Despite the rising decibel levels in the megaphone diplomacy between Aer Lingus and its pilots over the past 24 hours, both sides know further peace talks are inevitable between now and February 11th.

The only question is when, and under whose auspices, those talks take place.

There have been informal contacts between senior trade union figures and the Government to resolve the problem already and the National Implementation Body, set up to monitor the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness may become involved.

Averting a strike is only half the agenda. The other half remains reducing the workforce.

The company says it has 80 pilots too many and, ideally, wants to shed junior co-pilots rather than captains. IMPACT, which represents all pilots, wants job losses minimised.

It says it would only cost Aer Lingus €20,000 (£16,000) a year more to employ 60 co-pilots than 15 captains.

That way, 45 more people would be kept working and be available when the airline eventually expanded its services again. IMPACT has even suggested redeploying surplus young pilots on clerical or administrative duties in the meantime.

Not only that but it says there is already a shortfall, and cites the cancellation of early morning Dublin-London City airport flight EI850 on Wednesday because no crew was available.

Aer Lingus argues that making captains redundant is far more expensive than co-pilots and, inevitably, significant numbers of co-pilots would have to be retrained and promoted to replace the departing captains.

With normal crew levels of 10 pilots per aircraft, the company could argue that it needed to shed even more pilots than the 80 sought to operate 31 aircraft and some pilots are already rostered on leave for lack of work.

It was these requirements that led the company to offer pilots a redundancy package aimed at young, junior staff.

The package offered to all other groups was targeted at older, senior staff.

This, ultimately, is the reason why 1,600 other employees signed up within days for redundancy but only seven pilots.

On Wednesday, Aer Lingus belatedly offered the same terms to the pilots as other employees but there was an inevitable sting in the tail.

Under the package previously on offer a captain taking redundancy received a maximum payment of £50,000 (€63,500), but could avail immediately of a pension if he was 48 years old.

The new package can deliver lump sums of up to €230,000 - but no pension until 55 years of age. Far from exploiting potential differences between young co-pilots and older captains, the effect of the conflicting offers has been to push them closer together.

The company decision to press ahead with compulsory redundancies for the10 most junior and vulnerable pilots has also provided IMPACT with an emotively unifying issue.

IMPACT has offered to lift the strike and enter talks if the compulsory redundancies are withdrawn. The company argues that this would simply delay the inevitable confrontation over jobs.

There is also a question of equity. It says pilots, who are by far the most highly paid employees in the company, cannot be given preferential treatment over other employees.

At this point, the only clear thing is that there is plenty of room for manoeuvre for an honest broker between now and February 11th, if both sides can agree on one.