The organisers of Helitech stated their objective two years ago as being to weed out the tyre-kickers, freebie-locusts and spotters who took up all the valuable time for which exhibitors had paid good money. They certainly did that. I went to check out the price of doors for a Robinson on Wednesday and the guy's first question was "How big is your fleet?" When I engaged Honeywell in conversation about their Executive Observer, which is chipped to Ordnance Survey but happens to cost £10,000, their man kept looking over my shoulder for a bloke in a business suit or a burnoose whose decimal point was further right than mine. Spotters got their money's worth anyway, just watching the incoming. The sad thing for the rest of us was that there was nothing new there at all (apart from the EC130 which is only semi-new) and of course the tilt-rotors, which seemed to have so much promise last time round, were totally absent. They're looking more and more like a blind alley.