Originally Posted by
NutLoose
It was a first I believe for the lottery to be funding an aircraft, prior to that they only seemed to fund steam trains etc.. I just hope that it does not affect future funding as part of it was I think the requirement to have a home for it when it’s flying career ended, something that to date hasn’t happened.
I believe the regulatory regime for heritage steam is somewhat simpler to work with, longer established and better understood by the lottery.
As examples, there is no requirement for steam boilers to have a dedicated design organisation behind them all the time, only when a major repair or wholly new one is needed, as with Tornado or the Gresley P2 projects, for example. There are insurance driven requirements, sure, but these are long established and supported by panels of boiler inspectors, repair designers and repair workshops. There is a good range of choice and there is enough similar work for these skills to be needed every day in similar fields.
Many rail vehicles come with grandfather rights which have no real aviation parallel and there is again a choice of Vehicle Acceptance Bodies to help deal with new things like On Train Monitoring requirements.
A variety of potential homes for elderly steam locos exists, with a well established process of getting them between homes even if they are not allowed to run on Network Rail. Not something that can be said about large aircraft that cannot now fly, but which you want to fly again in future.
Once you are into actually flying large, complex aviation heritage there simply is not the scale to justify the infrastructure needed to satisfy the regulatory requirements. I cannot see the lottery again supporting anything as complicated as the flying Vulcan. Unfortunately.
N