You'd need to catch them first as they make their way to Norway :)

A friend of main, ex-RYR, told me of an earlier F/O colleague who gained their command. They are now a B7878 captain in China on U$25,000pm and loving it. All paid up expenses and a commuting roster. 10 years on, roll up your mat , find a part-time flying job and enjoy the sunset somewhere nice & warm before you are 50.

Well, the European communism had been largely ineffective. The "early capitalistic" term would be more appropriate here.

Harry, do you think Norway really wants persons who are addicted to unhappiness?

When it comes to aviation matters I'm afraid the UK media are very parochial and biased. Monarch, loses so much money it is forced to close down disrupting many hundreds of thousands of passengers yet they get the stiff upper lip treatment with absurd headlines comparing the fiasco to the nobility of the Dunkirk rescue. Oh, come on!

Er what mass he created ?

He not in charge of rosters which is where it has started............

Norwegian have got to start generating lots of cash.................... they know it as well.

Something odd.

The last day or two I've noticed sponsored paid for ad placements on Social Media linking directly to articles claiming that there is to be a strike or a mass walk out by cabin crew and a few other things.

Some of these advertisers would include established media outlets who are essentially linking to their own articles detailing the same, I cannot imagine why a media outlet would want to pay money to promote a negative article about Ryanair in this way.

Is it possible that there are other parties behind this or do any media outlets have any shareholding or other interests in the airline industry in the UK and Ireland?

From my past experience, and from what I have been reading he has p1ssed so many staff off demanding that they pay for uniforms, training etc. etc. etc., I mean Mr Ryan sent him to Air Southwest to see how they do it and he returned to pretty much change the way the industry did things.

I've read that RYR, O'Leary, were given two years notice to change their accumalative hours dates and they left it, and left it, and left it, until it was too late to do it over a reasonable transitional period ... Did MOL not know about that and kick ass before now or, as an accountant, was he too pre-occupied counting the billions going in to the company bank account?

And why are so many pilots leaving ... Is the bloke in charge of Operations responsible for that also, was he the one that reduced their terms and conditions to diddly squat whilst utilising them on illegal self-employed contracts?

And as a P.S. I worked for the guy who invented the low cost airline!

My Dad had in his office a big sign that read:

"Remember. things always go wrong from the top not the bottom."

Who's at the top? Question answered. That's where the buck stops. Glory & rewards come with responsibility.

How can you plan a whole years worth of hollidays and flying limits if your long term schedules are 6 months out and your short terms like rostering are only a few weeks.
When one grows up as an airline one have to give up a litle of flexibility for stability and predictability. Have at least a scenario schedule for a full year out to work from. Something that shouldn't be to difficult since for the first one knows how many airccraft will be at one's disposal, secondly one can predict approximately how many crew based on current levels, average recruiting and training combined with how many is historically leaving. Now if one has a computerised system, and is using its portential, one can create full year worst and best case roster scenarios, see where there is slack and offer leave booking opportunities accordingly. This results in a minimum flyable schedule. Then later add flights to that if recruiting goes better than hoped or less crew leave.
If one is a low fares airline it is after all easy to seat sale additional capacity. And cheaper than to re-accommodate, and compensate to the letter of the law, passengers on cancelled flights. And to a positive reception in the markets rather than negative headlines.

I read somewhere that RYR have 404 aircraft and 4,100 pilots, i.e. 2050 flight crews, that's only 5.07 crews per aircraft which doesn't sound very many, in my day an industry standard was around 6 or 7 crews per aircraft.

If each crew is entitled to one month's annual leave then there should invariably be 170 crews on leave at any one time and should they not be taking their leave then leave be allocated to them, so, on the line, 2,050 crews has been reduced to 1,880 crews so we're down to 4.65 line crews per aircraft ... It gets worse!

Then, as each season's schedule is published they can realise how many duties there are per week per aircraft, i.e. if it takes 3 crews per day to operate an aircraft then that is 21 duties per week, divide it by 5 (duty days per week) and it shall take 4.2 line crews to operate that aircraft and this doesn't take in to account other duty days for crew training or similar.

As a double check they can realise how many block hours are scheduled per season, even if the there is no thereafter season yet published they know their business model and can ballpark a figure of block hours, and then divide that figure by the 900 hours per crew per year, perhaps add a 5% for luck and now they have realised, double checked, how many crews they need.

Then, should crews be directly employed, then they be contracted to a three months notice period, an industry standard, so in the event that they quit Human Resources and Flight Operations have three months to recruit and train required replacement crews.

But ... in my past experience CEO's, Commercial Departments etc. strongest suit isn't listening when it comes to spending money, whatever number of crews they may be told they need to employ they have a habit of reducing it whilst expecting more and more blood out of the same old stone.

But RYR's business model seems flawed, from the figures I've read it seems they didn't have enough crews in the first place, that many of their crews are self-employed contractors so they can walk out without even tendering any resignation whilst RYR seem more interested in putting billions away in a bank than reinvesting, particularly in staff moral.

Careful Harry. You're setting yourself up for some serious incoming........:E

The ballpark numbers of set of crews per aircraft just becomes more difficult to operate when you run fewer aircraft in winter season than in summer, then increase the summer season. In addition you increase the fleet in batches, but at different numbers from year to year. Besides even 5.2 sets of crews per aircraft sounds massive for an airline that started out with 4. And unnervingly close to the then short-haul industry standard of 6.

There is no need for such ballpark figures when you have an automated system that can give you "real" cover, and targets for recruiting, far into the future. No exec will ignore a forecast of weekly numbers put in front of him/her, telling that at such and such time the schedule won't work. Many of them are after all accountants and used to exact numbers and balances or at least weigthed guideances, rather than statistical approximates and rules of thumb.

It was the Dallas, Texas based Southwest Airlines not Air Southwest which as you know was a UK regional airline based in Plymouth until it was taken over by Eastern Airways.

Ryanair don't 'demand' that staff pay for their training or uniform it clearly states in their contracts that they have to, saying they 'demand' is a bit over the top.

But regardless of those two comments I generally agree with most of what you have posted.

But you can't really compare Laker to Ryanair!

But if, as an average, they can only operate some 17.5 block hours weekly then that is only perhaps three days flying duties so fly them four days per week in the summer and only two days per week in the winter whilst scheduling any ground training classroom duties for the winter, RYR will still be getting their 900 hours per 12 months out of the poor souls.

RYR's accumalative year was April till March but were given two years notice to change it to January till December, now to move three months in one move would have been a significant headache to continuously check and cross-check that crews weren't busting 900 hours.

What I would have done would be ask the authority if during year one we can move to March until February, then the next year move to February to January and by the time year three came along we could move just one month again to the required January until December and I'm confident that any reasonable authority would have agreed to that.

It appears RYR management sat with their fingers up their butts when they would have had every opportunity to use any initiative they may have!

If each crew is entitled to one month's annual leave then there should invariably be 170 crews on leave at any one time and should they not be taking their leave then leave be allocated to them, so, on the line, 2,050 crews has been reduced to 1,880 crews so we're down to 4.65 line crews per aircraft ... It gets worse!

Ah, but if you do not allow any summer leave and then park up 25% of the fleet for the winter and allocate 1 months leave (i.e. a whole years worth in one pop, almost) during the winter when there is no work any way, you might just get by. In this current situation that 6 month plan had to be squeezed, at the last minute, into 3 months, Ooops.

But when I did Recruitment, that was after I did Crew Scheduling :) , RYR were so squeezed for crews during their apparent 'parked up' winters that we would be placing Excel's contract pilots with RYR to bail RYR out of the poo!

It sounds like that someone got carried away trying to save so much money whilst maximising profits they lost sight of reality!

Actually the problem was they were more interested in providing short term good customer service by large use of standby crews to maintain the punctuality record and recover service during disruption, strikes and bad weather at the expense of sustainable management of pilot hours.

Ryanair subs in extra crews to recover service and to keep flights on time when other airlines simply allow delays to build and build to the point where crews run out of hours and then flights are cancelled. If they took the same approach as other airlines they'd be able to run the pilot schedules more efficiently at the expense of later running flights and more short notice cancellations.

The expression "a prevention is better than a cure" springs to mind"!