Farnborough 2026: Dassault Systèmes Reveals the Invisible

This week, the entire aerospace and defense industry will be here in Farnborough. So the question that cuts across every conversation happening on the stands: how do you leverage knowledge and know-how? The judgment behind decades of design decisions, the knowledge that made programs work and that too often leaves when the engineers who built them do.

That is the challenge Dassault Systèmes comes to Farnborough 2026 to address. And the proposition is straightforward: Reveal the Invisible.

What is actually at stake

The most valuable thing an aerospace organisation owns is rarely the one that shows up on a balance sheet. It is the reasoning behind decisions: why a specific alloy was selected for a spar attachment, why a system architecture was built the way it was, which load case forced a full redesign twenty years ago and why.

That knowledge took generations of engineers to build. And in most organisations today, it lives in their heads, not in any system their successors can access.

That is the knowledge retirement crisis, and it is accelerating. What remains is data without context: records that tell you what was decided, but not why.

Dassault Systèmes’ answer is 3D UNIV+RSES: digital environments where that knowledge is captured, structured, and made reusable across programs, across organisations, and across generations of engineers. Knowledge that accumulates rather than retires.

Five themes, five real industry pressures

Dassault Systèmes structures its week around five themes. Each one maps directly to a challenge the industry is already navigating.

Sovereignty. Where data lives, who processes it, and under which legal framework: these are now program-level requirements. Dassault Systèmes demonstrates how sovereign deployment works in practice: data residency within national boundaries, zero-trust architecture, and full compliance with frameworks including FedRAMP and SecNumCloud.

Industrial AI for defence. The Virtual Companions in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform are grounded in 40 years of real engineering knowledge: not trained to retrieve answers from documents, but built to reason through structural physics, airworthiness regulations, and systems engineering constraints the way a senior engineer would.

Right all the time. Quality and traceability cannot be end-of-program activities. A digital thread from design intent to production control — connecting DFMEA, PFMEA, and control plans — means defects are caught where they cost a fraction to fix, not discovered in final assembly or, worse, in service.

Innovation at speed of relevance. The gap between recognising a new threat and delivering a new capability is too wide and growing. $500 drones neutralising million-dollar assets is not a hypothetical. Neither is a drone manufacturer ramping from 150 to 5,000 units per month in nine months. 3D UNIV+RSES is what makes those timelines achievable without the operational risk that comes with moving fast on disconnected systems.

Future workforce. The generational transition in aerospace and defence is not a future problem. It is happening now. Dassault Systèmes and its academic and industry partners are making the platform a vehicle for knowledge transmission — so that what senior engineers know does not retire when they do, but becomes part of the institutional record that the next generation inherits.

At the experience centre

The Dassault Systèmes Experience Centre at Farnborough is where these themes become concrete. Six challenge demos address specific engineering problems — from multi-domain mission engineering and airframe testing to production ramp-up and next-generation maintenance.

An executive tour shows what day-to-day work on the platform actually looks like. And the 3D UNIV+RSES demonstration makes the full value proposition tangible through one of the most strategically resonant structures in aerospace: the wing.

The Dassault Systèmes team will be available throughout the week for meetings and conversations.

To request a meeting: enorth.events@3ds.com

For full information, click here

Farnborough 2026. Reveal the invisible. Transform knowledge into a lasting strategic advantage.