In many respects I'm sorry to see what is happening, there really does seem to be a max exodus from BACON, and Easyjet in particular must be applauding the recruitment success. I'm sure you'll all enjoy the bigger aircraft and the bigger paypacket, certainly the effective management (compared to BACON anyway). You might not like the sheer volume of work as much, but then again, anyone who flew the Emb with BACON will not be working any harder. With ref ourselves, I suppose it's quite interesting. Whichever way the cookie crumbles we have effectively got rid of most competition on a lot of our best routes. The hiring business may look bleak, but then, I suppose that BACON can just ground a few hulls and come off the routes earlier than planned if the numbers don't match the roster. At the end of the day, we hadn't planned an expansion programme like EZYs, with new aircraft arriving practically every week, so no problems there, because as you all know there are lots of people at each end of the industry desperate to break back in or get a start. There will undoubtedly be a commander shortage at some point, but then, when have you ever known an airline able to properly plan ahead in terms of manning levels? Quite often through no fault of their own.
How may people are moving to the shiny new airline in Edinburgh? I had heard that many senior guys had chucked the towel in, although there were some, amazingly, who were moving fleet to fill those slots. Are there many of you who really believe it will be different in this latest version?
At this point, I haven't heard from any genuine management since Xmas, so I don't know how many are taking the FlyBe offer. Genuinely hope it all works out for you all, I don't believe there is any substantive seniority issue to concern the likes of me, though I'm glad I'm not a mid-seniority Flybe Effoh.
