Europe’s largest outdoor exhibition, the biennial Farnborough International Air Show is the aerospace and defence industries’ showcase of civilian and military aircraft to international customers, media and the public. Running over a week, the show attracts more than 100,000 people to see everything from the mammoth 440-passenger Airbus to the Red Arrows.
The tradeshow element of the show involves 1,500 exhibitors, 73,000 trade visits and US$124bn worth of orders and commitments. Two years ago, QSC’s Q-Sys audio networking system controlled the PA/VA at the show. For 2016, the Shure Systems Group UK worked with Show Hire to provide a more extensive Q-Sys network with more QSC infrastructure throughout the event, allowing the organisers to control every audio element required at the event.
Show Hire Events Manager Ross Slaughter provided a touchscreen-driven GUI in the Show Control office that delivered fingertip control of the 30 separate zones across the site, powered by two Q-Sys 500i Integrated Core processors with 11 I/O Frames. This allowed the event controllers to touch a zone, select a message, set up background music, route emergency services or general message paging, or select commentary.
This year, QSC CXD4.5Q and PL380 amplifiers were added, networked through Q-Sys and powering 120 speaker stacks on the flight path and 20 stacks for public announcements throughout the site, in addition to hundreds of speakers in the four trade show halls.
‘The addition of Q-Sys-networked amps provided invaluable remote status and monitoring information,’ says Show Hire MD Nick Chubb. ‘It was very reassuring to know that we would be alerted to any faults or problems occurring across the site and could be proactive in solving them.’
‘Show Hire has made a major investment in Q-Sys and are doing some very impressive work with the system,’ Shure Systems Group’s John Ellis adds. ‘In addition to Farnborough, it has been used at the Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials and the Badminton Horse Trials, which means they have been contracted for the three largest outdoor events in Europe this year. It is very exciting to work with a company who is using Q-Sys in such innovative ways and really stretching the capabilities of the platform.’
