I‘ll never know how the press manage to get to the proposed sale figure of £400m – indeed I seem to recall that they bandied that figure about during the original sale by BA, whereas in the end the figure was closer to £100m – and given that that sale was only about one year ago, to sell it now for four times that figure would be a truly astounding investment !
It would be fair to say that easyJet have out-grown Luton (indeed they did that years ago), and as such they’re migrating heavily to south of the Thames at LGW, and with this buyout news in the offing they’ll no doubt be looking to move across to STN – where previously such a move was made almost impossible by the three STN incumbent low cost operators RyanAir, Go and Buzz.
It might also be fair to say that 3i might have seemingly got the jitters about their aviation portfolio – e.g. post 911, and / or is Go really delivering the promised returns ?! – so as such they might well indeed be looking for an ‘early out’ and accordingly settle for a modest return on their investment ( say, a sale of £150m ? ) which would still yield a pretty healthy and facing saving return over the investment period.
Logistically there is some degree of commonality in the eJ & Go operations (aircraft types, company systems, etc), and as such a absorption of much of it would be fairly (?) straightforward.
However I would hazard a guess that, should this sale complete, any proposals for Go to change fleets to Airbus might get the chop – the point being that, as a guess, they are (were) contemplating doing this to provide some sort of market ‘differentiation’ against the other low cost products, i.e. the Airbus has slightly more pax appeal courtesy of a wider cabin, etc, plus the flexibility provided by being able to mix-and-match the various aircraft capacities (A319/320/321) to your route demand for seats, with added flexibility of commonality of crew training / type-rating; Of course one can only imagine the deal being offered to do as such must be very appealing, because during the migration period running two fleet types (Airbus and Boeing) with all the crewing problems, etc, is a very expensive proposition (especially so when you already have 22 B737’s).
There again, maybe there are some economies of scale to be had by consolidating the operations and perhaps the big plan is to move the whole bloomin’ lot (Go and eJ) across to Airbus narrow bodies ( now there’s a rumour ! )
W.r.t. the Go staff – there will almost certainly be some headcount reductions due to the economies of scale and rationalisation of routes and capacity (uhm, especially so if, say, they use A321 on the popular sunshine routes).
Of course one can be pretty sure that the directors of Go will come out of it smelling of roses, e.g. Babs will indeed walk away with her £4m - and she was after all only intending to stay for two years after the sale by BA - with the other Go directors getting their £2m each.
As for the other staff, well I’d be amazed if the much muted ‘one years salary’ bonuses ever materialise – but like much at Go, it’s always been case of “Jam Tomorrow !”