The story goes that senior management’s preferred option was to hire more direct entry F/O’s in order to quickly ( read cheaply ) recover crewing levels on the basis of less required training sectors. FOP management argued that with SO’s approaching 7 years in rank this would cause significant dissent amongst the crew. their efforts to improve the ‘business case’ for upgrading existing crew involved a reduction in the upgrade training footprint if the trainee was up to the task. This of course puts vastly more pressure on the training system to maintain standards, as is always the case with CX it comes down to money! Personally I think it’s only a matter of time until it bites them on the arse.