You are seeing here the hard edge of Andy Harrison, the new CEO at easyJet. He inherited a complete shambles from his dismal predecessor and could have faced an almost immediate strike involving both pilots and cabin crew. He set about building relationships with all staff and invited any criticism from the staff they thought was justified. In stark contrast to RW, who seemed to lack any people skills of any kind, AH visitied base after base and could be found anywhere and everywhere at 6.00 in the morning. He was there pressing the flesh, listening to every bleat and whine - he even dressed in easyJet cabin crew uniform around easyLand to show solidarity with the crew. He has largely won the confidence of the pilots and I personally think he has been great news for the company.
AH is, however, a hard guy and it has become increasingly apparent that some of the disastrous decisions made by his Flt Ops managers have cost the company a fortune. They failed to realise the strength of pilot feeling and created an atmoshere of suspicion and anatgonism. They orchestrated the plan to reduce our crewing levels to save money and we now cannot run the summer program. We are subbing in charters everywhere and are cancelling flights all over the place - someone had to pay for the shambles. They are the ones who, depsite countless warning to the contrary, said that there was no retention crisis and failed to recruit enough pilots in time. They thought all the pilots would roll over and take an effective pay cut while the directors awarded themselves obscene bonuses. Instead they all joined BALPA and stood up en-masse to the greatest threat to their liveliehoods since easyJet began. Rightly or wrongly, someone had to pay for the perceived failings of Flt Ops management. MS made the hard calls and got them wrong - he is now history. I personally wish him well as I think he was actually a nice guy. Nonetheless, in the final analysis, he was at the helm of the ship that ran aground in bad weather and the buck stops there.
It is to AH's great credit that despite having no previous airline experience, he has rapidly picked up the fundamentals and is now sorting the carnage created by the head-in-the-clouds 'leadership' of his predecessor and plain incompetence by his Flt Ops management. I personally do not think that anyone else will go but I may be proven wrong. Hopefully there are a few frightened people at easyLand who know that AH means business. The next problem looming is rostering and if that is not sorted then there will be some serious trouble. Common sense says that if you can reduce the number of people leaving by introducing the best roster pattern in the business (4-4), then you can still get 900 hours a year from everyone and save a fortune on the constant retraining of new pilots. Happy staff are good business - we can only hope that the new boy, Ken Smith, knows that. He had better do a lot of listening when he arrives, because if he misjudges the situation as badly as his predecessor did he will be on his bike very quickly indeed.