I know nothing about Ryanair, but they are compared to Southwest Airlines?
Ok.
So it must be a secret over there in Ireland, the UK and in Europe that Southwest pilots are, as a whole, the best paid B-737 airline pilots in the US (whether including extra trips or not), if not in the world? Many of the older SWA pilots and Flight Attendants did very, very well with shares of stock after it split several times over many years-the comparison?
Southwest appears to have been based upon and operated by a policy of keeping staff morale high and encouraging teamwork and enjoying the job. This is a very rare concept in recent memory for a large, US airline. Most upper managements are in it for themselves and to throw benefits to the Boards of Directors. Southwest has grown very carefully, and their marketing has been based only upon studious, gradual growth, avoiding the very typical corporate ego pitfalls and traps which have doomed and consumed dozens and dozens and dozens of US airlines, large and small.
Many of those which were doomed had the lowest labor costs. But isn't that an apparent contradiction?
I have trouble understanding how to improve morale by nickeling and diming (looking at tiny chicken s**t) staff for each ball point pen or bag of salty peanuts, from everything that I've read about the industry and those executives who displayed true examples of leadership. What a very rare commodity in the US airline industry, when a combination of talent for inspiring people joins up with true motivation in order to guide and position an airline for long-term success!
Not just sucking out any short-term costs, no matter how disappointed and disillusioned the passengers are (what? no more meals or pillows?), then lifting the handles, squeezing the triggers on a zero zero ejection seat for a guaranteed extremely "golden parachute" retirement (so they can build a much larger home at Lake Tahoe, then return to damage another airline).
