Future Air Show Will Be In . . .?
Your friendly forum-neighborhood SLF/attorney, first of all, is staying away from both semi-mourning the semi-death of international civil aviation, as well as overtly prognosticating how bad or how long the depression in air transport will last.
Instead since the thread is about Paris-2021, and for what little it probably counts, since about 1976 when I first read about events like Farnborough and Paris (in a well-known aviation and space weekly periodical) I realized what a fabulous experience it would be to attend either one or both - but only if a professional situation could someday be attained in a part of the industry covered by (at that time) Industry Observer. Heck, as a kid I used to run to one of the observation decks at a certain large Chicago airport every trip there to see people off or pick them up, time permitting. To be at one of the international shows, able to observe? Almost as motivational as an enduring fondness for air travel itself, maybe more. So it's sad, separately from the teetering, near demise of the industry, at the spikey-protein points of a super-novel viral scourge, to know Paris is off the books, for its next round anyway.
Well, almost staying away.... I can't connect the dots from where things stand now to what reason and experience tell us the future will bring, but (IMHO) the benefits of air transport, and the contributions it makes to virtually all sectors of any even medium-sized economy, will lead to its return. Otherwise, just like I'm constantly told to replace "manned" in all earlier references to human spaceflight with "crewed", we should shred all the nicely packaged IATA and ICAO growth projections from over the past, what, ten years or so? And let's not forget also to shred reports like the Wise Persons Group on the Future of the Single European Sky (April 2019) along with many, many reports and documents about future ATM and the aviation sector in general. If I have to pronounce a hope, it would be that the vaccine as inoculation will bring some restoration - but as an example of "get-off-your-cellphone and develop something complex technologically fast" ingenuity it will be the real restorative attitude adjustment. Meanwhile, we'll always have Paris . . . no?