"The Canberra is pressurised, that is why I said complex, plus it has bang seats that are probably no longer supported, is it manual flying controls on it? and to be honest isn't that much of a crowd puller, probably one reason tha the VTTS are not doing so well with it, just not the interest there. It's not whether the engines are simple or not, it's who overhaul's and supports them and that is probably the problem, same went for the Vulcan,"
In the 17 years that I was involved with operating WK163 we were the most popular non military display team before the Vulcan came along. We actually made a small operating profit and were pretty much self supporting in the beginning before overheads became a problem and Air Atlantique stepped in to offer help. WK163 has Avon 109's not 100Srs and is not in the complex catagory, we had our own engineers, all very well qualified and aircrew equally qualified and not one of us was paid, we did it because we wanted too. It has manual flying controls and we had our own seat servicing bay authorised by Martin Baker who supported us from the start as did many other companies Kidde Graviner, CFS, Atlantique and many others who gave free support. Loosing an engine caused us great problems and protracted negotiations ran for years until the the aircraft was no longer viable without a huge injection of funds which Mike Collett was happy to give. However the passing of time and retirement of key people stalled the project until VTTS stepped in.