OliWW
I'm not sure why you have a downer on J2. After year 1 at EMA they doubled capacity, year 2 increased by 50%, year 3 by 33% and next year by 25%. Most of the aircraft are owned out right so its cheaper to leave them on the ground than fly them at a loss or just break even.
This allows J2 to offer great flight times as they dont need to fly 24 hrs a day. Neither pax or crew enjoy a night Dalaman
. It also means that the aircraft are back at EMA by 01.00 at the latest (after the Sunday Pafos) which allows the engineers to carry out maintainance and gives flex in the programme before starting again in the morning at 0700.
Good deals on aircraft are hard to find and so are the right routes to put them on. Remember that J2 have 8 bases with expansion and new routes slowly happening at most of them. J2 took on about 150 new pilots in winter 2010/11 and about 100 this winter.
If you don't grow within your your means you'll end up like BMI, or Baby, or Eos, Silverjet, Zoom, Astraeus, Excell, etc.
Regards