ploughWould have made sense to loan the beautiful example that is outdoors at Doncaster?
I’m pretty sure that one isn’t outside 😉
ploughThe big problem with digital media is its ever changing and somewhat ephemeral nature. Something I have noticed over the 15 or so years that I have had internet access is that useful/interesting stuff that I found years ago, is now no longer there to be found (website content gets changed, websites disappear, sections of sites or web pages get changed or deleted, and on YouTube particularly, accounts hosting interesting content change or are terminated – nothing on the internet is permanent) – I have gone to view a number of clips/films for which I have saved the links over the past few years, only to find the video is no longer there. If you find something you value, you need to save it yourself (although this may raise copyright issues, not least because there is much on YT that is infringing the original copyright by being there to start with!).
Facebook is a whole different ball-game; whilst valuable for the here and now, it is almost completely useless as a historical repository of information – posts rapidly fall down the page as new posts are made, and become difficult to reach (fair enough if you saved a link to the post thread you want to see, but unreachable for anyone else). Facebook is not searchable in the way that most normal websites and forums are, so is of no value whatsoever to anyone searching for information in the future….
…and that is before we even start on the major privacy issues surrounding Facebook – I would hazard a guess that most Facebook users have no idea the extent to which Facebook actively harvests the details of anyone using it – cookies and web beacons that you are forced to accept and which send back not only the details of your computer/operating system/browser, but also your geographical location, your personal details, and your browsing habits, not just on Facebook, but monitoring every website you visit, building up a full profile of you as a person and your interests (and foibles!). It builds up a massive and very detailed user profile linked to a Facebook user account (or to a specific IP address/computer if you view facebook public groups/pages without having an account).
Whilst it may serve a purpose for the dissemination of news in the here and now, I would not recommend Facebook as a suitable place for the posting or storage of any kind of archive/historical/important information or material. As a searchable archive/historical reference resource, a well structured web forum with carefully titled threads is an infinitely better tool.
ploughWell, I am rather more than 99.9% certain that Gillespie has a serious mental health problem (rather a lot more in fact). He has been increasingly doing a very good impression of someone who is as big a fool as he thinks everyone else is.
Do children edit the Daily Mail now?
I think children have been editing it for many years now, and I think have spread into many other media news organisations too 🙁
ploughI think there needs to be a reality check…..
TIGHAR not really renowned for that sort of thing – they don’t seem to ‘do’ reality.
I doubt TIGHAR knows something that nobody else does…
I doubt whether TIGHAR know anything at all, if I’m honest.
plough……then that original photo had to be ‘flipped’ not just vertically but also horizontally……….the background is sufficiently “ambiguous” not to arouse concern….
I don’t think there is any ambiguity at all; it is pretty obvious that the magazine image is a flipped version of the library image – all the features of both aircraft and the background sky are identical, and your flip of the library image confirms this 100%.
Even to an untrained eye, the attitude of the Vulcan in the magazine version of the image doesn’t appear ‘right’: I am not sure why some appear to be having doubts about it to be honest.
ploughSlight thread creep…..
Hardly slight, it is going off at a major tangent!
As nobody appears to be even remotely interested in the news that I posted, I have deleted the post.
As seems to be the case too often, members of web forums are very quick to get on their high horse and be aggressively indignant over unwelcome news; good news doesn’t give them anything to get up tight about, so it is ignored 🙁
ploughThe £200k was to cover the cost of the move, plus the cost of the redundancy packages for those staff who lost their jobs, plus the ongoing costs associated with the running of the trust and maintenance of the aircraft. They have also had the not insubstantial cost of getting the design for the new hangar drawn up and all the preliminary work associated with the planning application. They state that the fee payable to Doncaster borough council for submitting the planning application was £15+k, you can imagine what the fees for architects, ground surveys and the rest have probably cost.
Similar costs would have been incurred for a planning application for any other host site, if indeed there had been any realistic likelihood of a planning application for such a hangar being accepted/approved at some of the sites we hear so much about. You say they could have channelled the money they have raised into building a hangar had 558 gone elsewhere, BUT, without an existing hangar in which to host those lucrative money raising events, it would not have been possible to raise the kind of sums you are referring to, and therefore the funding to build a hangar would be worse (or at least no better) than it is now.
Iclo: they always knew the flying lifetime available was finite, and the trust always operated with this in mind – regardless of the withdrawal of support by BAe and RR, 558 had only a small amount of FI left and limited engine cycles remaining to fly with anyway (and had flown significantly more hours than any other Vulcan had done). At most, it could only have flown for part of a season, and then only after expensive replacement of life expired components. A parallel fundraising campaign to fund a retirement hangar would have been a good move, except that they were having to put every available effort into raising sufficient funds just to keep 558 flying and a parallel funding appeal would in all probability have diluted the response to appeals for funds for maintenance and flying costs.
The cost of erecting a hangar building will be near enough the same wherever you erect it in the UK. There will only be differences in the price/rent of the location of the ground it is to stand on, and perhaps differing fees for submitting a planning application.
ploughWe are now six months on from the successful conclusion of the £200,000 Survival Campaign
Err wasn’t that raised under the auspices of being the amount required to move between hangars and NOT to sustain themselves over the intervening period….
It was stated at the time that it was to cover the cost of moving and to see them through the period until they were able to restart commercial visitor activity in a new hangar, so I don’t think there was any attempt to decieve or defraud. I do think they underestimated the timescale though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a further funding ‘push’ is required for next year.
For those suggesting moving an old hangar from elsewhere; the small knowledge I have of moving agricultural steel framed buildings would suggest to me that it is quite likely that moving a hangar from elswhere may end up costing more than building a new one from scratch, and you would still have an old building which would probably require more in the way of ongoing maintenance costs in the medium term than a brand new construction would do.
Some people (especially elsewhere on the net) are conveniently forgetting that if 558 had gone to any of the popularly mentioned alternative homes, there would have still been the need to build a hangar for it (none being available at those sites), and in all likelihood, 558 would now have been standing outside for 2 years rather than 2 months, and without the level of income that had been generated by events in Hangar 3 to pay for the upkeep. Whilst other Vulcans are indeed being looked after outside by volunteers on a shoestring budget, only a fool would deny that they have been having an uphill battle.
ploughStrange how marks picture on 31 looks like the rudder is shot away, but on this it is complete… souvenir hunters?
….or the ravages of the tide perhaps??
ploughThank you for the update David; very sorry to hear that you have been thwarted again by forces beyond your control. Having seen the current state of the area, are you still confident of being able to pinpoint the spot where you originally saw the groundwork you suspect to be the the burial site?
ploughVBulletin version 4 is the software platform that the whole forum is run on (along with many other forums). This forum has been run on VBulletin all the time I have been on it; nothing new.
You possibly chimed in when an update or change was being applied and just caught the forum in the moments when the configuration wasn’t set??
ploughLets hope David Billings is able to put this nonsense to bed permanently in a couple of weeks.
ploughDisappointing, but at least it has been one incident which hasn’t left aeroplane or pilot with serious damage.
Total nit-pick, it’s barley in the field, but really that’s irrelevant.
Not a nit-pick at all – it is a very important difference; you possibly wouldn’t want beer brewed from wheat! (or bread made from barley for that matter) 🙂
I think most of the suurounding land is owned by the College
The surrounding land to the east, south and west of the airfield does belong to the Shuttleworth Trust, so I don’t think there will be too much distress over the landing. I am not sure whether that land is farmed by the College, rented out or what these days; they have gone through several changes in recent years, the Trust having farmed it in-hand themselves for most of the 1990’s. All the land eastwards as far as the Shefford road, and southwards to the Southill road belongs to the Trust (the college itself is now owned/a part of Bedford College, and rents the buildings they use at Old Warden from the Shuttleworth Trust – the mansion is no longer part of the college).
ploughI think you are being obtuse. It has been discussed argued about repeatedly every time that there has been an appeal; a lot of the people donating have been attracted to do so by advertising and appeals to the wider public; a lot of these people now feel an affinity to 558. If 558 wasn’t there to give money to, it is highly likely that they would not donate money to anything else, and if they did, it would possibly not be aviation related.
There have always been continual shouting voices trying to make out that the Vulcan appeals were robbing donations from other worthwhile aviation projects, but there isn’t any specific evidence to back that argument up either.
Right; next contrived obstacle/negative argument please 😉
ploughVTTS have stated clearly and unambiguously, at the outset of fundraising for the Canberra and since, that funds donated for Vulcan 558 will not be used for funding the Canberra restoration. They have made that clear statement again today within a series of Q&As relating to the current situation: http://www.vulcantothesky.org/faq-contact/survival-q-a.html.
I am unsure how they can make it any clearer??
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