With Aer Lingus facing serious losses a raft of cost cutting measures have been proposed to save the company and those are due to be revealed to the stock market later today. As ever the Irish Sentinel strives to bring you the hottest breaking news first and our intrepid reporter posed as a hotel waiter in order to steal one of the confidential documents which outlines their plans.

There is a 12 point proposal which company executives hope will save enough money to keep the struggling airline afloat, if you’ll excuse the rather mixed metaphor. Some of the most shocking are revealed below:

• All flight attendants and stewards are to be fired and replaced by dwarves as the relative weight loss will save upwards of €500,000 per month in fuel costs
• Bosses have asked engineers to report on whether it is ‘absolutely necessary’ to have both wings on the aircraft with one saying “It should be possible to navigate the skies using only left turns. It’d just take a bit longer”
• Baggage handling is to be outsourced to an Indian call-centre
• The self check-in terminals will now be coin operated with each passenger required to deposit €4 per boarding card
• Seatbelts will now be hired to customers at a rate of €10 per hour (€6 on long haul flights)
• Pilot training will be moved from specialist training schools in the USA and instead be taught using a flight simulator program on the Sinclair ZX81 (the one with the 16k RAM pack, of course. No expense spared here).
• All radio, television and print advertising is to be halted with new campaigns to be carried out by dropping leaflets from commercial flights. Bosses are confident this is the way forward despite the recent tragedy when two small children were flattened by a bail which failed to open when dropped over Hertfordshire on the Dublin > London Heathrow route.
• The concept of the co-pilot is to be done away with. As one executive was heard to opine “You don’t get in a taxi with two drivers, do you?”

Aer Lingus executives would not confirm or deny the information when pressed for answers by the Irish Sentinel but health and safety officials have called the proposals ‘an act of madness. It’s like asking a hungry lion to teach a kindergarten class’.