They could’ve called it the National Queuing Day; it would have been a lot more fitting.
Are Singaporeans really that interested in aviation, or are they just curious, or do they simply have nothing better to during the weekends? I counted spending at close to 4 hours waiting in queues, possibly more. There was that massive convoluted queue around the Pasir Ris MRT station (that alone took more than an hour) to board the free shuttle (should have avoided that in the first place), the jam along the roads to the exhibition site (we ended up missing most of the flying display, and had to watch the A380 and the RAAF’s performance while still on the bus) , the queue upon arrival to get through registration and all those security checks, the queue after registration to get to where the static displays were, and after everything, the queue back out and the queue to board the coaches back out to town.
The airshow itself was pretty good, but crowd control and organisation was extremely poor. Tickets had to be purchased in advance, and so most people had to grit their teeth and just go through all that agony for that opportunity of a close encounter with military and commercial aircraft. I didn’t catch the Black Knights doing their manoeuvres - I only saw the Aussie’s Roulettes, and even then the sky was overcast and all washed out and just made for horrible, horrible photography. Even so, I’m glad I went for the airshow, fulfilling a lesser-known childhood want of mine, despite my parents’ warnings that airshows were dangerous events to attend. How else could I get to stand under the nose of an A380 or get onto the back of a Chinook?
Photos :: S’pore Airshow 2008