St Helena

[enicalyth]

Readers of Flight International may have seen the advert for parties interested in DBO contract for this putative airport.

This is merely the latest round of talks, adding £10M with more rises in the pipeline and delaying in-service date by at least 10 years from the first workable proposal.

St Helena has had interminable rounds of feasibility consultants when a private investor stands by, largely ignored. Shelco have the money, Ove Arup are amongst the top civil engineers in the world, especially on airports but the pair have been all but excluded. Why? Civil Servants don't like private enterprise, the FCO don't like non-diplomats and commercial upstarts. Especially when investors come up with a workable plan after years of Buggins after Buggins doing nothing.

Like the mating of elephants all Government consultancy happens at a very high level amidst a lot of dust and noise and then nothing happens for years. Except the revolving door from High Office and onto the Board for the Mandarins.

Past experience of the last three fiascos is this. The price has gone up by half and the airport size is halved effectively doubling the cost and halving the safety.

Of course the outcome will be that the present proposals are unworkable and no-one will touch the DBO with a bargepole.

So what will happen? Will DfID, FCO capitulate and say to SHELCO/Arup, "You know, you guys were right all along! Carry on and we'll pick up the tab for the excess!" No. They will sack the present consultants and invite another round of consultants who just repeat the process.

If they had let private enterprise in the form of Shelco take the financial risk we'd have had it built by now and if the entrepreneurs (Shelco) went bust at least we'd have the airport and that would be operable, having been built to the standards then in force and all we'd be arguing about is the need (or not) to extend the into-wind RESA.

[LGW Vulture]

I did some consulting work on this project 5 or 6 years ago. And they still prevaricate with the whole bloomin project!!

Good grief ! :rolleyes:

[enicalyth]

LGW! G'Day!!

Mate! You have absolutely no idea what goes on. I tell you, as a Saint and an aviator, no-one listens to us.

I thought that the Shelco proposal was elegant and once explained blindingly obvious. You want to take off and land into wind but you can't because of the Peak and the high incidence of mist. End of story until Ove Arup said, more or less, "You can sure take off all right but I agree you can't land. But would it be all right if you had a bit of cross-wind within limits whilst landing? You could miss the Barn with an offset threshold and at landing weights Great Stone Top is not a problem!"

Stone me! I never thought of that! Two runways with their ends touching in a narrow Vee. One for landing, one for take-off. At the time it was mooted the cost was £26.2M

Sure in come consultants, y'self included but nothing moves forward. It is a hard reset every time a new batch are fetched in. First they rubbish the last consultants (how else will they get their fee) then they make a song and dance about consulting the "natives" and we spend ages telling them what we told the others. And off they go. To spend £3M writing a report full of inaccuracies.

Meanwhile the British Government is furious that someone had the audacity to come up with a workable conclusion and worse still to say that they were willing to put their money where the mouth resides. Your work gets wasted. Our time gets wasted and because it would be a loss of face to go through all this hassle and NOT overturn the Shelco proposal... the Vee runways are scrapped and the "solution" is to skew the landing runway so that it is neither suitable for landing or take-off, cry sh*t we need super-duper RESAs longer than anywhere else. No one says "Why not put it back to the original plan" and gets listened to because someone somewhere in Whitehall would want to know why all the dither, millions spent on consultancy and we're back to square one! Your ideas, my ideas are in the bin. They may have been right or wrong but they count for diddly squat. With each batch of consultants every idea is given new life again and has to be put to the test.

A cynic could be forgiven for thinking that the more delay there is then the more likely the project will die off. After all, you can't keep on handing out Knighthoods and OBE's then ask for them back. So let's kill the project otherwise it looks like Buggins Major sat on his hands when he wore the ostrich plumes; no, no... Buggins Minor has to get his K too. Better hack off these troublesome chappies or there will be rumblings in the Club.

"St Helena welcomes inward investment". Pray tell me sirs, when has there ever been any inward investment that WAS welcomed?

You're right of course LGW. We have all put our input into the pot and you'd think we'd be moving forward. But here we are again inviting people for tea and cakes, coming up with half-baked ideas and asking people to competitively tender on a 10yr or more DBO. And in the wings sit the people who raised the capital and made the designs for a superior little airport with an infrastructure of eco-tourism, the Napoleonic trail etc to help feed the project. There they sit, ostracised by ostrichisers, and I for one would not be surprised if they quietly folded their tents and took their £36M away to invest elsewhere.

Peace to you LGW, and thanks for caring!

The "E" and KO Sally