Originally Posted by Tim McLelland
unless another 200-250k is found within the next three weeks, the project will have to be terminated
£200-250k to do what? Buy time? Get it to first flight? Get it through the flight testing? Get it ready for the show circuit? There were other figures of £1.2M required being bandied about - what's that for, and why the difference between £200-250K and £1.2M (quote from 558club website - "That sum, though, is small compared with the £1,200,000 still needed to complete the aircraft’s restoration, its ground tests, and its air tests, so that it could be handed back to the Trust sometime in the spring of 2007."). If the £200-250k will only to get it to first flight, then all that's going to happen is that there will be another cash call in a few months time, with more tales of woe and herculean efforts coming to nothing emerging along with threats that the project will be wound up unless people donate again.
When oh when will someone come out and unequivacably tell the truth about how much money is needed to see the project through to fruition - to get it onto the show circuit? And if that needs some contingency to cover further overruns, OK, so admit it and plan for it. That way, at least potential donors big or small know where they really stand. Really, until such meaningful information is forthcoming, throwing further money at the project would seem to be throwing good money after bad.
In any case, the project shouldn't be in this state now. Any good project management should have covered the issues the project now faces pretty much before it was launched. If the initial planing work had been done properly, if costing had been realistic, if contingency had been put in place to cover overruns, the project would either (a) have never been started or (b) would have secured the funding to run to conclusion already in place. Don't blame the HLF, or Waltons, or BAe, or Marshalls - for the most part they're commercial organisations that have shareholders to satisfy in preference to sentimentality. To ask the HLF for more now merely suggests that there was some incompetence in preparing the original funding request - or was the most optimistic budget put up because it was felt that would be easier to secure and that overruns could be sorted out later?
My feeling is that no commercial donor is coming forward because the project is such a mess, still with unclear targets and budgets. If a Vulcan-minded person or organisation did exist, then realistically I think that they only way they'd engage would be if the project was temporarily stopped, the entire management team on the project was fired, and a realistic reassessment of the full and true future requirements of the project was put in place before any further work was undertaken.