alt Hacker NewsNo. They are for recruitment and showing other nations what is on hand in case they want to mess with them.
>insightful cynicism.
So in response you select the most naive take?
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Even the airshows that the military flies at are often primarily civilian shows. The military clearly has recruiting and power demonstration goals but airshows in general exist outside of those goals. The majority of the aviators at these shows are civilian hobbyists.
I like air shows and there's no chance I'm enlisting. Maybe citizens like to see the cool toys they pay for actually do cool things other than seeing them parked in museums.
Why do people go see rocket launches?
Sure that's why the bean counters wrote the checks for them, but that's not the reason people attend. People attend because they are a spectacle.
>> We do airshows because they are cool.
> No. They are for recruitment and showing other nations what is on hand in case they want to mess with them.
That's what he said.
I don't understand this comment. If you want to be the minimally charitable + maximally accurate commenter your tone suggests, then you're also wrong.
It's a superset of the reasons you poorly articulated, and those reasons would include the fact it's cool. Cool things can help both recruitment and morale, and the US military seems to recognize that: https://armedforcessports.defense.gov/Sports/Esports/
If this is just meant to be another comment on the situation which comes with an implicit grain of salt, then the browbeating doesn't make sense.
There are a LOT of air shows where military airplanes are a small or zero component.
I'm totally in agreement that armed forces are there for reasons you described. But an "air show" is a massive and sometimes separate Venn diagram. There are air shows where main thing is thousands of private airplanes coming from across the country to be together and meet up and have fun.
Put it other way, if armed forces decided it's not worth the recruitment investment and pulled out, air shows would still happen :). For most sizes air shows, the biplane aerobatic stunt done by a crazy local 50 year old real estate agent, is way more fun than the c5 galaxy transporter showing "short takeoff" :-)