Manston-4

[Andy_S]

Originally Posted by Jetscream 32

Oliver Iny was skipping around the city promoting Gatwick mk 2 - at that board meeting in Mayfair to approve of the plan for EUjet - one of us got up mid-pitch and walked out resigning on the spot - making a statement that it was financial suicide and impossible to achieve or deliver as per the expectations of the proposed plan... the rest, as they say, is history!!!

Ahh yes, Oliver Iny. Living breathing proof that dreamers are not necessarily the best people to commercialise their vision and bring it to life. Rarely has so much shareholder cash been sp****d up against a wall in pursuit of such an utterly futile and disastrous series of projects. I wonder what happened to him? Manston was the jewel in the Wiggins / Planestation crown of course, and if they’d stuck to running it as a niche operation along the lines you suggested then who knows? But Olly’s vision was far grander than that. He wanted a landmark international airport business and he wanted it in a hurry. So not only was Manston marketed as the next big London airport, but the operating rights to a whole string of obscure overseas airports was acquired (using unsecured loans), none of which had any realistic prospect of success, most of which faced well established competition and few of which came with any significant ongoing operations. The landlords probably couldn’t believe their luck.

To be fair, the final nail in the coffin was the disastrous acquisition of EUJet and Olly had been booted out by then. But by that point no-one was prepared to throw good money after bad. The mystery is just how Olly was able to get away with it for so long.