I think sleep suits for crew rest are a great idea much more practical then the 'sleeping bag' I've not seen one person use. I could do with one and I think they should add them to the new uniform list....I'll swop it for my useless winter jacket.
And just to balance things out it's my belief that the wastage in training is more than evident also on command upgrades, if not more so. It may be the belief by some that Cathay has the hardest course in the world and hence the highest chop rate......but it's blatant obvious that people failed because they weren't trained correctly in the 12 years previously. It's absurd the past numbers. So as a company we're faced with the high costs of retraining and wasted instructor time which could be channelled into HKPA. To have people learn everything themselves and point out where they haven't learnt it properly by checking them might have been good enough with the steady stream of high experienced personnel, but it appears only now is Cathay adjusting into a training organisation.
It's nice to see however that our head of training is having some good effect as the line checks are slowly becoming a more gentlemanly affair, and there are some great guys in the sim block now (despite me being biased I have to take my hat off to the ex BA and Virgin guys in there).
So another idea, one that Emirates use, is to have yearly line checks alternate between the aircraft and the sim to allow at least one year of another good (training) loft.