value in these hard-copy editions, available at the show site as the early birds are getting there to beat the traffic and often still taken back to homes and offices to study later. We aim to go beyond the immediate news, digging deeper to explain and illuminate the context and background to industry developments. This means starting work weeks ahead of each show, preparing in-depth feature articles, doing background interviews and gathering all the information and images we will need for each of our four packed issues in Paris.
Charles Alcock is managing editor of the AIN Media Group, having rejoined the company in 2019. He has been an aviation journalist since 1986, and previously worked for AIN from 1990 to 2017, most recently as editor-in-chief. His main focus is on covering new aviation technology and business models, as well as international news.
Having been raised in the London area, Alcock studied at the University of Manchester in the UK and earned an honors degree in Politics and Modern History. He speaks English and French, and some German.
