You claim you're British airline management but you describe yourself in your profile as an FO? You also seem to be saying that airlines are effectively permanently overstaffed as "An airline will always recruit for the next financial year's expansion. Taking on sufficient staff and crews for planned route expansion, to provide the better service for the forward area passengers thereby not being caught out when the expansion arrives."
Well, I don't know what airline you're with, but few that I know of can handle extra personnel hanging around costing the company lots of money and doing b*gger all for it!
Then you come up with a real corker: "...don't use staff or crew for
PR purposes because this is really all they are doing. Yes it's true, I sat in on a board meeting and it was discussed, that if we as an airline announced job losses, it would give give us $1.2 million in free advertising."
What company wants to admit that it's in trouble - because thats what these announcements are really saying! Read the
PR handouts from people like FR and EZY - they are emphasising that they are
not laying off anyone; but are rather looking to
expand. As a punter, who would I prefer to put my advance bookings with - someone that's laying off staff and grounding aircraft left, right and centre; or someone that's expanding? And how come a UK airline is quantifying its
PR benefits in US$?
All rather fishy to me...!
