I gave this some serious thought in 'beer glass philosopher' mode last night
If BA aren't planning to seriously downsize their comibined fleet (over what they have already announced), I would expect most if not all crew to keep their jobs in the merged franchises. I'm not sure exactly what BA's business plans are, but I guess that the real savings will come from the removal of duplicate personnel on the ops and support side, plus some from the absorbtion of the lower cost working practice of the franchises into mainline ops ('synergies' in M&A speak).
Either way, the BA fleet will expand as they absorb the franchises' aircraft. A bigger fleet will mean more vacancies due to natural crew wasteage, which will require an increased DEP intake to fill the vacancies, maybe with an increased CEP intake as well.
Which brings me back to the question I posed above of whether your average BA DEP 'pool' pilot with several thousand jet hours and their heart set on a medium or large jet job would be interested in an RJ RHS or TP job, as a foot on the ladder to get into BA. I think in most cases these DEP pilots would not be happy with this.
Possibly BA could run a two-tier DEP scheme, taking on people with lower hours with the expectation that these people would be going to the TP's/RJ's and the higher-houred DEP's would go to the bigger aircraft. This is possible.
Now, let's assume that the CEP is not increased for cost requirements, which is a likely scenario, the DEP scheme isn't changed to allow the lower-houred, and BA CEP's are posted to the TP's or RJ's initially. This would create more vacancies for DEP's onto the larger machines as less CEP's would be coming through the system into larger jet RH seats. This will increase the already pronounced shortage of mid-hours type-rated jet crew (the true 'pilot shortage'), which could cause the charters and low-cost mob to have to take lower-hour people straight to the RHS in their jets to replace losses to the BA DEP. This could be a good thing. Factor into this the effects of the BA retirement bulge, and the effect could be even larger.
Overall any move that does not decrease the number of aircraft flying for British airlines must be a good thing, since there will still be similar number of vacancies at the bottom of the career ladder. The airlines and aircraft may change, but the jobs will still be there. And as long as the airlines respond to this by keeping sensible experience requirements rather than massively upping salaries which will suck in more overseas pilots, I don't think that us self-improvers have too much to worry about.
[This message has been edited by foghorn (edited 17 January 2001).]