Hi all,
I am a bit of a glass half full kind of a guy so this is my personal take on things.
Cadets, be they FPP or whitetail can go only go onto short haul. They also need about 40 training sectors to get to line check as opposed to about 10 for DEPs. Therefore the ratio of cadets to DEPs has huge effect on the ability of the training department to get pilots onto the line, and consequently how quickly senior A320 FOs can be allowed off short haul and into training for their desired long haul slots.
40 slot pairs may only support 10 short haul aircraft at one end of the spectrum but 40 long haul aircraft at the other. Each long haul aircraft probably requires about 7 Captains and 10 FOs depending on the destinations. BA clearly want to compete with Norwegian so I expect a good percentage of the slots to be long haul ones.
Clearly there are issues such as magicing up aircraft to fill those slots and training the crews in a short period to fill possibly 15 long haul and 6 short haul aircraft. I suspect that a rough figure of 300 pilots will be needed.
All in my opinion. All the best to those in the pool.