The report in the Daily Telegraph yesterday (not one of my usual reads, but just happened to pick up a copy!) said that the new rostering system had pilots, cabin crew and aircraft all working to different patterns so that the pilots and aircraft could be in Luton but cabin crew still coming in from Barcelona.
Hmmm...sounds suspiciously like Carmen (also known as Carnage) from BA. BA only cope with Carmen by building in so much spare time into their flying programme and crew turnrounds that it rarely has any effect. easy have obviously tried to use Carmen but without building in the productivity-munching punctuality buffers that BA put into their programme.
Carmen looks great on paper - optimised crew numbers - but is completely impractical in real life as it takes no account of the disruption caused by exactly this problem. It is not uncommon at BA to have an aircraft coming in from Stockholm, Captain & FO from Frankfurt, CSD from Amsterdam and four more cabin crew from Madrid all meeting up to operate a flight to Munich. Optimised crew numbers are great until one of the four flights which you need to arrive on time to achieve an on-time departure on your Munich flight goes wrong. But BA, being BA, do not recognise the extra airport standby crews and disruption as a cost to be set against the allegedly optimised crew numbers and so still have not realised that this system is costing them a fortune.
In summary, methinks BA could learn a thing or two - i.e. their short-haul rostering system is rubbish and that you can't run a low-cost airline from it, as easyJet have found to their horror.
Well done easyJet for having the guts to stand up and admit they have got it wrong. The true test will now be what they do to fix it and restore confidence from those passengers who have been affected by the whole debacle.