Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 26 July 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport
Situation at Dublin Airport: Discussion
Ms Lynne Embleton:
I will answer this and then call Mr. O'Neill. The lead time for training pilots is the longest lead time among all of our work groups. As we look at our growth plans and future aircraft we make sure we have sufficient pilots in the system to fly them. At present this gives us more pilots than we would normally need to have for the level of operations. It gives us an extra buffer in the number of pilots. As we have said, we have more cabin crew as a percentage than the relative operations. Where we took the biggest reduction in staff numbers was in head office functions. In our front-line functions we were ready with the right resources for the schedule. When we noticed the disruption occurring throughout Europe in particular, rather than stopping recruitment because we had met the requirements for our schedule we took the decision to continue to recruit because we could see how much extra pressure it was putting on our ground teams, crew teams and call centre teams.
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