no sponsor - regarding the pay for line training, the only battles we can win are those that people will fight for. The pay for line training deal was in retrospect a massive error. I thought initially that this would be a minor deal but I was wrong. The seasonal commands deal is a direct threat to every First Officer at easyJet. Knowing the incentive scheme in operation at easyJet, there are managers who will personally gain substantially for successfully bringing this is in. This will only happen if we let it - I remain totally opposed to it in any form and believe it is an issue to fight over.
Regarding the fuel hedging disaster, I have no sympathy whatsoever for whoever made that decision. These guys are paid staggering sums of money to get this right and instead have cost us around $450million! To say it was a difficult call at the time does not cut it for me. BA did not hedge like that, nor did most of our competitors. In the final analysis, their market predictions were right and ours were wrong. It was clearly possible to get it right, most airlines did and we did not - that is what you sack people for or pay big bonuses if you get it right. We at easyJet seem to have an unusual practice where we pay big bonuses regardless of whether you get it right or wrong - nice work if you can get it. And like I said earlier, why are we discussing seasonality when this catastrophic burden has been laid on our business by incompetent people who could and should have done better. As an aside, George Bush is being piloried for making the 'wrong call' over invading Iraq - ultimately history will judge him on that one issue from his presidency (it is too early for me to say one way or the other if he was wrong or not but that is another story!). The guy in the seat has to be held responsible for making disastrous decisions - for me it is not good enough to say it seemed like a good idea at the time.