kotakota,
you're right about huge cash reserve of Ryanair
buying Air Berlin for the sake of buying is possible, but I talk here about sustainable business
load factors of the carriers are dropping (
http://www.reuters.com/article/tnBas...00034520070704), so one way to compensate these drops is to get a bigger fleet
That's why Ryanair ordered around 20 new aircrafts recently
If we think about the strategy one second: Ryanair like other low-cost carriers have open routes that were the most profitable and they stimulate demands on these routes
Now that these routes are saturated, they look for new ones that are farer (risk on the business model...) and obviously these routes are less profitable
(because there were not the first choice)
So to sum up, yes Ryanair has enough cash to buy Air Berlin, but no this business model is not sustainable
easyjet business model with its networking strategy (versus Ryanair's expanding strategy) and frequent daily flights seems more solid to face the slowdown of the market