Ryanair worry the heck out of me and many other professional pilots.
If it were not enough that they fly a fleet of aircraft on a Flight Time Limitation Scheme that has no basis in objective science - the Irish one that allows strings of multiple earlies - and we are forced to share the skies with guys and girls who are driven by that imperative AS WELL AS the "turn up to work or your on a disciplinary" management style, the company's cost cuts are seeping out across the industry to enormous disbenefit all round.
I very much doubt that Ryanair use ANY of the modern methods of continuous safety management - a FDR trace review for excessive out-of-parameter operation of every flight, moderated by peers through the pilot union; an open and honest no-blame reporting culture; a safety incident data base that tracks every incident company-wide and provides open and full feedback to all crews as well as "closing-out" the process loops found to have been at fault, for example.
There is, of course, a cost implication to these, and though I would be genuinely delighted to hear otherwise, I very much doubt that these are in place. Likewise, I doubt that there is any meaningful training standardisation going on to check and verify training outputs against an objective standard.
This is NOT to denigrate in ANY way the pilots of Ryanair, but to question the PROCESSES and motives behind the probable lack thereof.
But there is much worse than that. The culture of getting pilots to pay for their own sims and conversion courses etc etc has led to a cost advantage for them that no carrier who does not do this can beat.
So what, one may say?
So everyone else who does not do this is reducing sim times and courses to the bare bones in an effort to claw back that 'advantage' that Ryanair have 'created' for themselves. Our sims have been cut from 4 to 3 hours on some fleets. Conversion course are at rock bottom in terms of sectors allocated and sims programmed. A certain "bare level of acceptability" may be being maintained, but it is just that, a bare level of competence.
There was a view within commercial aviation that quality was everything in creating a safe operation. You had to strive to create it on initial conversion, strive to keep it on recurrent training, AND strive to support it by the quality of, and commitment to, the processes you put in place to monitor and adjust the trained outputs that you were getting on the line.
That Ryanairs' anti-union, anti-pilot ethos attacks the core competencies of a safe operation is, to me I believe something that one can allege as being beyond doubt, that their stance on training is affecting the whole European industry to its great disbenefit in terms of quality and safety is something one can allege with just as much conviction also.