Their meeting comes just two days before the expiry of the deadline marked for Friday at noon, prior to the company’s extraordinary shareholders’ meeting on Friday afternoon.

The deadline, however, is a rather elastic one, seeing that Investments and IT Minister Austin Gatt said last week that the government, the majority shareholder, will still go on with its planned Lm30 million recapitalisation plan, even if no reply has been received by the unions until then.

By yesterday, according to sources near the ministry, only the pilots’ union had asked for a meeting with the management.

This meeting was held on Monday and the pilots’ side included a number of consultants, but not Dr George Abela, the sources said.

The management and ministry sources steadfastly refused to disclose what points of agreement or disagreement had been established during the meeting. They said they refuse to carry on the discussions through the media.

Negotiations, they added, should serve one and the other side to come up with explanations and possible concessions. There is, they however admitted, precious little time left for more explanations and discussions.

What seemed to concern the sources was that there still seems to be little appreciation by the public in general and by the Air Malta employees in particular that the fundamental problem at Air Malta lies in its core business.

While others keep mentioning issues such as the RJ-70 purchase and the Azzurra Air venture, the sources said, admitting these have impacted on the airline’s progress, the indisputable fact, they said, is that the airline lost Lm5.1 million in its core operations just last year.

One has to appreciate, the sources said, that the airline will be facing even keener competition in the coming years. Air Malta will be facing increasing competition from the other airlines and especially from low cost airlines on its main routes.

Some, like Lino Spiteri (Talking Point: Model flying – The Times Monday 12 April) are arguing that “job sharing at reduced pay in a commercial context simply ensures that the threatened collapse will get closer”.

Mr Spiteri then went on to portray the Aer Lingus response to the crisis: the airline became a low fare airline. It slashed fares and attracted higher passenger volumes. It also slashed costs across the board and cut the workforce by a third, critically reviewed work practices, but “pay was not cut”.

This, the ministry sources said, is not the route that government and the airline have chosen. “Had we wanted Air Malta to become low cost,” they said, “we would have taken different measures.”

In short, government and management is offering a full commitment of no redundancies – something the unions had immediately asked for – along with cuts not just in workers’ allowances but also in administrative expenses. The burden, they said, will not fall on the employees only but also, and specifically, on the company.

Among the cost cutting measures the airline is proposing on the administrative side, there are:

• The directors’ remuneration has been cut.

• The duty free allowance was removed.

• Allowances of senior management have been slashed – the phone allowance is now capped, the family social memberships have been removed, as has the wedding gift allowance. The duty travel allowance has been capped to Lm30 a day. The fuel allowance has been capped as per public service. The leasing of cars has been cut through utilisation of lower makes of cars.

Savings have also been made through the reorganisation and creating of synergies between the various IT sections.

The cost of in-flight service has been reduced.

The airline will also reduce its commercial costs through the reorganisation and restructuring of its sales and marketing units and the reorganisation of its outstations.

The airline also plans to reduce its direct operating costs mainly through the utilisation of the new, more efficient, aircraft.

It is planned that through the above cuts the airline will save some Lm3.75 million a year in three years’ time. The workers, through their unions, will also have a formal overseeing role to ensure that what is being committed will in fact be done.

So far, the sources said, everyone around has been “responsible” and the much-feared industrial action over the Easter weekend did not materialise. They however admitted that the union leaders are coming under intense pressure both from internal and external sources.