U.S. President Donald Trump announced a new international aviation and aerospace exhibition to be held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The event will be called CapeWeek, and its inaugural edition is planned for 27 March – 2 April 2028.
“In two years, we will have the greatest air show. We are talking about civil aviation and space,” Trump said during his visit to the space center on 6 November. According to him, the event will be “much bigger” than the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget and will become the largest in the world.
Exhibition, forum and air demonstrations
CapeWeek will combine a business forum, an industry exhibition and days for the general public. Aircraft, spacecraft, autonomous vehicles and new technologies will be showcased, along with air demonstrations. The event will be held on the former space shuttle landing runway, which is 15,001 feet long.
The initiative is being developed as a public-private partnership between NASA, the state of Florida, Space Florida and the organizers of CapeWeek. They say the goal is for the forum to become an annual event that will gradually attract more than 500,000 visitors per year.
An attempt at an American response to Paris and Farnborough
Trump noted that for decades the largest air shows had been held outside the United States – in Paris, the United Kingdom and Dubai. He added that more than 30 years had passed since a new passenger aircraft had been presented at an air show in the United States.
The U.S. president also said that major airlines would attend CapeWeek and that commercial deals would be concluded. The new exhibition will thus seek to compete with established international forums such as the Paris Air Show, the Farnborough Airshow and the Dubai Airshow, which attract manufacturers, airlines, engineers, investors and government representatives.
The plans for CapeWeek were presented alongside MAX POWER – a NASA exhibition and air show at the Kennedy Space Center on 7 and 8 November 2026. Its program features aircraft from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and other demonstration teams.
Sources: new.streetinsider.com, floridatoday.com, flyingmag.com