If nothing else, that comment gave me a belly laugh. Fanciful wishful thinking. Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel happy.

However, let's get back to numbers shall we, and some hard data:

http://corporate.ryanair.com/about-us/fact-and-figures/

Not the only ones...my son flew to Istanbul last year from Heathrow...some BA diversions from Gatwick which didn't effect his flight. At the last minute they allocated the aircraft and crew to another service with the result that he and his family had a total of eight hours before they eventually left. Refused compensation as outside of BA control..not.

. . . and there you have it. Shit happens.

Energy providers raise cost of electricity to households. Insurance providers raise cost of car insurance. Credit monitor provider (Equifax) gets hacked, your PII is now at risk.

Shit just happens. First world problems. People need a sense of perspective and get over it.

3 wheels (9 posts) 100% affected? If you had brains you'd be dangerous. I have 11 flights with FR over the next 3 weeks none cancelled.

Ryanair cancellations
 

Mrs and myself planning DUB to AGP in November.
Because of the present Ryanair pilot holiday problems our choice is now down to one airline i.e. Aer Lingus - unless of course they run into a similar Pilots 'holiday' problem!
Anyone know if Aer Lingus operate their Pilot holidays programme using the calendar year?

What goes around, comes around. This issue has been brewing for at least 15 years. MOL has reaped what he has sown - this issue is far more than pilots' annual leave naturally.

Sooner or later employees will take no more and vote with their feet - which has been going on to some extent for a long time now.

I've never spoken to anyone with a good opinion of Ryanair. Nothing about their organisation, from the comments made to me, puts them in contention for an 'Investor in People' type award.

Don't be too confident that Ryanair is exempt from it's own self-destruction - this is a PR nightmare and the pilot shortage within the company a potentially insoluble problem.

Pilots are not made overnight and simulator capacity cannot be increased at a whim. Someone mentioned on LinkedIn a few days ago that airline flying is not as attractive as a career option anymore - thanks in no small part to people like MOL, a lack of sponsorship (investment in people) generally and an expensive no-other-option training route to a fATPL/MPL.

I'm sorry for the passengers of course, but I for one would be pleased to see Ryanair and their attitudes to the public and staff crash and burn in a metaphorical sense.

EU261/2004
 

O’Leary said consequential losses, caused when travellers cancel hire cars or hotels, will not be covered by Ryanair. He added that the airline will not book passengers on to rival airlines to get them to their destination on time.

“We will not pay for flights on other airlines,” he said. “We cannot afford to pay the high costs of our competitors.”

From The Guardian (London) today.

The first part is I think down to the carrier's T&C but I would suggest that this final part of the statement is outwith the spirit of EU261.

Is it outwith the letter?

If yes, will Herr Schulz's successor and/ or M Jean-Claud be taking an interest; always supposing the latter is in a state to so do.

Perhaps if you thought about it you would realise that out in the real world the vast majority of people booked on Ryanair in the next couple of months will be fretting about whether their flight will happen. Although only 2% (on Ryanair's figures) will end up being affected, the impact will be much wider. I would expect a number will look to rebook on another airline if they have the choice, rather than chance their flight being added to the cancelled list late in the day. There will also be a fair number who would have booked to travel at fairly short notice who will not do that on Ryanair now.

I have 8 flights with FR over the next six weeks, none cancelled.

Yet.......

I agree with your comment regarding commercial airline pilot as an occupation is no longer seen as an attractive career. Doing the maths, time taken to achieve min. Requirements plus work life balance / family friendly,etc. and cost to recoup your education investment means its not as attractive now. Plenty of other career routes out their with much higher attractive factors on many levels.

However, there will always remain a cohort of wannabes focused on getting into the right seat and jet time. Likes of Ryanair offers that basic hours building to help pilots look at opportunity with longhaul fleets elsewhere. For some, there will always be ambition of a right seat or PIC on the 380 or Dreamliner.

That's not altogether surprising.

There's an 85% probability that eight flights, each with a 2% chance of cancellation, are all going to fly.

It will be interesting to see how this fiasco affects those numbers. There are a lot of very annoyed people! It's also way above 2% of flights cancelled - more than 80 a day, not the 40-50 stated.

Passengers will soon forget about this episode and take a chance and book with Ryanair again and and again.

Was planning to fly to Limoges next August and hire a car. Now I'll drive all the way. I won't forget. There's enough growth out there for FR to brush this aside eventually, but it will have an effect.

Of course they will. Customers are fickle minded on many consumer characteristics, not exclusively reserved to the airlines. Did Volkswagen see diesel car sales fall off that metaphorical cliff. Did the European high street banks implode following their predatory and irresponsible mortgage lending strategies that lead to the 2008 meltdown.
The consumer carries on.

Ryanair is extremely cash rich with high cash liquidity ratios. It is a powerful business operation and this latest challenge is an unfortunate event but one it will survive and continue growing. It's business model (whilst not for everyone) consistently delivers shareholder investment value and a major employer across Europe. That is the bigger picture.

MOL was upfront, said it as it is, facts and figures, the guy knows his numbers well, very well. The rostering dept on the other hand, well let's just say I would not like to be the leadership of that function, such basic ops stuff to get wrong.

Ezy or ls out of belfast, no delays or that type of shit happening up here

Rostering dept nothing to do with 140 transfers to d8

Economics101
There will not be any. The factors in FRs favour are already noted:

• They are RICH.
• Pax are POOR.
• They have a PR machine that runs smoother than a Rolls-Royce.
• Some Pax wannabe Pilots.

mik3bravo
Absolutely. Even if the 2% number is not accurate, they will keep spouting it. And, given that BA has buried the reason for their massive systems failure a few months ago, they can claim to be 'open'.

Self-evidently not true after this cock up.......

Just wait until a few months have elapsed. They will continue to smooth this, even as the real reason continues to leak out.
Again, compare their PR with BA's.

And I’ve no doubt it will be. And no, this isn’t the end for Ryanair. And yes, people will still book with them.

But I do wonder if this is a bit of a watershed moment for them. They’ve been shown to be vulnerable and to have issues with staff retention and internal processes.

They've had issues with staff retention for years, especially cabin crew. It's now come to a head, and the pilots are in a stronger position than they were because they are fighting for them

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/201...us-for-pilots/

Nice money, if you can get it.

Plenty of strings attached if you read the whole article. Too easy for them to worm out of paying it.

I find it astonishing that they feel able to cancel 25% of their Stansted flights over the six week period. Since they are so dominant there, there's (almost) no-one to fear.

FR are cancelling 7-10 departures per day from Stn in the period from 25Sep , this is no where near 25% of operation.

It involves the equivalent of 2 out of 41 STn based a/c though some of the cancelled flights are operated by overseas based aircraft.

It looks more like 7-8% of STN operation.

Not paying someone for 12 months, and then not at all if they have left in the meantime, would appear to breach minimum pay legislation, in the UK at least (possibly also in Ireland and other EU countries).

Saying they will not be paid the amount due if they have more than 4 days sick in the intervening 12 months would act as an incentive to wish to work when unwell, which should surely attract the attention of even such a toothless regulator as the Irish CAA.

Interesting BBC take on the situation, at last now questioning the Ryanair official line

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41319482

Did this press conference happen?

Slow day at the Beeb and amateur so called journalism. If they bothered to rewind yesterday's VT of the MOL press conference they will have fact based data on crew availability per airframe. Stupidity of the BBC. MOL would not be stating the numbers and facts yesterday for the fun of it. It was aimed at aviation regulators attention to detail and the Ryanair institutional investors and it's own employee's.

Yes, Burgas 1 aircraft base confirmed with 10 routes.

Nothing on the Ryanair website for the moment.

Thanks for the info!

"April to June adjusted operating profit before leasing and depreciation (EBITDAR) fell to 1.19 billion crowns (€125.8 million), down 21 per cent year-on-year and below analysts’ forecast in a Reuters poll of 1.51 billion crowns. Norwegian Air’s operating result swung to a loss of 863 million crowns from a year-ago profit of 1 billion, while analysts had expected a loss of 246 million."

Not everyone you lose is a loss.

Bulgaria New Routes
 

Burgas:
Bratislava (2)
Dusseldorf Weeze (2)
Frankfurt-Hahn (2)
Krakow (2)
Memmingen (2)
Milan Bergamo (2)
Riga (2)
Rzeszow (1)
Tel Aviv (2)
Warsaw Modlin (2)

Sofia:
Paphas (3)

Plovdiv:
Brussels Charleroi (2)
Frankfurt-Hahn (2)
Milan Bergamo (2)

Vana:
Brussels Charleroi (2)

The Bulgarian press release is now here:

RYANAIR ????????? ???????????? 100 ???. ?????? ? ???????? ? ???? ???????? ???? (? 87) 1 ??????? ???????, 10 ???????? ? 250 000 ??????? ??????? ? ???????? ?? ???????? ?????????? ?? ???? 2018 | Ryanair's Corporate Website

The big question is what they plan to do with the aircraft in winter.

EU-free airline company?
 

That would seem to be the case given that the BBC has just reported that Ryanair's offer to rebook passengers on alternative flights is contingent on their being willing to pay the difference when the replacement flight is more expensive in clear contradiction of EU261/2004.

An error by the BBC? Far from impossible !


A clear indication that Ryanair is an EU-free airline? Far from....

Would a Plovdiv base in the winter make sense, to tie in with ski season?

At least BA wet leased a bunch of Qatar A320's when BA had staffing issues (strikes). I wonder did Ryanair even explore this option? The 8 Qatar A321's would have worked great, and Qatar still have not resumed the dozens of daily short-haul flights it was forced to suspend earlier this year.

The underlying thought seems to be that cancelling the published number of flights and the slow winter schedule will somehow, at a stroke, solve their pilot shortage for next year. I am very sceptical about that. Next summer is not far away and the bums on seats that matter are in 1A & 1F.