10 July 2012 Last updated at 19:02 ET By Jorn Madslien Business reporter, BBC News, Farnborough airshow

Specialist rivets, electromechanical actuators, hydraulic manifolds and snake-arm robots that have been designed to be used in confined spaces.

The aerospace and defence industry is, perhaps more than any other industry, truly a sum of its parts.

Indeed, even the thousands of individual components that make up a fighter jet engine, an unmanned aerial vehicle or an aeroplane wing are so complex that they too are sums of their parts.

Dice it and slice it enough times and you will eventually find that there are thousands and thousands of parts suppliers.

Each and every one of them is contributing to the manufacture of the metal that is displayed in aerial acrobatics, or to the planes or engines or missiles sold in the many multi-billion dollar deals announced this week.

"It is like a pyramid," says a US investment banker at the Farnborough airshow.

The pyramid's pinnacle is made up of big players, such as aeroplane makers Airbus and Boeing, engine makers such as GE and Rolls-Royce and defence firms including Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, to name but a few.

Each of them have trading relationships with a vast number of so-called tier two and tier three suppliers, who in turn rely both on the big players and on each other.

Most of them are here this week, milling around in a vast exhibition hall, establishing contacts, pushing their wares.

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