Flame, you must realise that your comments such as "The bottom line is, whether you like it or not, is that people like me pay everyones wages in Ryanair and if some Capt, with dillusions of grandeur thinks otherwise , he is sadly mistaken." will only provoke more vitriol because you are showing a total lack of understanding of the situation.
I will attept to clarify it to you in laymans terms because you are obviously not familiar with all the terminology and other aspects of what is involved in a crew positioning for duty.
There is a crew, which consists of one Captain, one First Officer and three Cabin Crew. All these people are required to in order for their flight to be able to operate. Remove any one of them and the flight is grounded until a replacement can be found, which is never an easy task, especially if you are undercrewed as most airlines are these days.
This Crew have been rostered to operate a flight out of Stansted. The crew are obviously not starting from Stansted but from Dublin. This may be because they are based in Dublin or because they all ended up there after their last operational flight. It doesn't really matter. Due to the inefficiencies of a company with not enough crews to go around they have to position crews.
The problem for companies positioning crews before a duty is that the positioning time has to be included in the maximum duty time they are allwoed to operate if it is immediately before the scheduled duty. Therefore, the positioning has to be as short as possible otherwise it is a waste of time if by the time they get to their aircraft they don't have enough duty hours left to operate all the sectors they are scheduled for.
I hope you are still with me on this. The flight that the Crew are scheduled to fly out on to position to Stansted is almost full. There are two jump seats available on the flight deck and one spare cabin crew seat available in the cabin. Only one passenger seat is empty on the flight. Still with me? That equates to only four seats which are empty on the whole aircraft. Now, there are five members of this crew who have been rostered to position on this flight so that they can get to Stansted and operate another scheduled flight on behalf of Ryanair, full of fare paying passengers like yourself. Unfortunately, someone has made a boo boo here. An extra seat has been sold and so there are not enough seats available for ALL the positioning crew.
The Captain of this positioning crew informs his operations people that there is a seat too few for his crew to position to Stansted to operate the other flight. What are they, operations, going to do about it? It is no use positioning only four of them as it takes a minimum of five crew members to operate the flight out of Stansted so unless they can all go they might as well stay where they are. Without five of them, two flight deck and three cabin crew the Stansted flight they are scheduled to operate is going nowhere and no doubt the cost to Ryanair of delaying or cancelling a flight is going to be very high.
Still there? In this case, operations advised the people in charge of boarding to remove one of the passengers so that the whole crew could position to Stansted and operate their flight and so generate a lot of money for Ryanair. Normally passengers are offloaded for whatever operational reason based on their fare status. For example, if you were on a free or reduced fare ticket you would be near the top of the list of people asked to get off whereas if you had purchased a full fare ticket you would be well down that list and fairly secure in the knowledge that if only one person has to be offloaded then it isn't going to be you.
So, for operational reasons, one passenger was offloaded and therefore there are now enough seats to accomodate the positioning crew. Two on the flight deck, one cabin crew jump seat and two passenger seats. The Captain, using his privelege of rank requests one of the passenger seats together with another member of the crew.
Now this is where it obviously becomes complicated for some of you. As with any chinese whisper and no doubt a management twist on the facts it first appears that the Captain, who is a union organiser and therefore the antichrist as far as Ryanair management are concerned has offloaded a passenger so that he may travel in some tyoe of comfort instead of using a jump seat. Well, that would suit the management and by the sound of it, Mr O'leary used the opportunity to get rid of this thorn in his side, quite obviously without all the facts before him.
I certainly hope that this Captain takes the whole issue to tribunal and gets reinstated and compensated for this injustice. The penalty against mr O'leary should be punitive because of the 18th century style of man management used.
So Flame, this Captain did not have delusions of grandeur, in fact he asked his operations people to solve the problem so that the company could operate a scheduled flight and thus increase revenue for the company. The operations people obviously realised that the inconvenience to one passenger and the possible loss of revenue from that one passenger was far outweighed by the need to operate another flight full of revenue passengers at all costs. Had you paid only one penny to Mr O'leary then there would have been a highly likely chance that you would have been that unfortunate passenger that had to be offloaded.
Your quote Ryanair management have got it right and are having various business accolades heaped on them, by business leaders, whom I guess, know more about running an airline than you will ever know" only goes to show how easily some of you are duped by the press releases by that same management who have very little understanding of the concept of loyalty and the fostering of goodwill from its employees.
The Captain concerned was fired purely because of his union work and the excuse used is nothing but a red herring. I am sure you don't treat your staff or are treated by your bosses in such an obviously underhanded manner.
You obviously enjoy the cheap fares that Ryanair have brought to the marketplace. I would suggest you get all your facts right before you spout off about things you clearly know nothing about. Personally I am suprised that the rest of the Ryanair flight crews have not yet take some sort of industrial action to get the fired Captain re-instated. You may yet be left with no alternative but to pay the whole hog airfare if the Ryanair pilots ever get their act together and show how expensive it can be for management to screw around with peoples lives like this.