DJ I must say I have had quite a bit of respect for you in the past your arguments seem to be a well balanced, I can not say the same with your 2 recent posts, its disheartening to hear that that is how management feel, I suggest to read The Actuator's comments to you I believe he has put you firmly in your place.
I have always been optimistic about SAA and SA and I finally think the time has come to make a move, I was at work the other day and the talk was very disturbing, if you knew how the pilots felt you and the other management would be worried, you may think you can replace us tommorow with that pile of 400 CV's well maybe you can, nobody is indispensible, but come 2008 or whenever it is that you need to make the 600 odd million difference you may not have 225 pilots left working for you in this company, so I dont think any pilot needs to be worried about retrenchment, the figure of 225 pilots that will possibly be retrenched is quite amusing, because by no steach of the imagination can I see how you plan to crew the aircraft, lets say we have 800 pilots (although it is less) roughly half are F/O's and half are Captains (roughly I know we have more F/O's) so thats about 400 F/O's now you say there is potential to retrench 225 so I can assume that you (management) are threatening to gid rid of half the F/O's if things dont go your way, well there is no way the current airline can run on those numbers, maybe you guys have other plans, maybe this is your battle stratergy to finally get to the pilots.
What you possibly dont know is that a very very large number of your current pilots are making plans to go there own way, I stated this was not true on a previous forum but a few facts have come to my attention. Do you guys have the possible training of 200 - 300 (guess) pilots in your calculations? have you any idea of what that would cost and how long that would take, currently it takes 4 months to train one person to fly a A340 (from start to finish), you guys have finally started something I dont think you can stop, I am currently searching my options and yes it is heartening to know that I can make a move relativley easy, I wonder how easy it will be for you and your fellow managers when you finally destroy the second oldest airline in the world to find new jobs, who would hire anyone in management at SAA, unless its government and corrupt or useless.