...is of the utmost criticality to the Vulcan project. There are going to be enough serious problems that might ground the plane on any given day without it being grounded by beaurocracy, and when it only has a limited handful of opportunities to perform, any time it misses one counts as more than a nail in the coffin of the project.
On the other hand, I fail to see why anybody expects it to be of relative importance to a major commercial aviation contractor. If the price of getting the Vulcan signed off for an airshow is that a major airline has a jet on the ground that should be on a revenue earning flight except the engineers were off in Oxfordshire, or... well, pretty much anything else the supplier concerned is working on, really... then I'd say that spending 4 hours driving, bracketing two hours of work on the Vulcan, in order to get it to an airshow is naturally going to come second. And turning up like a zombie to rubber stamp something, either on the Vulcan or whatever was the next day, is not a professional option either, is it.
Of course, I'm sure something could have been arranged, with sufficient goodwill and organisational flexibility on all sides, but the vibe I'm getting is that TVOC couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, and that there isn't much goodwill to be had amongst the people with the magic pen, or their bosses.
Nothing that seems to have happened here couldn't in general terms have been predicted and planned for. I've read before that Vulcans are fickle beasts, and that they were often U/S with miscellaneous niggles even when operational. Since the Vulcan appears to be unable to legally fly in a condition that the RAF would have been happy to operate it in back in the day, I perhaps niaively cannot see how its serviceability performance is going to have improved any over when it was last in service. If you couple that problem with a failure on the part of the TVOC (i.e. the people who have had best part of a decade to think about how they are going to operate the aircraft) to plan for timely certification of any fixes performed, then the odds are that it will miss more airshow comitments than it gets to.
Posting petulant press releases that effectively blame Marshalls for the Vulcan missing the airshows this weekend is just guaranteed to ensure that any corporate favours that Marshalls might once have felt moved to bestow on TVOC in exchange for basking in an expected
PR benefit for being associated with the project will definitely not continue or be repeated. Since my understanding is that the Vulcan only flies at all because Marshalls didn't shut the project down and demand payment for work done, instead writing off part of the outstanding bill, that seems as churlish in the extreme as it is counterproductively self destructive.
In any case, the relevant question you have to ask Marshalls is 'Did they meet their SLA?'. If, as I suspect, the answer is 'Yes, they did - or will when the engineers turn up later this week'), then the failure to have a serviceable aircraft for this weekend is all TVOC's.
As to how and why TVOC have managed to exhaust the goodwill of the Marshalls engineers, such that there was no reasonable accomodation that could be made, that's another difficult question that the TVOC have to answer.
It occurs to me that 'We'll send a limo and driver to Cambridge to pick you and your lady wife/wives up and ferry you down to Oxford for dinner and a night in a decent local hotel, briefly borrowing you for a couple of hours to sign off the work on the Vulcan, and then ferrying you both back to Cambridge the next morning' might have worked, if relations were still reasonable...