Dubai Airshow

Dubai Airshow is the world’s fastest growing aerospace exhibition, in 2013 generating civil aircraft orders alone worth £135b. Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin decided to invest in this opportunity building a brand new 2 storey chalet for this year’s show. SDD, part of the GES global network, were awarded the contract. Helm-X have built numerous big structures for SDD at airshows around the world, but this was the largest and most challenging so far. After months of design and discussion, we were finally given the go ahead in late June, giving us only 6 weeks to detail, fabricate and finish 40 tonnes of steel and stack everything into containers for it to be shipped to Dubai in time to install it for the show.

Our site team arrived out in Dubai at the end of September. Dubai Airshow is located at the newly completed Al Makatoum airport, which is 40km south of Dubai in the middle of the desert. Our boys had to acclimatise to temperatures as high as 49 degrees Celsius, Humidity as high as 90%, sandstorms, and even mini tornados! Nevertheless, the steel structure was complete within 2 weeks.

The building comprises of 2 floors, with a downstairs terrace, a first floor terrace, and a roof terrace. Half of the building is cladded with composite panels, the other half is glazed with blue tinted 17.5mm laminated glass. The terrace areas have baluster free 21.5mm glass balustrade. Access to the 1st floor is via a glazed internal staircase. Front access to the ground floor is via a glazed ramp with canopy, access to the rear by a staircase. There is also a fire escape for access to the first floor and roof terrace. The floors were decked with metal decking and then layers of plywood. The roof and terrace areas had a waterproof membrane and gutter system fitted. All of this work took our site team 5 weeks to complete. We handed the building over to Interface, who did a fantastic job fitting the inside of the chalet out.

The show started on the 9th November and the chalet was officially opened by Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson and Sheik  Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The chalet looks spectacular and stood out at the show, a worthy investment for Lockheed Martin and a proud success for our client SDD. The building is permanent and will be used annually for future airshows.