According to Richard Branson, the secret to running a successful airline is to keep the staff happy. They will, in turn, be nice to the passengers, who will themselves be happy and flock to fly. A charming if naive theory. Virgin Atlantic, run on this principle, has teetered on the edge of insolvency for years.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary, on the other hand, doesn’t seem especially obsessed with the morale of either his cabin crews or his passengers. He cares about watching the pennies and making sure his planes run on time. He is a brutal negotiator. When Willie Mullins, who trained his 60 racehorses, tried to increase his fees, O’Leary withdrew every single horse from his yard. When Boeing demanded he pay more for new jets, O’Leary called them ‘delusional’.
The consequence of his approach has been a revolutionary democratisation of air travel. He has built a fabulously profitable business now with more than 400 aircraft, soon to be 500. Ryanair carried 14 million passengers in April and has never had a serious accident. Before Covid, it was making a billion pounds profit a year.
Just take your own sandwiches and pretend to be asleep when they start selling the scratchcards
Snobs might say they’d rather crash at Heathrow than land at Ryanair’s base at Stansted. Fair enough – but count me out. It is the airline in Europe least likely to cancel your flight. In May, the month of airline madness, Ryanair scheduled 13,100 flights from the UK – and cancelled just three. That’s a cancellation rate of 0.02 per cent, unmatched by any other airline. BA and Virgin Atlantic, so-called full-service airlines with fares to match, were almost 50 times more likely to cancel your flight than Ryanair. WizzAir and Lufthansa were about 100 times as likely. With KLM, 220 times.
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