It was in the slump time and there was quite a bit of a discussion about that on pprune. Dunno when exactly, but somewhere in the 2009-2012 timeframe. And no, nowadays they don't have the surplus workforce in the flightdeck to do that, that why they wet leased in Qatar, which, by the way is of course completely legal in europe.

Found at least one newspaper article about that: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/tr...er-strike.html

Training for pilots is just about a few hours, after all we are already trained in SEP for the cabin side as well, that is a basic EASA requirement.