The full stats are elsewhere in this issue, but I will tell you that the trade show had a record number of exhibiting companies. A record number of companies bellied up to the bar and laid their money down to exhibit. That doesn’t guarantee our future, but it does show that some mighty successful businesspeople do believe that we have a future, and a good one at that.

Companies like Boeing, Airbus, Gulfstream, and Bombardier were there, and their exhibits alone cost more than any airplane I know how to crank up. They were staffed by corporate types with blue suits, silk ties, and shoes that gleamed with a gentle luster to which my Rockports cannot even aspire.

And there was something new this year. The big buzz was the announcements of two — not one, but two — supersonic bizjets by two companies, Aerion and SAI. Both include big names in aviation, finance and design, and both sound like they know what they’re doing.

The numbers alone make your head swim. We’re talking 4,000 miles range at Mach 1.6 to 1.8. We’re also talking about laying out billions, repeat billions, of dollars over the next eight years or so before the aircraft will be ready to sell at a retail price in the neighborhood of $80 million — give or take a few million.

I am struck dumb with wonderment. How can anybody plan ahead that far, raise the money, pay the bills, hold it all together, and make a profit eight years down the road? The people with the money think they can do it, and they’re willing to invest that money to prove it. More power to them and I hope they succeed.

Along those same lines, I went to a much smaller aviation meeting recently. Burt Rutan, builder of SpaceShipOne and Voyager, and one of the hottest people in aviation, was in Huntsville, AL, meeting with NASA folks. Burt agreed to speak for free in a hangar at my favorite grass strip, Moontown Airport. Details were handled by our local EAA Chapter 190, FBO/airport manager George Myers, and a zillion volunteers. For no charge we got supper and a Burt Rutan speech with plenty of time for autographs and photo ops.