Mosquito TPM new build in Uk discussion link

Terrific! Thanks D1566

How far advanced are they and how much has been committed? The Tornado was certainly a great success

https://www.p2steam.com/

😎

Could call it MTTS…… :rolleyes:

I have to say the TPM sounds more like a Russian state or terrorist organisation.

I grew up with the story of Johnny Appleseed – I think the CIA in the mid 70’s must have printed a few million of these books and parachuted them over Laos to convert Commies into right thinking people, and the pilot was rolling a joint and just carried on to drop these books over Australia. Anyway, in Johnny Appleseed, this guy with a pot on his head goes around the frontier planting apple seeds, so eventually good folks like the Waltons and the babes in Little House on the Prairie got to make apple pies. God, Guns and Apple Pies. Johnny Appleseed did a lot of walkin’ and plantin’ before the apple pies appeared, though. But he did. He walked, the sonofabitch! He didn’t do feasibility studies, budgets, he just put a pot on his head and walked out with a bag of seeds. This is the American way, and so far it’s got them to the moon.
So due to Johnny Appleseed and the CIA messin’ with my head in the 70’s, I got this Ameri-Thort in my head. So what the TPM, which sounds like a North Korean initiative, want, is an Apple Pie, a Mosquito. What would Johnny do? He would jes walk out and start planting seeds. It would take a while, but an Apple Pie would be.

Now Ameri-Thort does not understand British Thinking. BT is based on a see-saw. On one end is an eccentric, on the other end is a civil servant. You need both to make the wibble-wobble magic work. If you only have the eccentric, you get fabulous chaos. If you want an apple pie you get a mess of flour mixed with acorns and absinthe. If you only have the civil servant, you get delay and paperwork. If you want an apple pie you get feasibility studies, proper budgets, lists or prerequisites and no actual baking.

Now of course Ameri-Thort originated in BT, but was modified by Lutheran Germans, mad Scots, excitable Sicilians, Adventuring French and Spaniards and Hungry Polaks and Irish. You can never re-inject this mess back into Great Britain, it won’t work. You have to go back to the see-saw, and see that it is properly loaded.

So what I am sensing is too much civil servant and not enough eccentric. Lots of moaning, lots of infatuation with prerequisites, no baking.
You don’t need money, that’s not the problem. For the last ten years the EU has been printing Euros and the US has been printing greenbacks and there is too much money in the world. It is getting duck shoved into all sorts of exotic crap far weirder and ultimately crueler to our children than a flying Mosquito project. You just need to start jumping and catch some of it as it flutters by, before the printing presses close.

Start being eccentric again, doing crazy things, feeling the bit of the civil servant in your teeth as you drag him along.
Want to see a flying Mosquito in the UK?
Just pay for a little flap actuating hydraulic cylinder mounting bracket and send it in to TPM, put a pot on your head and do a Johnny Appleseed. From little things, big things grow.
There are 20,000 parts in a Mosquito, just cover one, or five, if you can.
Get the see-saw wibble-wobbling, get momentum, catch some of the fluttering notes along the way.

I must say I am not happy with a Commie, Kim Jong Il sounding thing like the ‘TPM’ though, Johnny would have his doubts.
Just call it the UK Mosquito, the United Kingdom Mosquito, that will do it.

Like most projects, I think until people see physical progress happening then the money will start coming in.

And this is the problem of TPM, as they have nothing to start with.

IIRC, they couldn’t raise the funds to buy Glyn Powell’s project, which would have been a worthy starting point and given a substantial visible entity to progress with further fund raising.
As it is, I just don’t see them ever raising enough to get enough new build as well as parts/component buys etc., in the time that they will have….all made worse by the fact that whatever they do have is on the other side of the world, which if anything has been a bonus to Jerry Yagen and Paul Allen, but a distinct disadvantage to a project requiring UK public fundraising….

It’s called RVP (rapid visual progress).

Like most projects, I think until people see physical progress happening then the money will start coming in.

To be clear, I’m not against the project or running anyone down, but this was once pointed out to me about the costs of restoring/building projects – if it’s going to take you 50+ years to raise the funds to complete the project, you need to seriously evaluate the viability of the project and your fundraising methods!

In answer to your last question – a cheque for a few hundred thousand pounds perhaps….

TPM are great because part of the process of educating the public about the achievement of the Mosquito in 2017 is exemplifying to a new audience the negativity and discouragement that de Havillands met when they first proposed the design seventy odd years ago! The re-enactors of Air Ministry doubt and discouragement are very convincing ! But I think TPM have now spent enough money employing Air Ministry re-enactors, popping them into social media like the Russian government trolling the world. It’s been great, really dismal !! Good show ! I am convinced the aircraft will never work and never fly and is a waste of effort. Now let the engineering re-enactors have a go. Give me a Geoffrey de Havilland re-enactor with stern countenance and beetling eyebrows surrounded by a table of urgent, sleepless, smoking men, plans and sketches and calculus strewn about. What can I do to help ?

So, not very impressive and does not bode well for the project’s fruition, sadly.

So, if they are raising £100k/Year, the project will take around 70 years to raise the necessary funds?

By contrast the P2 lot have raised £1.4m and have £2.4m pledged (they started raising money just under 3 years ago and reckon on finishing in about 4 more years).

Since they started, I believe they have raised a little over 100K

How far advanced are they and how much has been committed? The Tornado was certainly a great success.

Railway preservation has some parallels. There is a project to build a Gresley P2 steam locomotive, by the same group that built “Tornado”. They are looking for a similar order of magnitude of funds (~£5m – I agree that that’s probably a bit on the light side for a Mosquito, but the order of magnitude is right), and their approach has been:
1. Start a “founders club”, which required something like a £250 contribution and was open for a limited period of time.
2. Follow this up with open subscription to a covenant scheme (where people sign up to contribute monthly)
3. Have sponsorship of individual components (which is open to covenanters)
4. Have subscription “clubs” for major components (e.g. the boiler)
5. Obtain corporate sponsorship for many major components – e.g. steel castings from a foundry, where they are obtained at a preferential rate.
6. Have successfully completed a project by a similar means.

Of course, #6 isn’t easy for most organisations, but the other points could, I think, be applied to a project such as this, and have a significant advantage over the “quid in a bucket” method of fundraising, in that once a donor has been engaged, they (by default) will continue to donate.

Yes, the Vulcan folk have the ex CAF Canberra but it’s on the back burner for now.

What are the Vulcan guys doing now? Do they have another project?

5 mill a little tight to get a Mozzie flying I would say

So would I, especially when you have zero parts to start with.

KA114 supposedly cost Jerry Yagen $7m, and he had a LOT more bits and pieces to start with, and didn’t have the CAA to satisfy either.

As much as I would love to see a Mossie back in UK skies, I can’t ever see this drip/drip constant trying to find funds from public donation ever making this project come to fruition.