standbyils - as one who is clearly Astraeus management, you can hardly be blamed for defending the indefensible. It is also worth mentioning that I personally see no safety issues with Astraeus operating the A320. In safety terms your company is clearly competent and proficient and any views I have of Astraeus do not extend as far as making any negative assertions about their professional abilities.
My doubts are much more to do with the active participation in a union-breaking operation that is clearly intended to udermine the power of the Irish unions. Somewhat disappointingly, a number of your own pilots are choosing to turn a blind eye to this contract to look after number one. Like all operations where looking after number one is the main aim, what goes around comes around and these very same people will no doubt find themselves royally stuffed by you and your management mates at a time and place of your choosing. Ultimately they will only have themselves to blame for having a cobra for a tie - looks great, makes you look better than you are and puts you briefly centre stage, but in the end it will always bite you. The people who are ultimately allowing this to happen are the Irish Unions, who are 'fiddling while Rome burns'. There will always be unscrupulous companies like yours but unions are there to oppose this sort of activity. In the final analysis only they know if they are willing to watch the destruction of their futures at the hands of a here-today, gone-tomorrow company like Astraeus. My sincere hope is they will have the foresight to take you on rather than bury their heads in the sand and hope you will just go away. There is no doubt you will not disappear just yet - the nature of scavengers and vultures is that they will always be hovering round near-dead carcasses about to breath their last. The question I have for the Aer Lingus fraternity is this - how long can bury your heads in the sand until someone cuts your head off while you are pretending nothing is wrong?