Vulcan and money
 

I see they want a mere extra £400,000 just to keep flying this year!

Why leave it till the last moment to cry for help? Again! :(

Some of the foreign aid that Cameron throws away should do the job.

Vulcan and money
 

A Vulcan can provide 21,000lbs of foreign aid too...

Also a fair amount of instant sunshine if required.

It's like the Lifeboats.... Ethnics don't use it, ergo, NO funding.

I've had a longstanding problem with the Vulcan to the Sky charity.

The annual 'we need x to keep flying' sits awkwardly with the massive volunteer fundraising efforts seen around the air show circuit. Add to that some hefty remuneration for some makes me wonder why if these people are worth so much why they need to put out such a large annual begging bowl>

Trashing 2 engines for the sake of a proper pre flight safety system just adds to the feeling that summats wrong.

SGC

They are raising funds continually.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the Vulcan To The Sky Trust financials on the Charity Commission website (http://tinyurl.com/q5oyrgf).

The latest figures are for 2012. The trust had an income of £2.2 million, of which £1.7 million was voluntary contributions.

What I found hard to believe was that they spent £0.5 million on "Generating Voluntary Income". That's nearly a third of the contributions! Unbelievable! :eek:

Eventually it will HAVE to stay on the ground. Perhaps they should just cut to the chase and start collecting funds for a hanger and exhibition space.

Fund raising is a big industry now. Those friendly young people who ask you to sign up to long term commitments to some worthy cause or other are NOT working for the worthy cause, but for the fundraiser the cause has hired. I don't know what the average costs are, but there's a rumor that the first year's donation mostly goes to the fundraiser. More snouts in the trough.

Well said Sir GC.

For Vulcan, read Marmite.;)

Once I saw a VTTS display and saw it was a shadow of the RAF displays of old (to preserve fatigue and engine life presumably) I thought 'what's the point?'.

There must be many younger folk around who have only ever seen a VTTS display and think they've seen a real Vulcan display; they have not!

They should give as many 'balls out' RAF-style displays as the engines and structure will allow (even if that's only one show!) just for those who've never seen one, then retire the old girl to a museum. What they do instead, pussy-footing it around the sky to eek out its life, is completely pointless.

Except it provides a nice cosy income for certain individuals......

For the amount of money spent on the Vulcan year on year , think of the custom built hangars we could have had in our museums throughout the UK to house our historical aviation artefacts.

Too many precious machines have been lost. If memory serves, we have airworthy Mossie? People love to display them and then the one thing goes wrong.

Get lots of top quality video in HD, with air-to-air, then a lovely hanger and museum where folks can see things and hear things and all the rest. I will give money for that but not for her to fly for display only.

The money spent on the Vulcan has been donated by those who want to see the Vulcan fly. Why do people find this so difficult to grasp?

If you want to solicit donations for custom built hangars nobody is stopping you.

A pity that the Vulcan won't be seen at RIAT as that might have attracted a few more donors....

Quite a few people make small regular donations and I'm never sure whether the 'appeals' take that into account? 4000 people donating £25 per month over 4 months would cover it - but are there that many?

Incidentally, I think that the current display is far more graceful and impressive than some of the clumsy, stress-inducing displays by VDF. Every time I saw the apple-spitting gibbon doing that stupid wing-waggle on climb out, I winced at the thought of the damage it was doing.

The RAF hadn't looked after '558 particularly well in its latter days - as the degree of corrosion showed only too clearly, once certain panels were removed for inspection.....

If you want to see a Vulcan in a museum, go to Duxford.

The part you find difficult to grasp is that people generally only have so much free cash to give to worthwhile causes annually.

In aviation historical circles the Vulcan has take away quite a bit of that free cash year on year, as people do find it a worthwhile cause.

People are more than welcome to donate to whoever they wish, but generally donations to aviation related good causes in the UK have fallen while the vulcan has been flying.

But this is precisely the point. You are arguing that the Vulcan be grounded in favour of other projects on the grounds that the public clearly prefer the Vulcan to those other projects.

I have no idea who the 'apple spitting gibbon' is, but wing waggles don't impress me (I'm not qualified to assess what it does to a Vulcan airframe).

I remember the RAF displays at Barton and Woodford and they were so much more impressive for their demonstration of sheer power and noise than VTTS displays. To see a tennis-court-sized bomber thrown around the sky and stood on its tail at max power (which was felt in one's chest and through one's feet as the airfield itself vibrated) was something not to be forgotten.

You won't get that at a VTTS display, even if the flying is more 'professional'. They simply can't as they have to preserve the airframe and engines for as long as possible.

Ditch that. Go balls-out, even if just once, to show today's punters how impressive an unrestrained Vulcan can be, then ground her. She'll be grounded soon anyway so only those drawing nice salaries will suffer if she goes to a museum sooner rather than later.

Vulcan and Money
 

A Vulcan is a complex device for turning money into wake vortices and kerosene fumes.

Dash8driver1312:

"A Vulcan can provide 21,000 lbs of foreign aid too......"

I attended a fire-power demonstration on Larkhill on Salisbury Plain when I was a 19 year-old officer cadet. The last item on the programme was a Vulcan dropping 21 x 1,000 lb bombs not a million miles away from the audience.It was VERY impressive.