If one day I find myself looking for flight support for a flight in Africa, it is good to know which providers think it is acceptable to engage in mud-fights with their ex clients
Yes; I agree. But people can find the info in various other places.
we also have a court system and no longer the village pillory.
Shall I ask David to implement a button for Paypal donations? 
If one day you are looking for flight support to the 3rd World, don’t go to a supplier of the whole package. You don’t need that. For overflight etc permits, go to one of the firms in my list here (under “overflight”). Let’s face it, you don’t need a ground based crew, a chase plane, and a co-pilot in yours This stuff is standard; bizjet pilots do this every day.
For example this proposed trip to Iran would be organised wholly by any competent overflight agent. They do this for a living. You just throw some money at it… it is only if you want it for free that you end up posting on forums, looking for contacts, etc.
TCT’s project clearly did need a lot of support and her media/support team might not have initially known anything about the task. But it isn’t rocket science so it doesn’t surprise me if/that at some stage they got rid of the original contractor.
We had one well known 3rd World flying trip organiser advertise such packages here, and people commented on the costs, but the posts were deleted following noncompliance with our Guidelines (useful participation in the forum, etc). Everybody could see the stuff at the time.
when there is a whole crew with her taking videos, interviews and so on?
Well, we all know the Moon landings were faked and nobody spilt the beans, did they?
yappmeister thanks, my ground exams were in the Jurassic pre gps period
I find the whole Tracey Curtis-Taylor episode rather sad. Whilst on the one hand she has used PR to the misleading extreme, I don’t quite understand what some people are so wound up about.
There seems to be an awful lot of effort going in to pointing out her failings, however subtle, in addition to the obvious questions about the flights. Yes it was all very misleading, but why the endless witch hunt.
I find it all very reminiscent of a situation on another forum, where I and several others objected to a pitchfork mob mentality which was led by a poster with the user name Golden Eagle Pilot. He was later exposed as a shyster and may well have ended up in prison, but not before myself and a few others were accused of all sorts of wrongs and given all sorts of insults and threats. I never had an apology from any of the other posters who jumped on that particular bandwagon, when in the end I was right and they were wrong. Indeed, the villain of the piece was even able to send me personal emails to my work address, which he claimed to have got from the IP address of my posts. I found that interesting.
I’m no TCT supporter, but I am just cautious about mob mentality.
I am well aware of what you are talking about, Neil, and this sort of thing was one of the reasons why EuroGA was set up to be like it is – to avoid that sort of thing happening here.
Unfortunately not everybody quite “gets it”, because they don’t know what goes on, or would go on, behind the scenes. Hence I get criticism from some quarters for running a properly moderated forum, and people chuck their toys out of the pram, leave, run sh*it spreading campaigns in email (had a great one recently), come back a few months later, chuck their toys out again, etc…
Mob mentality is alive and thriving, especially in certain countries.
I’m no TCT supporter, but I am just cautious about mob mentality.
My claim to fame is being banned from posting on that particular thread and also having most of my posts removed in return for making exactly this point.
Presumably they liked the traffic generated by the vitriol and controversy
That thread was a total low point of that forum and should never have allowed to happen to the extent that it did, and actually still does.
I ran afoul of GEP myself after Jetblu’s accident. I only do hope that he ended up where he belonged. What this episode has shown me is that those who often shout the most moral clout are the lowest scum on earth.
However, the fact that the whole affair went the way it did had a lot to do with the fact that after a previous affair where a well known and at the same time despised poster was found to be a criminal and actually is doing time, because he was “unveiled” due to investigations by some of that forum. There were some who felt that gave them the legitimation to do the same over and over again.
That particular thread broke the law on many accounts of slander and pulverized the forum rules about personal attacks to the tell me not. It may even have lead to much more than that. That it was allowed to continue to the extent that it did until someone put his foot down, was something I’ll never understand. People were attacked even off forum (I recall the episode where Jan Brill of Pilot und Flugzeug was implicated by some of them and actually hassled when he entered the UK from the US) and they never even apologized.
Thankfully I don’t have to deal with such rubbish here. My participation in the other place has gone down massively.
But that will happen, and has happened, on all forums that carry advertising – because if you let people do a load of kicking and biting you get many more advert click-throughs. This is widely known; one mod/admin of another UK site explained this to me in pretty clear terms not long ago. It is a business decision… simple! You moderate it to just below the legally actionable level. I have totally lost count of forum fights which were allowed to run, generating dozens of pages of vitriol, and which were chopped only when it got to the legal stage. I’ve been on pilot forums since Usenet (year 2000 for me, 1993 for other technology) and then when the www became popular (c. 2002) and I think I’ve seen it all, frankly. EuroGA is run to promote GA and to be an informative and interesting site and the lack of advertising enables us to avoid these issues.
Back on topic, LeSving’s point above is a good one. How can one hope to get away with this, when so many people know? I guess the psychology has been pointed out already…
Back on topic, LeSving’s point above is a good one. How can one hope to get away with this, when so many people know? I guess the psychology has been pointed out already…
But this was my point earlier. I do not think she, nor her team, set out to deceive. Certainly not initially. I think, comments, and certain events, ran away with themselves, and in any duplicious scenario, a line can be crossed where it is more difficult to reverse the comments, than leave alone. However, Mr Rutherford, for whatever reason, got chopped. Hell hath no fury than a spurned project manager.
I just had a quick look on the other place, and it is a free for all. All sorts of scandalous drivel now getting levied at her, her PR manager, and a poor soul from Wikipedia. His crime, trying to reason with the lynch mob.
I believe these are grown men having a field day, at a women’s expense. Lovely.
I get the impression that this business woman is promoting herself via adventure-vintage-historic recreation type flights – her business may be the promotion of interesting content in this theme, with leadership/inspirational/after dinner type lectures as part of the product, in addition to the advertising value of the trips.
I really don’t see the harm in this, and for someone who has been exposed to leadership/motivational speakers at sales/management conferences, she would be much more entertaining than the semi warmed over politicians/pundits that sometimes ply their trade this way.
As LeSving points out, if she was caught out in a lie, and am not totally clear she was, she didn’t go about it very intelligently by posting media content showing herself not flying solo.
Organising the sort of trip she did with a Stearman requires enormous energy, and in fact highlights how incredible the Amy Johnson flights were. I do think she got this point across and I congratulate her on this.
Historical disclosure note, the brilliant Amy Johnson was once a pilot at Stapleford – unfortunately she wasn’t the AoC Captain who flew Jimi Hendrix to the IoW concert, after some refreshments at the club house, in the then Stapleford hack, a Piper Apache.
Peter, why did you raise this issue here? Sometime back I started reading the thread on PPrune, realized I didn’t care, felt a little sorry for the lady, whatever she did or didn’t do, and couldn’t figure out why so many posters were out to get her! She didn’t murder whole villages in the Sudan or shoot down a passenger plane. OK, a PR stunt. An award! Some royalty somewhere. Just a weird level of vitriol over such a minor piece of play. Who cares??
