Has anyone else had a go at the maths on this? I have, and I'm struggling.
Two million extra seats from the UK next summer over a 30-week summer season is 66,667 seats per week. Divide by 189 and that's 352 extra roundtrips per week. If each TUI aircraft is typically operating 16 roundtrips per week, that's 22 more 189-seat aircraft, but they've announced 50 direct entry Captain jobs and with a typical ratio of 6 to 7 sets of crew per aircraft, that sounds like about 8 extra aircraft.
How do you square away the difference between these numbers? Is the two million figure referring to sector seats, so 1m extra holidays?
My guess is that this must include some 757 retentions to provide 40-odd extra seats on some flights versus the 737s. If all of the TUI pilots are already flying those 757s this summer due to the MAX issues, it would explain why all of the new vacancies are on the 737 fleet.
The only way I can get close to some numbers that add up is if you assume that eight 757s due to go this winter will now stay. That provides around 170,000 more seats and then the eight 737s provide around 800,000 more seats and you get to a million holidays and two million seats.
Put another way, if this is the case, then it means that any option to use the 757s as contingency for continued MAX grounding is gone, as those 757s are already providing extra lift after Thomas Cook's failure. That's quite ballsy.