Hi JimL, while I am generally in whole-hearted agreement with you on this, I don't understand your first point.
Surely there will indeed be an immediate reduction in seating. Side-floating thingies don't exist at the moment, so they are out for the 1 June deadline.
The EBS get-out requires stuff to meet an as yet unfinalised draft technical specification. Now it might well be that the Canadian HUEBA are close enough to this, but it would be nice if the CAA would make it clear. Even if they are, and assuming enough sets can be bought and delivered in 7 weeks, surely we are not just going to give these SCUBA devices to people without theoretical and practical training? I see that there is onfgoing discussions in Canada as to what is and what isn't safe training, and I haven't found consensus on this in my googling.
I hear that management are trying to plan for reduced payloads, and I guess this is being shared with oilcos, so I cannot be the only person who doesn't see how the dots join up here.
Still concerned that the oilcos best way out of this is to stop using UK AOC holders and just contract in the foreigners. That was none of this applies. Not sure how that improves safety for passengers, or job security for pilots. Just makes the UK operators less and less competitive.