15 February 2008
The popular Great Vintage Flying Weekend (also known as the G-VFWE) has been cancelled in 2008 and will not take place in future years.
Terry Booker, the event’s operations manager, explains that he has been running and underwriting the event since 2000. Each year, he says, has seen rising costs and he says: “As I reach my seventieth year this is no longer a risk that I feel either willing or, indeed, morally obliged to undertake”.
Terry had been trying to put the event on a more secure footing, and earlier this year had announced that he was ‘sufficiently confident’ of the outcome to say that the event would go ahead in 2008 at Hullavington. However, the potential backers have withdrawn, leaving ‘no more avenues … for the reassignment of the legal and financial responsibilities for G-VFWE’.
The event was originally the brainchild of former publisher Peter Campbell, and had in its eleven years of existence generated around 12,000 aircraft movements at eight different airfields in front of approximately 70,000 spectators.
