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Michael O'Leary talking about pilots

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Old 26th Jan 2012, 00:11
  #81 (permalink)  
 
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After a few snorts, not relevent at all, something has struck me.

ln the early days of easyjet The Head Waiter kept a board upon

which he pinned the left over ties of job applicants after he`d used

scissors to cut them off.

Emasculation ? He started it. MOL just picked it up and ran.
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Old 26th Jan 2012, 05:38
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Ryanair is a cockroach.
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Old 26th Jan 2012, 08:22
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" At no point have I voted or agreed to anything with an Employee Representative Committee. All I have done is signed the contract I have been presented with when forced to change base for upgrades etc."

Oh come on, did you really expect the kid glove treatment. Joining FR is like signing a contract written on toilet paper, at least there is use for toilet paper if the contract turns out to be fresh air.

If you read my post I said you should join FR with your eyes open as it is obvious what is going to happen. Obviously you went in blinkered by shiny jet syndrome. You made an informed choice, deal with it, just stop whining please. Tin helmet and flack jacket on :-D
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Old 26th Jan 2012, 11:42
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I doubt he would be fully configured by the 500 landing gate doing 500 MPH
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Old 26th Jan 2012, 12:17
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1000' shirley ? as MOL said "in fog", or we just pretend it is 500' because OFDM can't detect cloud
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Old 28th Jan 2012, 08:24
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Oh my God, Delusion!!!!

From the Irish Times

Where do we even start! Talk about people living in Ivory Towers and not seeing reality. Every employee and passenger who reads this can see the disconnect between Ryanair management and reality. No wonder Easy are posting record profits, the competition isn't up to much!!!! Get them out!

Society » News Features »


INSIDE STORYBetween the bad coffee, anti-trade union stance and not so much as a mobile phone charger on offer, life at Ryanair HQ may not seem like a barrel of laughs but, as staff member after staff member tells CONOR POPE*, 75 million passengers can’t be wrong – unless, that is, they’re calling customer service

RYANAIR’S HEADQUARTERS in the shadow of Dublin Airport’s still sparkling Terminal Two is like a well run cult, and there’s no doubting who the leader is. Although Michael O’Leary is nowhere to be seen on this visit to his grey, unimposing and decidedly surprisingly small base, he is everywhere. He is there in the words and mannerisms of his senior staff, who dress down and drop casual insults about rivals into their conversations, and his stamp is evident on the large stapled-together poster in the staff room that exhorts employees to “SELL SELL SELL!!!”

The cabin crews’ target this week is to get passengers to spend €2 but, with the average spend currently just €1.54, they are under pressure. As the afternoon shift starts and blue-clad crews quietly file in to download and print their flight details from the company’s intranet, senior staff push them to sell more. Hampers, provided by suppliers at no cost to Ryanair, are promised to the month’s best performers.

The staff room doubles as a canteen. It is a miserable place. A wall-mounted TV blasts out spirit-crushing scenes from various Ryanair staff parties – again, paid for by suppliers – with nothing more nourishing than vending machine coffee and bars of chocolate available for the pilots, cabin crew, engineers and administrative staff who work at the heart of one of the biggest and most successful airlines in the world.

Bad coffee aside, Ryanair’s story is remarkable. Set up in 1985 by Tony Ryan, the airline’s first route ferried very small numbers from Waterford to London Gatwick. A year later, it started flying from Dublin to London with its Ir£99 return less than half the lowest ticket price offered by British Airways and Aer Lingus, which had monopolised the route.

Passenger numbers grew, as did the airline, but before Ryanair’s third birthday, it had accumulated losses of Ir£20 million. Then a junior executive named Michael O’Leary visited Southwest Airlines, the US low-fares carrier, and the game changed forever. Having witnessed first-hand the airline revolution sweeping across the American Bible Belt, O’Leary came home and, with evangelical zeal, set about resurrecting Ryanair.

For more than 15 years, the airline has relentlessly driven down fares across Europe as it fought countless battles for passengers and control of airports. And the war is nearly won. Ryanair employs more than 8,000 people and operates more than 1,600 flights a day from 47 bases across 27 countries, with a fleet of 250 Boeing 737-800s. Based on passenger numbers, it is the biggest international airline in the world.

Despite the part it has played in opening up our skies, Ryanair remains the airline everyone loves to hate. It is also the airline that seems to hate everyone. There are few spared the wrath of O’Leary. Governments (“numpties”), airport authorities (“overcharging rapists”), other airlines (“expensive bastards”), air traffic controllers (“poxy”) the European Commission (“morons”), Brussels (“the evil empire”) environmentalists (“lemmings”), travel agents (“f***ers”) have all been damned. Even this writer has incurred Ryanair’s considerable ire more than once for having the temerity to suggest its customer service may, at times, be less than brilliant.

That’s all water under the bridge now, however, and while O’Leary may not exactly be greeting us with open arms – or indeed at all – at least he’s not calling security.

FIRST UP IS the 9am conference call involving HQ and every airport Ryanair flies from. Today, there are 44 people on the call and each one has to detail how their staff got on handling this morning’s first wave of flights. It’s like a less glitzy version of Eurovision voting: “Good morning from Bergamo . . . This is Malaga calling . . . Calgari, you are online . . . Hello Dublin.” Every senior executive, including O’Leary, is rostered to host these calls regularly, so there is nowhere to hide for those who make mistakes.

Like sullen teenagers producing their homework for a scary teacher, airport staff must say how many planes departed; how many, if any, left late, how late and why; how many bags did not make it on to the planes, how many passengers were charged after failing to check in online, and how many bags were deemed too big for the cabin and checked in at a penal cost to passengers.

It sounds like O’Leary micro-management gone mad but, like so much Ryanair does, this call has monetary value. “The data about the short-shipped bags is effectively useless, but we want to make the point to the airports every day that we care about the bags,” says director of ground operations David O’Brien. Ryanair cares so much because losing bags costs money. And Ryanair hates losing money. It has a very good record when it comes to lost baggage (I once said it had “quite a good record”, which prompted the airline to send a furious letter objecting to the use of the word “quite”).

Ryanair misplaces 0.25 bags per 1,000 passengers. “The most recent British Airways figure was 16. If we underperformed at that level we would need to ship one million extra bags by taxi each year,” says O’Brien. He has been a Ryanair employee since 1992 and is a mini-Michael. While discussing Ryanair’s training centre at East Midlands airport, which has four flight simulators worth €10 million each, he says, almost without thinking, that they “are probably worth more that the whole Aer Arann fleet”.

This needless aggression aimed at rivals percolates through Ryanair like bitter coffee and is at least partially responsible for the low regard many have for it. Former Aer Lingus chief executive Willie Walsh once characterised Ryanair as “cranky, basic, unapologetic and tolerable” and claimed that while Aer Lingus was “cheap and cheerful”, Ryanair was “cheap and nasty”.

When asked why Ryanair has such a bad reputation, O’Brien points to its 75 million passengers as evidence to the contrary. “It is very easy to indulge a late-arriving passenger at a gate but, if you do that, you are delaying 180 other people and we will not do that,” he says. “Of course, people get pissed off but only when they are surprised. We want to be clear to people, that is not the same as being rude.”

Next door to O’Brien’s office is the operations room, which has space for 10 people. Everyone’s staring at computer screens filled with incomprehensible data. A red tab flickers on one screen, indicating a Polish-bound flight can’t land because of snow. The woman responsible for diversions makes contact with the man responsible for organising coaches who, luckily, is sitting two feet away, while the person who will have to make alternative rostering arrangements sits beside him. It is very cosy.

Hangar Two, where Ryanair’s planes are serviced, is not cosy. It is massive. Christy Duffy, who has been promoted through the ranks to aircraft maintenance manager, has an easy manner but is fiercely loyal to his employer. And very conscientious.

“There are certain things you can cut back on, but you can’t cut back on maintenance,” he says. Planes are rigorously checked after 700 hours flying time and crews work night and day running through various checklists.

Fearing the worst does not keep O’Brien awake at night. “I have confidence in our systems, but that is not complacency,” he says. He knows that Ryanair, given its reputation, has more to lose than most airlines if something goes wrong. “If there is an accident, then people will say, ‘I told you so’, despite our safety record over many years.”

The (entirely wrong) idea that Ryanair cuts corners when it comes to safety is fed by misleading media reports. Late last year, a picture of crew applying tape to a window in a 737 cockpit appeared in newspapers and made it look as if the airline was holding planes together with sticky tape. The truth is that, when a window is bolted into place, a sealant is applied and covered in tape as it dries – a fact that got lost in the blizzard of headlines.

O’Leary is always apoplectic when he reads such stories, but he sometimes has only himself to blame for negative press. Last week on The Late Late Show, he won himself few friends by saying the “customer is nearly always wrong”.

Despite O’Leary’s showboating and endless rudeness towards those who choose to spend money with his company, Ryanair invests considerably in customer care.

THE CENTRE OF operations is located a short drive away from HQ and is headed by Caroline Green. These are good days for her. In December, only 23 Ryanair flights were cancelled – compared with 2,500 in December of 2010. During the ash crisis, Green’s office handled 60,000 calls, emails, faxes and letters every day. Today, there will be fewer than 1,000.

Saying you’re the head of Ryanair’s customer service must be a conversation starter? “I try not to say where I work,” she says, ruefully – she can do without the grief. When asked why people hate Ryanair, she denies it, although not very convincingly. “They don’t hate us. They love us. We are great,” she says, although she accepts that O’Leary “antagonises people”.

She says his bullish media persona can make her life harder. “He has his own agenda . . . What can I say? I think we could do better because people’s perception of us is less than it should be. There is so much that is good about this airline. My main objective is to keep Ryanair out of the papers and keep people from going to the press. Michael is Michael and he has a lot more positives than negatives.”

The ash crisis taught Ryanair a lot, says Green, and it is now better equipped to deal with a crisis. “We are automating things. Letters for insurance claims, for instance, can be done online now. There are areas when airlines get it wrong, but we have done a lot to make things better.”

The calls coming in suggest that O’Leary’s claim that the customer is nearly always wrong is right. Staff are on their best behaviour, possibly because we are listening, but the callers are not. They are cross and grumpy.

One irate man complains that he never got his confirmation email for a flight due to depart days from now. This Vilnius caller is building up a head of outraged steam until it emerges that no confirmation mail was sent because his credit card was declined – a fact that would have been relayed to him via a pop-up window. As a result, the booking was never completed. Sheepishly, he hangs up. Another caller, from Scotland, also complains that he never got his details. Again, it’s not the airline’s fault. The wrong email address was submitted. The problem is resolved efficiently and quickly.

Eddie Wilson is an unusual human resources director, not least because he is responsible for the on-time jingles on every on-time flight – after pleas from staff he recently agreed to drop the wild applause that used to follow the jingle.

Like O’Leary and O’Brien, Wilson is loathe to accept Ryanair does anything wrong, ever. “We court publicity and are always going to get some reaction to that, but based on some of the headlines you’d swear you worked for the Taliban,” he says. He agrees that Ryanair is tough, but says it has to be to survive. “Most companies that are soft and spend their time explaining can’t deliver. This idea that people don’t like us is not borne out by the facts.”

The “75 million passengers” line comes up again. Everyone is on-message at Ryanair HQ.

Wilson says staff are treated well and paid fairly. “Our wages have to be high enough to attract people. There are no salary scales that you see in legacy airlines, so we don’t automatically pay someone who has been here for 25 years more than someone who has been here for two years – and we make no apologies for that.”

But what is a fair wage? According to the Ryanair website, new crew earn between €1,100 and €1,400 a month after tax – not much more than minimum wage – have “great promotional opportunities” and could earn more than €30,000 gross after the first year. Hardly a king’s ransom, but given the company’s virulently anti-trade union stance, there is little room for negotiation.

Unions have described Ryanair as “extremely hostile to the workforce” and said it is “a very, very oppressive regime”. While they are undoubtedly working to their own agenda, it is hard to imagine a wonderful working atmosphere where an employer forbids its staff to go online onsite or even to charge their mobiles on the premises, and thinks it is acceptable to bill new recruits for their own uniforms.

Wilson is having none of it. The way he looks at it, everything is fine. Better than fine. It’s a great place to work. He makes no apologies for the airline’s position on union recognition. “Unions tried to close down this airline – don’t forget that. We are in western Europe, not deepest USSR, so you have to treat people right.”
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Old 30th Jan 2012, 21:53
  #87 (permalink)  
 
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Angel Micko! Have a look out your office window

Its going to be a bitter pill to swallow MOL, and from July onwards.....
your "ex glorified bus drivers" as you call them, are back much sooner than you think !!, buzzing Ryanair Headquarters daily with a brand new shinny B777-300ER.

Emirates to roll out larger aircraft on Dublin-Dubai route · Business ETC

Interesting times Ahead
B737-NG to B777, daily flights to Dublin... hmm interesting,
Typing CV as we speak
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Old 31st Jan 2012, 07:07
  #88 (permalink)  
 
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Danger b17c#1n9

personally, i think all of you that are blaming this guy for being an a.hole are a bunch of ungrateful sons.
this guy has a great concept. he doesnt tolerate fancy stuff, he wants you to work. in return you get some kind of security. it's not like most of you pilots working for ryr have any other choice. especially not in europe. be grateful. respect the concept. work hard save some money, build your hours. when you're ready, say thank you and leave.
joining the unions are just gonna ruin your airline. and thats a fact.
and at the end of the day, you loose your job, the customer loose it's cheap-ticketed airline and you're working in the supermarkt.

this guy gave all of you an opportunity to "work", an opportunity to fly the worlds best (selling) airliner. an opportunity to realize your dream. you make a decent salary.
work hard and leave your complaining to some school kid crying about homework.

i wish you all good luck in hard times there at ryr, for what it's worth.. life is hard in every other industry sector. be nice to ur wives and kids and please don't accidentally slip and fall in the life rafts.
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Old 31st Jan 2012, 08:53
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Nice bait there KingChango.........I'm sure you will have a few bites on that chunk of wisdom
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Old 31st Jan 2012, 11:50
  #90 (permalink)  
 
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KingChango
I had to fight the urge to respond to your breath takingly ignorant post, however ultimately as you can see I gave in because I think you views are actually seriously held ones.

Firstly your comment
"he doesnt tolerate fancy stuff, he wants you to work. in return you get some kind of security"
There is no Job security in Ryanair the majority of pilots in Ryanair are contracters firstly because Ryanair don't have to pay PRSI and secondly because they can terminate contracts on a whim.
Ask the 15 contracters who where sacked last September because the company thought that we should be shown who is the boss! god forbid we as professionals should have a say in our working enviroment.

There has been countless numbers of permanent pilots who have been sacked by Ryanair as well Cpt M D, Cpt J G, Cpt A, the list is endless.

People who don't know what the working enviroment is like in Ryanair are shocked when they realise the atmosphere of Fear in which its employees work. I have never seen anything like it and I have in worked in plenty's a place to judge.

joining the unions are just gonna ruin your airline. and thats a fact.
Bolderdash, BA, Aer Lingus, Easy Jet, Air France, Jet 2, the list is endless.
There is no other profession where union's or collective representation is more needed. Evidence of this can been seen in Ryanair's example of the Brookfield pilots working for Ryanair being called for meetings as they have had less than 4 days of sickness in a year. This is a serious safety issue as we have seen more than a few Captains in Ryanair becoming incapacitated on difficult approaches or flights due to sickness or stress! Ask yourself why these pilots felt the pressure to fly?

All we are looking for is collectively someone to represent us! to organise our labour.
This is not only our civil rights but our human rights, without these rights working people would end up being slaves and MOL would be the first one to do away with wages if he could.
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Old 5th Feb 2012, 10:24
  #91 (permalink)  
 
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Haha just after the 31 minute mark, Ryan Turbidy thinks aircraft fly at 500,000ft hahaha
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Old 5th Feb 2012, 16:44
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Guys,

Lets just close or ignore this thread. O'Leary and his cronies are thieving, bullying, b#@!?@#s . Whatever crap passes his lips is either to agitate his staff, competitors or business 'partners'. Nothing positive can come of discussing this any further. Instead, join REPA and an appropriate ECA member. If you're not in FR, then just support us all in our endevours, as otherwise, all the crap will filter down and affect you all somewhere down the line.

MOL and his cronies will get their come uppance at some point, of that I have absolutely NO DOUBT.

For now....safe & happy flying!

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Old 6th Feb 2012, 21:21
  #93 (permalink)  
 
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I agree this thread is a pointless discussion that will only massage this idiots ego. Join Ialpa/Balpa, sign the commitment to unity letter and let's make this year one that makes a difference to t&c's of all airline pilots in Europe not just FR.
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Old 6th Feb 2012, 22:08
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Slightly off topic..........There are a lot of people in Ireland ( where I live) believe we would do well to have MOL negotiate in Europe at a political level for the Irish people. The mind boggles at the thought of that scenario playing out in reality.
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Old 6th Feb 2012, 22:11
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Thank god for democracy!
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Old 7th Feb 2012, 02:11
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I don't know why anyone would want to work for a company with such a to**er in charge who possesses such a flagrant disregard for one of the most important elements of the work force.

If pilots are glorified bus drivers then get the pr at to put one of his 737s down on a contaminated runway with a max crosswind and see how he gets on.

I've thought for years that Ryanair have a hull loss coming at some point. All credit to the pilots for keeping the show on the road. Hell will freeze over first and I'd rather flip burgers in McDonalds than work for a such a jerk....
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