Posted not by me, but a well known poster on PPruNe:
I donated once and ever since I have been bombarded with begging letters which I simply bin, they seem to know no bounds as to how low they will stoop to extract Money, it is also one of the few historical civilian aircraft that pays its crew to fly it, didn't mind funding the aircraft considering the amount of people that give their time for free to help keep it airworthy, but to fund the crew..I will pass.
BUT the year it flew to Waddington I think it was, where all the blurb for the show swelled the crowds to see the Vulcan fly, with some people travelling hundreds of miles with their families to see it and having paid to get in to find it was actually in the static as the VOC prior to it arriving knew the Permit to Fly would not be in place. They then left all the unpaid volunteers to face the anger of those that had spent a lot of money to get there, whilst the paid Aircrew, Staff and Dr Fleming stayed well away.... I truly felt for those volunteers and the abuse they got...
I would rather see it reduced to baked bean cans than it see another £1 out of my pocket to pay the wages of Fleming and his cronies.
0ct 2009 accounts
Wages and salaries 642,680
Social security. 59,263
Pension costs 2,474
Total 704,714
Average number of employees 17
Highest earning Robert Pleming 72,000
A lot of tin rattling before a penny gets spent on the jet.
For full details see
http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk...091031_E_C.PDF
This has everything to do with my HAV argument. Did the people that crowdfunded the £1/2million have any idea where their money would go? Did they know it might end up lining execs' pockets rather than the naive belief it was helping to fund the thing to fly? Lots of promises, sales pitches and glossy brochures using too much artistic licence - "aerospace hussle" - comes to mind! Or have the HAV team undertaken to spend none of the crowdfunding on wages and only on production materials and/or direct support costs for fuel (without creative accounting to achieve this)?
LJ
