Originally Posted by
silverstrata
"I have ended boom and bust cycles", said the British prime minister. (What planet was that guy on?)
He wasn't the PM at the time - he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And if the banks had stuck to the letter of the regulations in place at the time he would not have been far wrong.
Unsurprisingly, out of this nouveau faux-political environment there emerged a number of companies who aped this style, including Easyjet and Ryanair. These were companies who just said they were marvelous and everyone believed them. They covered up poor employee relations, poor management decisions, poor safety records, poor safety cultures, poor everything - and replaced it all with smoke, spin and mirrors. As long as the Irish leprechaun played the fool, and the fat Cypriot gurned for the cameras, everything must be wonderful. And the media, the financiers and the CAA fell for the corporate tom-foolery, hook, line and sinker.
But everyone forgot that aviation is a serious business, with serious consequences.
Did they? No less than the original UK flag carrier spun off "Go" to capitalise on the same gap in the market!
Just how can one refuel, deice, ensure you are not overweight, get the performance calculation correct, and make sure you are correctly fueled for those pesky TSXXXs, BLSNs and BCFGs, and do all the checks in 20 minutes?
By being super-strict on the carry-on baggage limit. Remember that in the early days, most flights were operating in temperate climates such that extreme weather conditions were rarely encountered.
...Easy and Ryanair aircraft flying too fast, taxying too fast, hassling ATC to cut every corner enroute, hassling ATC to take off now or be number one in the queue - and still they did nothing.
EZY were never known for that kind of behaviour - it had been noted in RYR well before the days of MOL.
Ryanair and Easyjet, flying too fast, cutting corners:
BBC NEWS | UK | Budget airlines' pilots 'cut corners'
BBC NEWS | UK | Ryanair denies pilots 'exhausted'
BBC NEWS | Business | Easyjet staff vote on strike
BBC NEWS | UK | Ryanair threatens to sack pilots
BBC News - Ryanair jet's 'rushed landing a serious incident'
Faced with these problems, O'Leary merely threatened to sack more pilots (see the links above). But the problem was not with the pilots, it lay with the impossible schedules and turnarounds they were being forced to achieve. So now Ryan and Easy pilots were between a rock and a hard place...
EZY did no such thing, to the best of my knowledge.
when a minimum 35 minute turnaround would have solved many of these issues.
How would a 35min turnaround solve the problem of the upfront cost of jet fuel (which is supposedly the driving factor behind what was mentioned in the programme)?
Don't forget that MOL's game plan from the get-go was to apply the SWA business model to a European airline.