J-Class - I can't comment on the standard of training on the no-frills carriers, and would be very surprised if the standard was not high but I do know that [list][*]Ryanair aircraft are mostly(if not all) CAT 1 which means that they are unable to land in fog when the visibility is less than 550m, which between you and me is 5-10 days a year when you can't land.
When a large stable High Pressure sits gloomily over Western Europe, does the Captain blast off with the knowledge that visibility improves as the morning wears on, hoping that the MET OFFICE have got their predictions correct? Or does he/she wait arms crossed in the crew room of the airline with the worst employee relations in Europe?
Will Mike O'Leary sack him/her for insubordination?
Most other carriers can land in visibility down to 75m.[*]5milesbaby said that these no frills carriers "know aircraft performance when you need it". This implies that the Standard Operating Procedure of having aircraft at a stable speed in a landing configuration at a specified distance from touch down appears to be a lot closer for the no-frills airlines than with the full-frills airlines. Why do you think the established carriers are a little unhelpful to 5milesbaby? Because we are made painfully aware that if we break the procedures by flying the aircraft too fast and too close to the ground we are 'discovered' by our SESMA flight data monitoring equipment and we lose our jobs.
Why do BA/BMI etc install this equipment? Because the flight will be conducted in a safer manner if we stick to the modus operandi that many decades of 'corporate memory' (That PaxBoy describes) have taught us - Keep it simple and you won't have incidents.[*]The last time I flew with a No-Frills airline I spoke to both the pilots who for some reason took great glee in telling me that they did a proper job because they worked to the maximum hours allowed (900 flying hours per year). As a BA pilot I work 750 hours in Europe and that is hard enough. Do you want a couple of pilots who are persistently tired to be flying you around on a foggy day? No matter how professional we are as pilots, if we're knackered, we make mistakes. FACT.