The sun went down over the Egyptian Mediterranean coast on Friday evening and left a row of American warplanes in silhouette: a C-130 Hercules, an A-10 Thunderbolt II, an F-16 Fighting Falcon and an F-15E Strike Eagle, parked nose-on to the desert.

A few hundred metres away, Russian ground crews were preparing a Su-57 for the same flight programme. Chinese fighters, tankers and radar aircraft were arriving on the same ramp.

The second El Alamein International Airshow opens today, 8 September, and runs to the 10th. It is the rarest thing in the modern arms trade: a runway where the United States, Russia and China are all selling to the same customer, at the same time, in front of each other. The customer is Egypt.

Not an airshow the public can walk into

Despite the name, El Alamein is not a weekend spectacle with burger vans and a display line. Egyptian state daily Ahram Online describes it as a trade-only event, open to approved business and government visitors, built around static displays, scheduled flying demonstrations and an exhibition hall.

The show is backed by Egypt’s Ministry of Defence, the Egyptian Air Force, the Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Egyptian Space Agency, with EgyptAir as official carrier. A separate Aerospace Future Technology Symposium ran on 7 September, covering future airpower, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and multi-domain operations.

The numbers depend on who is counting. The organisers advertise more than 250 exhibitors from over 50 countries. US Air Forces Central puts participation above 80 countries with more than 50 aircraft on display. Both figures come from interested parties, and neither has been independently audited.

What is not in dispute is the exhibitor list. Airbus, Boeing, Dassault, Lockheed Martin, L3Harris, Raytheon, Leonardo, Korea Aerospace Industries, Turkish Aerospace Industries, China’s CATIC and Russia’s Rosoboronexport are all booked into the same hall.

Russia brings the Su-57E and two weapons nobody has seen

The Su-57E is the export model of Russia’s only fifth-generation fighter: single-seat, twin-engine, thrust-vectoring, and pitched at air superiority, interception and ground attack. Rosoboronexport’s advertised weapons package for the display includes RVV-MD2 and RVV-BD air-to-air missiles, the Kh-38MLE, the Kh-69 cruise missile and the Kh-58UShKE anti-radiation missile.

Two more will be shown publicly for the first time. Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation has named them the S-71M, described as a delivery platform for a warhead, and the S-71K, an aerial bomb. Both are billed as fifth-generation-fighter weapons. Beyond those designations, almost nothing has been officially released.

Rosoboronexport chief executive Alexander Mikheev went further in the run-up, telling Russian state media that the Su-57 has proven itself in real combat and that new Su-57E export contracts have been signed, with deliveries expected to begin in 2026. He named no buyers and disclosed no contract values.

That claim deserves a hard look. Russia has largely kept the Su-57 away from contested airspace over Ukraine, using it mainly as a standoff cruise-missile launcher. In June 2024 Ukraine’s military intelligence said it had struck a Su-57 on the ground at Akhtubinsk in Astrakhan region, roughly 590 kilometres from the front line, and released before-and-after satellite imagery. Britain’s Royal United Services Institute assessed at the time that losing even one airframe amounted to around five percent of the operational fleet, so few are in service.

Four months later, video circulating on Russian and Ukrainian channels appeared to show a Su-57 shooting down Russia’s own S-70 Okhotnik stealth drone near Kostiantynivka, after the drone reportedly lost contact with its operator and drifted toward Ukrainian lines. Russia’s Defence Ministry never formally addressed it.

China is not selling a fighter. It is selling a system.

China’s Ministry of National Defense announced on Sunday that the PLA Air Force would send fighters, airborne early warning aircraft, tankers and helicopters at Egypt’s invitation. That combination is the message.

At the inaugural 2024 show, China sent seven J-10s of the August 1st Aerobatic Team and a single Y-20 transport, which flew over the Pyramids trailing smoke in Chinese and Egyptian colours. That was a charm offensive. Sending a fighter, a radar aircraft and a tanker together is a different pitch: it says Beijing can supply the connective tissue of an air force, not just the jets.

The timing is deliberate. Egypt and China wrapped up Eagles of Civilization 2026 days before the show, a joint exercise running from mid-August into early September that covered air combat tactics, air superiority and combat search and rescue. It was the first deployment of the J-16 to such an exercise, and the first time Egyptian Rafales took part. 2026 also marks 70 years of Chinese-Egyptian diplomatic relations.

The United States is defending a 45-year-old position

Washington is not arriving as a challenger. Egypt has flown American fighters since the early 1980s and operates one of the largest F-16 fleets outside the United States. The US pavilion at El Alamein carries more than 25 American aerospace and defence companies.

The most interesting American exhibit may be the A-10. The Thunderbolt II is being wound down at home, yet it has turned up in Egypt as a live sales proposition, built around a 30mm GAU-8/A seven-barrel cannon firing 3,900 rounds a minute, titanium armour around the cockpit and up to 16,000 pounds of external stores.

Boeing used the show floor to hand over the first five of twelve CH-47F Chinooks to the Egyptian Air Force, replacing older CH-47D airframes under a contract signed in January 2023.

Why Egypt can do this at all

Most air forces buy from one bloc and live with the consequences. Egypt has spent forty years refusing to. It flies American F-16s, French Rafales and Mirage 2000s, Russian MiG-29 variants and Ka-52 attack helicopters, and it has been talking to Dassault about 24 more Rafales on top of the 54 already ordered.

That diversification is exactly what makes El Alamein possible. No single supplier has enough leverage to demand exclusivity, so all three turn up and compete in the open. For Cairo, the show is less a shop window than an auction floor.

The organisers describe El Alamein as a bridge between Africa, the Middle East and the global aerospace industry. On this week’s evidence it is something sharper than that: the one place on earth where a Warthog, a Felon and a Flanker derivative sit on the same concrete, and the buyer walks the line deciding which one to take home.

The organisers’ own overview of the 2026 El Alamein International Airshow.

Sources: U.S. Air Forces Central; Ahram Online; Xinhua; Global Times; The Defence Blog; TASS via The Defence Blog; Royal United Services Institute.