@LeSving with respect you quite evidently know very little about the LCP issue. Every prediction you made about how the issue would play out turned out to be wrong, and I lost count of the number of times I corrected you on simple and uncontentious facts. Whether anyone agrees with you I cannot say but it’s probably a bit more than a ripple – right now the future of the company is in the balance. The latest documents filed with the court show that their December cash inflow was about 60% of the number that their recovery plan predicted for that period. That can’t carry on for long before it collapses into Chapter 7.
Whether the LCP issue is a ‘small nuisance’ or something much more serious depends on the individual builder and the individual situation that it’s presented them with. For some it’s a case of re-ordering a handful of parts. For others it may write off several years of work and several 10s of AMUs. And any situation in between those extremes that you can think of. The fact that you generalise like this shows how little you know of the nuance.
Van’s could perhaps have ridden out the QB primer issue, but the LCP issue on top killed them and they made a number of elementary business mistakes, both in creating these issues for themselves and in how they handled them. A $50m company cannot make 2x $5-10m mistakes in the space of a couple of years and expect to brush it off unless they have a big cash pile.
Forums are a reality of the modern world. Business owners can complain about how unfair it is for their customers to be able to communicate with each other (it’s certainly killed that reliable old rebuff “no-one else has reported this issue”) or they can knuckle down to running a well-run business providing good products and value for money to their customers. If you do that, PR tends to take care of itself and so does the bottom line.
Where the VAF/LCP situation was interesting was how the heavy moderation might have caused Van’s leadership to mis-read the mood among their customers. Prior to the Chapter 11 filing the moderation was very heavy, bordering on censorship. Posters simply weren’t allowed to say anything even slightly critical of the company, and even relating challenging individual experiences was difficult without getting donked. So those who might have read the forum to take the pulse of the customer base only saw the “keep the faith” and “I trust Van’s 100%” -type posts and might have thought that represented the mood. For a couple of weeks after the filing the moderation relaxed markedly and there was some quite robust criticism allowed to stand. Just before Christmas it reverted to the earlier strict policy. Why, I have no idea.
It is true of course that Van’s management does/did post information there. In reality, it equates to public announcements hitting VAF about 3 minutes before they hit the Van’s website and you don’t learn anything new. They also give the odd personalised answer to some obscure random individual-circumstance question that the poster could have phoned/emailed the company for. It’s also true that if the site owner didn’t ban criticism of the company, the company probably wouldn’t post there. That’s not a new thing – the main UK GA site moderates any criticism of the CAA, NATS and ATC that escalates above the ‘grumpy old men in a pub’ level – why? Because the site owner has a degree of engagement with these various bodies that he considers important to his business, and he needs to keep them sweet.
