[SUBARMAN]

Some of you may have seen the Vulcan fly last year. You might be glad you did, because seeing it fly again might not be possible unless funding is forthcoming.

Please read this letter from the Chief Executive of the Vulcan Operating Company and consider the issues raise and whether there is any way you can help.

Visit the website www.vulcantothesky.org

Appeal Funding Crisis - Urgent

Our 50th Birthday Appeal to our loyal supporters and the millions who saw us fly this summer was for cash for two key reasons:

· To bolster our depleted reserves, now down to critical levels, to cover daily costs such as rent, wages, insurance;
· To commission and begin work on the Winter Service and life extension modifications to ensure we can deliver the 2010 Birthday Season.

From the small size of the mailbags arriving at Bruntingthorpe, it appears that XH558’s 50th Birthday Appeal has been badly affected by the various postal delays – we are significantly behind where we need to be to reach our £400,000 target by Christmas.

So far, we have received less than £30,000 in donations from 800 donors, from a mailing that went out to 35,000 people. This is a far lower response rate than ever previously experienced.

The total so far amounts to less than 10% of what we need before Christmas! Not only will we not be able to begin the time-critical engineering work, we are looking at the serious prospect of having to shut down the operation. This is now a serious and imminent threat.

With the major proportion of our known and planned funding of £1.6million coming in during the air show season, we have to rely on the Appeal to survive through the winter months

With the desperately slow progress we are currently making, we are finding it more and more difficult to cover our monthly base costs, let alone commit to the work that we need to have done to make it to the 2009 season.

I have to admit that I am now much more nervous about XH558’s future; it seems that unless we can mobilise significantly more support, the day of reckoning may not be far away.

This would be devastating to all those who have fought long and hard over the years to realise the dream. Our goal is so small in comparison to other funding needs, so we must try every avenue in which to succeed.

Our strategy remains to reach out to all those who saw XH558 last year, especially the huge numbers – 1.5 million – that attended the “free” airshows, and ask for their help in supporting XH558, whilst also trying to attract fresh support from others yet to be touched by “The Vulcan Effect”!

We need your help with this effort – which is why we have chosen to call the 50th Birthday Appeal a “staged appeal”.

We need you to act as the secondary stage of our campaign! We have released the primary – the 50th Birthday Appeal itself. We now need you to multiply the effectiveness of the Appeal many-fold in a chain-reaction, by taking the Appeal out to everywhere and anywhere.

Contact your local newspapers and radio stations, put up the posters, post on your blogs, email your friends and colleagues, link back to us from Websites you run – all will be valuable in taking out our message.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments, if you run into problems or have new ideas, or if you need posters and leaflets: give the office a call on 0116 247 8145.

We continue to work on leads and contacts in the hope of getting some widespread National coverage soon that will make the difference – it is hoped we can achieve this before it is too late.

My wife Suzanne and I were in London last Sunday for the Remembrance Day commemorations at the Cenotaph. It was a truly emotional experience, and a huge reminder of how much we all owe those who have served, and are serving, in our Armed Services.

It was also a strong reminder of XH558’s role in “Honouring the Past”, in particular those thousands of service personnel who supported the RAF’s “V-Force” in its strategic deterrent capacity in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In John Milton’s words, “they also serve who only stand and wait”: never more true than in the case of the V-Force personnel who were on standby for so many years. We must keep XH558 flying to ensure that this message is not forgotten.


Kind regards

Robert Pleming
Chief Executive