Shame, I know MOD and I wished him well with this project. However, I'm not sure his flight operations experience helped him with dealing with the CAA's CPG ( the department responsible for Operating Licences as opposed to AOC's)
I've heard that the CAA CPG put a funding requirement on AV8 of £8M ( this for effectively one aircraft, althought he 767 ACMI lease would have to have been included). This is on top of CT2's ATOL Bond of circa £3M. The CAA's forumla is that the operation should be sufficiently funded to cater for three months of costs with no income. Now, because the CAA always apply the same formula, ( irrespective of charter or scheduled) they include in their costs the DOC's ( Direct Operating Costs) of flying the aircraft. If you are starting a scheduled airline, that makes sense, but with a charter airline, it could be argued that if the charterer doesn't pay, the the flight doen't operate, so the DOC's could be excluded from the calculation.
If AV8 had argued this, they might have dropped the funding requirement to a level CT2 could manage. This argument has won results in the past.
Barmy Army, I'm afraid that ultimately the blame for the failure of this operation to get up and running comes down to the inexperience at this level of AV8's management team. CT2 have a very experienced and successful team who have a great depth of knowledge of being a Tour Operator. They relied on the AV8 Team to pull it all together.