I see many of you guys are wondering what's the pattern. So here's my 2 cents: If you look at the post about people who did get their final approval or their ticket & visa, they all did so at the end of January or the first 2 to 3 days of Feb at best. My impression is that sometime at the end of last month, someone at EK finally got the whole picture,which is that you can't keep growing at the same pace in the face of a global economic crisis ("global" being the key word here) and more particularly in the face of dropping demand. Real estate speculation in Dubai has been a complete madness in the last few years and they are among the places worst hit by the crisis.Contrary to what many believe, Dubai is not your tipical oil-rich MidEast heaven and even if it was at the current price of oil it wouldn't be doing too good either. So, back to our particular case. Someone at EK managment finally realized that if they are going to get thru this and maybe even continue making a profit, expansion is not the way. So they plan to cut routes that have become unprofitable,maybe just increase the Indian and OZ ones in terms of frecuency, reduce the number of crew staffing the aircraft at the minimum and have already offered unpaid leave to employees. Now,anyone would agree that if the company you work for suddenly decides to offer you unpaid leave, things are not going well. So the way I see it,they are probably going to keep the aplicants who already have their final approval,maybe just shift their DOJ's around to keep the ab-initios at an even pace and be able to staff most of their aircraft ordered for the first half of this year.There are probabbly going to be some canceled aircraft orders,but it's gonna cost them more to cancel all of those they've ordered at once, not to mention the damage this would inflict on their corporate image. So instead of canceling everybody's offers at once, they're gonna do it a sip at a time, In the hopes of not atracting too much attention. So, as you see, unfortunately ot's not a matter of positive thinking (I ,of all wish it was) but of maths.
P.S. As I was writing this one of my friends who was supposed to fly on the 27th of Feb forwarded me that dreaded e-mail she recieved this morning. I guess I better start making calculations how much this whole odissey cost me and searching for my lawyers phone number....