We are deeply saddened to to have to announce that after 13 years of being in business, Virtual Aerospace has ceased trading.  On 23rd March 2024 we handed over the keys of the business to liquidators who are now in the process of closing the premises and auctioning the assets to pay our outstanding creditors. 

 

What went wrong?
The company managed to successfully navigate the turbulent world of business for 11 years, during which time we flew over 50,000 customers and generated over 2000 5-star reviews. We operated 6 simulators across 3 branches and employed over 40 flight instructors. We were, for a time, the largest flight experience company in the UK.  However, one emergency that dealt what turned out to be our fatal blow was Covid!  At no time did we think a government would shut us down, let alone keep us closed for 15 months. Yet through that time people kept supporting us, kept buying vouchers and when we finally opened after nearly 1.5 years, over 2500 customers needed to be serviced, all at once!

Although a shock, we quickly invested in 4 new simulators to be able to service this huge backlog, but it wasn't enough when combined with new customers booking in daily.  Soon the company was booked up for over 12 months on every simulator. With such a large number of customers to fly we tried to run double shifts to clear this backlog, but people having to wait for over 12 months to get booked in massively affected new sales and soon we were starting to run out of money.
We tried everything. The directors were working for free, our lovely instructors started running shifts free of charge, anything to try reduce the backlog and keep us alive. But eventually two of the landlords doubled their fees, electricity tripled, Facebook took £15,000 fraudulently in 24 hours and didn't give it us back, in fact didn't even investigate! Then the final blow; our 12 month moratorium on the CBILS loan that was used to buy the 4 new simulators and move to larger premises kicked in and we were done. We entered a Company Voluntary agreement in Jan 24 to try to reduce the accumulated debts but it was too little too late. We kept trading whilst several options were explored, we couldn't stop taking sales as we would have died on the spot!

We know that many of you will be mad at us and that you invested in us in good faith and we feel awful and cannot apologise enough to anybody that has lost money in this situation. Honestly we have tried everything we could to keep VA in business. Thousands of hours of good will from engineers, pilots and the VA team was not enough to fend off the impact of shutting a business for nearly 1.5 years and other businesses increasing their costs at such a difficult time.  We had a thriving, growing business until we were forced to shut our doors for Covid.

What do i do if I am owed money?

If you have either not yet flown or hold a VA voucher that hasn't been used, then your details will have been passed to the liquidators. There is no need to do anything and they have asked us to not pass out their contact details as they will be in touch in due course.  The process is as follows: strip our assets, auction the assets then divide what that generates by % for outstanding creditors and then make a payment. This process can take between 3 and 6 months apparently.

Again we want to thank everybody that has flown with us over the 13 years and again also want to apologise to those we never got the chance to fly with our amazing team of staff.

Thank you

Virtual Aerospace Ltd.