Sarah737 - that may indeed be the case in terms of how Parc are presenting things. You have to bear in mind that we were clearly told a few month ago that there were no plans to employ our 737 contract captains after the 737 left. Lo and behold, they are now on Airbus courses and will be used to crew Lisbon. On one level, what you say is music to my ears, but I have to say that life is never that simple. As I said previously, if I had to bet on it then all the contract crew in Lisbon will be offered jobs in easyJet at the end. You may be interested to know that if you are an internal applicant (not that there are many), you are guaranteed a return to the country of your departure if it all goes wrong. EasyJet are just hedging their bets, and there is a lot of water to go under the bridge before any final decision is made. You do need to be aware, however, that the unions will rightly fight tooth and nail to prevent any contract captains being offered permanent contract as long as there are First Officers available internally to fill those vacancies.
On display here we have here the two extremes of easyJet life - myself and Doug the Head. Doug hates working for easyJet and I quite enjoy it - it is up to others to decide who is right and who is wrong. It would not be an exaggeration to say that easyJet could give Doug a Ferrari and it would be wrong colour, or a bag of gold and it would be too heavy. What can be done to help such people? Very little unfortunately, other than to do what I have done on many occasions and recommend he finds alternative employment. I am not aware of defending the Lisbon contract, but again others must decide.
It is a statement of the obvious that many pilots from outside easyJet want to joint us - possibly showing that Doug may not be totally correct in regarding easyJet as the worst airline on the planet. We can hardly blame them for that, but I am nonetheless dismayed that we did not give our own First Officers the opportunity to bid for the Command slots in Lisbon, rather than take external candidates. That is an internal issue for us to deal with - once the Project Merlin saga is over, we must go into attack mode to deal with that.
Overall, however, in my judgement we are in a good company with a bright future. You must decide whether to take Doug's view or mine - the bare fact is that if you do not want to join us then there is no shortage of external applicants who do.