A & C - first of all, no one at easyJet wants to have any customer have a bad experience, particularly when they are facing difficult family circumstances. Let me genuinely apologise on behalf of easyJet for that unacceptable treatment. Nonetheless, every airline in the world has these issues and we are sadly no exception. That does not mean we should accept this as the norm (and we most certainly do not), but every legacy and low cost airline has numerous issues of customer satisfaction to deal with. It is probably no consolation to you, but I too have had some utterly frustrating experiences involving easyJet staff (and indeed many other airlines) - and I work for them! Nonetheless, I would have to say that I have had countless more good experiences and see every day the efforts made by the team to put the customer first. There has been a revolution in low cost thinking which we are at the forefront of and of which Ryanair are only now just thinking of catching up on. We know the customer is everything - a thought that was unthinkable a few years ago. To judge an airline on the basis of a couple of trips is simply not reasonable, given that we take over 60 million customers a year - the vast majority of whom love what we do and keep coming back for more. We have now one of the highest on time performance scores of any airline in Europe and we are striving for better. Our job is to take our customers from where they want to leave from to where they want to go, safely, comfortably, on time and at a great price. In the vast majority of cases we achieve that despite some enormous challenges along the way. No airline is exempt the difficulties you describe, and Norwegian certainly is not. It is what we do to put right the mistakes of the past that we, and all other airlines need to be judged on.
On other matters more pertinent to this thread, I was speaking to a chap only yesterday whose wife works for Norwegian. He was suggesting that the Airbuses are only being bought to be leased out - an interesting thought indeed. That would certainly make things easier for the recruitment team - they would hardly need any pilots at all! Anyway, I wait with interest and look forward to seeing the offers of 'golden hellos' to experienced Airbus captains and trainers to hit the pages of Flight International. It remains to be seen how many of those guys/gals would leave their current employers without a substantial inducement.