Thinking further on Re-Heat's costs obsession, even making comparisons between BA and GB pilots is futile. GB is a small, friendly company with a specific route network with stage lengths that are, in general, longer than the average BA shorthaul one and where nightstops are, at a guess, relatively rare. Multiple sector days beyond an out and back are relatively rarer, and "touring" the exception rather than the rule.
They operate from LGW, which has its own challenges, but not, by and large, from LHR where a great majority of BA's shorthual operation is based.
BA operates predominanantly from LHR on many short stage lengths, with multiple sector days ending in multiple nightstops ("tours") where you drag a suitcase around europe for five days at a time whilst dashing from aircraft to aircraft at LHR or herding the fixed link turnaround process like crazy to keep some semblance of a schedule together at an airport where a combination of endless building site, extraordinary ramp practices and straightforward overcrowding (airport running at limit capacity most times of day) makes for a debilitating environment.
Despite this, BA shorthaul productivity in terms of hours flown per pilot is better than almost any benchmarked competitor.
This is not to denigrate the GB operation one bit, but to wonder aloud just how attractive the BA contract will seem shorn of either a FS DB pension at the end of it, which, although Re-Heat may not like it, is the deal 99% of pilots signed-up to when they joined, and bidline which gives some semblance of control over your life at work when being tasked to be away from home so much.
Without these two items, factoring-in BA's time to command and the constraints mentioned above, then BA becomes a very much less worthwhile prospect at all.
Current management like Re-Heat, (hello PoD!), blithly assume that because people are still applying all must be well, however the wiser ones are realising that we are now going to have to bond people as well, as a slow flow of joiners gets a free type rating, experience on type and then say "sayonara" and goodbye.
I would go as far as to say that if the FS DB pension is closed or turned into a career average one that then, especially for the co-pilots who will be worst affected by it, the slow flow of departures would turn into a debilitating stream. The end of bidline, origionally called "incentive bidline" would have a very similar effect.