Bladdered, agree, I did a straw poll.
"Would you rather chuck £20 in the kitty and have the weekend free?" or
"Would you prefer to slog your guts out preparing, running, and wrapping up an air show?"
Now on an Station with 2,000 personnel that would have been a guaranteed £40k to charity and no fiddling the fuel bill. And no incidents or accidents or weather abandonment.
Yup, it came out as No Show. Unfortunately in the race to the stars every little helps.
Now I wonder how many of our top brass actually ran an air show?
Ones I had been involved in resulted in: Staish retiring and a Gp Capt, his successor made ACM but ran one air show unsuccessfully and stopped. Another reached Air Cdre and the Waddo show went from strength to strength.
I guess the B-word was successful.