Grizzle,
Thanks for the confirmation, pretty much as I thought!
GBFUN,
The major reason no airline would take all it's staff that way is because it would require them to be 100% accurate with their staff forecasting a year and a half in the future. This is because a pre-requisite of MPL is the pre-training agreement between the airline and the cadet...the airline must have 'offered' a job to the cadet before embarkation on the course. Most people that have anything to do with this game will tell you most airlines find it hard enough to predict staffing a week and a half into the future!
They would be relying on not only accurate forecasting, but nobody failing the course once they had been selected, nobody failing their medical, the industry staying 'as forecast' for the duration of the course - and you only have to look back twelve months to see how infeasible THAT is. There would have to be no delay in aircraft orders, no sudden growth that required a large influx at short notice....in short if they opted to ONLY take MPL pilots, any flexibility in A.N. Aircraft companys operating plan would be lost.
Hence, it is potentially a great method of training pilots, but the need for them to be tied means it is unlikely, IMHO, to replace fATPL entirely, or even the majority.