I understand why they can't announce the 6 weeks worth of cancelled flights at once (and therefore have up to 400,000 people phone them at the same time), and I understand that they can't do it too far in advance as they will be making desperate phone calls and this is probably an excellent and remunerative time to be a 737 pilot, ...

But the drip feed in this way, and flying people out without them knowing if they will be flying back, is the most damaging way to do this possible. Couldn't they find a happy medium by saying that they're cancelling the following flights for the next three days + the following flights to X destination for the next 6 weeks?

Spotter alert :8

According to the excellent Puget Sound blog, there is only one more 737 that has flown which is waiting to be delivered . It's EI-FZZ which made its first flight on 11th September and was flown to Spokane for painting and is still there.

http://boeing-test-flights.********....st-flight.html

Don't know abut any future orders, but EI-FZY and EI-GDC have both been delivered to DUB in the last two weeks and are in service.

Spotter alert OFF :ok:

EI-GDA and EI-GDB are both due this month, plus five in October and another five in November.

Time will tell whether they show up on schedule.

Ryanair Cancels Flights - Hitler parody
 

Make sure that 'subtitles' is switched on (control located on lower right side of video):

Hitler finds out Ryanair is cancelling flights - Caption Generator

That is the best I've seen!

The problem with not publishing a list of all cancelled flights is people looking to book will not book and this will probably hurt Ryanair much longer than the 6 weeks this is the time people are looking to book summer 2018 holidays and much closer to home is the Christmas get away this news about Ryanair has spread world wide and is only going to spread on social media as more and more people get affected we are on day 2 and Facebook and Twitter is full of horror stories the last one I read was a family of four yesterday rejected from the security area in Alicante as their flight was cancelled (no email or text regarding the cancelled flight home) staff at the Ryanair desk could only offer a flight in one weeks time to an alternative UK airport.

I just can't see many people booking any flight with Ryanair until the 6 weeks are over and things are back to normal even then if I was going to book with Ryanair I certainly would not book anything to the new year at least

Just how much is this going to cost Ryanair in refunds EU compensation and lost bookings due uncertainty I'm not saying people will never fly with them again once the £4.99 seat sales pop up but already I would imagine booking for the next 6 weeks must be down dramatically.

Ryanair cancellations.
 

The EU flight compensation of eu250 ,is only applicable if the cancellation is advised within 14 days of departure, so I would expect Ryanair will be doing all possible to advise passengers travelling in Oct as soon as possible to avoid incurring liability.

The fact that these September cancellations are being advised so close to departure ,suggests the resource shortages have only been identified as critical very recently i.e within the last few days ,otherwise I'm sure they would have adised Sep canx at least 14 days in advance,even if on a rolling basis , to avoid this element of liability.

Still doesn't explain why they don't subcharter in, which is what other carriers would do in this situation, and in fact Ryanair has done plenty of this in the past. The Lithuanian/Baltic contract operators always have spare capacity, and the peak holiday season has passed.

I presume they wouldn't be daft enough to do this if anyone at all has any spare capacity, and that their bar is going to be set somewhere roughly equivalent to the EU's no fly list?

I am pretty sure that it is possible to find 400*2%=8 planes for wet lease in October. That is not August.

But the crew shortages are across all bases, so it wouldn't solve anything. You can't split 8 aircraft between 80 bases, whenever they're needed.

And this is why they can't tell the public which flights are going to be cancelled, as they simply don't know which crews are going to go out of hours and when.

Many of their bases are not too far from each other and crew could commute. And I am sure for paltry couple hundred thousands euros some IT shop could count and optimize it all within few days.

That assumes that they only needed 10ish (the cancellations so far have actually been more than the 2% they said) in the first place. Maybe they actually needed 18 and are already using the 8 they could find?

I'd like to hope that apart from reducing the levels of customer contact to something closer to what they can cope with, one of the reasons for not giving advance notice is that they're trying to beg / borrow / steal as many crew / wet leases as they can?

Now they are working to the new rules ,they should be able to calculate which pilots are in danger of breaching the annual 900 hours cap fairly easily.

So I would surprised if they don't identify Oct cancellations within the next few days.

The canx they have published up to 20Sep are not spread across 80 bases.

I don't understand why you've bought their story about 'new rules'. This is nothing to do with 'rules', they don't have enough pilots. Period. They don't know which flights are going to be cancelled, because they don't know who is going to call sick, who is going to go out of hours because of a delay, who is, god forbid, going to call fatigued, who is going to fail their command check.

Simple fact is, they have nobody on standby. Anybody on standby is only there because they don't have enough hours to be of any use during their five days on. So no, don't expect them to identify their October cancellations in the next few days, and don't expect them to Wet lease aircraft that will sit idle in Stansted whilst a flight from Bari is cancelled.

If you know there is a resource shortfall , you need to remove a sufficient number of flights to protect the rest of the flying programme.

You decide which flights to cancel and create a pool of pilots who can be assigned as and when required.

It would be nonsense to wait until there is a problem with a specific pilot
and then cancel the flight they happened to be rostered on, otherwise you could end up cancelling a service 100% full and operating one only 50% full.Or operating a flight to somewhere easily accessible by other means like Beauvais and cancelling a flight to Tenerife.

You manage the resource you have to operate the flights you want to operate.

There is a big incentive for Ryanair to get the cancelled flights published asap,it will save on compensation and in addition people will be very reluctant to make a new booking on Ryanair up to end of Oct while there is a possibility the flight
may be cancelled.

Another corker for my list of Oxymorons:

• Military intelligence
• Business ethics
• easily accessible by other means like Beauvais

Nice one Big Frank........have you ever been in the Irish bar at Beauvais Airport on a Friday night? Truly wonderful.....

I also would have liked to have been at the meeting when this was first raised to MOL as an operational issue .....

FY:AGM it's not just the flights that are up the creek..
 

Due on Thurs 21st September.

http://investor.ryanair.com/agm-2017/

Though obviously the effect may be different when you click here later.

Assuming that the cancelled flights amount to about 2% of all seats, the effect of reduced bookings for the remaining 98% of flights (over six weeks) could well outweigh the direct compensation costs to those whose flights have been cancelled. And this ignores any further long-term reputational damage.

You don’t have to be a business genius to figure this out.

Would it make sense for Ryan air create some space for itself and minimise the effect on bookings by announcing now which flights will be cancelled over the next 6 weeks and guaranteeing the rest? To ensure the guarantee it might be necessary to cancel 3 or 4% of flights to free up more standby crew. I’ve just been listening to a discussion about Aer Lingus, who used to have frequent threatened strikes. Even though these hardly ever materialised, apparently the effect on bookings was immediate and very significant.