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Dear Mr Kilduff,
I acknowledge receipt of your letter.
I apologise for any inconvenience caused by not being able to sit in certain rows on your flight with us.
Whilst we do operate a free seating policy, on recommendation from the manufacturers Boeing, we are advised when an aircraft is not filled to a certain capacity it is necessary to cordon off three rows of seats. This is for weight and balance purposes.
Once again I apologise for any inconvenience caused and hope that the above is sufficient information.
Yours sincerely
For and on Behalf of RUINAIR LIMITED
More bolloxology. And here’s why. A few months later I read in the newspaper of a former Ruinair cabin crew member sacked for allegedly falling asleep on the job who was ‘delighted’ that a tribunal has found she was unfairly dismissed. One Ms Vanessa Redmond was fired after a passenger complained she had blocked off rows of seats and fallen asleep while reading a novel on a Dublin to Durham flight. The passenger, who was married to a Ruinair manager, said he believed he saw Ms Redmond fall asleep. Ms Redmond denied all the charges apart from blocking off a row of seats, which her Ruinair colleagues testified was common practice because they didn’t want passengers ‘in their faces’. Balance, me arse.
How to Build Your Own Five Billion Euro Airline (#ulink_0f17b0d5-cf4d-58e0-968a-e76778cb5b79)
1985
Incorporate your new airline in the Republic of Ireland on 28 November with £1 of share capital ‘to carry on the business of general carriers and forwarding agents and to use machines of all kinds capable of being flown in the air,’ as if there’s much choice other than using aircraft. Seriously consider calling your airline Trans Tipperary Air but then decide to name it after yourself. You know that one in ten new airlines succeed.
The late Tony Ruin was born in Thurles in 1936, worked as a clerk with Aer Lingus in Shannon, ran the Aer Lingus operation in New York’s JFK, dabbled in aircraft leasing and set up Guinness Peat Aviation with Aer Lingus and a City of London bank, hanging on to a 10 per cent personal stake in a fledgling enterprise ultimately worth millions years later. Tony once told a senior manager, ‘The world is made up of fuckers and fuckees and in our relationship, you are my fuckee.’ On an Aer Lingus flight from London to Dublin Tony once encountered a senior Aer Lingus executive who publicly ridiculed him for flying on his arch rival, to which Tony replied: ‘I had to fly on your airline—all our Ruinair flights are full today.’ Tony once admitted to being happiest when stepping either on or off an airplane, much like myself.
Start your airline by flying from Waterford to London Gatwick, Waterford being ninety miles from Dublin and shortly to be renamed Dublin South International. Use a single turbo-prop fifteen-seater Bandeirante aircraft which today would not hold all your management team. Hire only cabin crew smaller than 5 foot 2 inches to operate in the tiny cabin. Employ 51 people and fly 5,000 passengers between Britain and Ireland.
1986
Launch a second route: Dublin to London Lootin’. Charge £99 for a flight (which seems steep now but was half the price charged by the two flag carriers). Run press advertising campaigns which ask ‘Do you want to pay £100 for breakfast?’ Use two 46-seater BAE-748 aircraft. Launch a Knock to Lootin’ route, Knock being a village in the west of Ireland where the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared and granted favours, much like the Holy Stone of Clonrickett as seen in Father Ted. Employ 151 people and fly 82,000 passengers.
1987
Lease three bac1-11 aircraft from Tarom, the Romanian state airline. The planes come with Romanian pilots and crew, making for challenging cabin announcements. Increase the number of routes to fifteen, all between Ireland and the uk. Lose £3 million. Employ 212 people and fly 322,000 passengers.
1988
Lease three more aircraft from Tarom, making six in all. Launch the first routes to Europe: Dublin to Brussels (not Charleroi) and Munich (not Friedrichshafen). Launch a business class service and a frequent flyer club, neither of which endure. Incur more losses. All is gloom and doom. Employ 379 people and fly 592,000 passengers. Appoint an assistant to Mr Ruin called Mick O’Leery: born 20 March 1961, son of Timothy and Gerarda originally from Co. Cork, the eldest boy of six children, educated at St Mary’s national school and the Christian Bothers in Mullingar, and Clongowes Wood College in Co. Kildare, a graduate of Economics & Social Studies from Trinity College Dublin and formerly a trainee tax accountant for eighteen months with KPMG Stokes Kennedy Crowley Dublin (where he assisted Mr Ruin with his tax affairs) and a successful former owner of three corner newsagent shops in Walkinstown, Terenure and Crumlin.
1989
Lose more money hand over fist. Employ 477 people and fly 644,000 passengers. The new guy called Mick tells you to shut down the airline due to the huge and accumulating losses, his first and only mistake.
1990
Realise you have lost £20 million due to intense competition from BA and Aer Lingus. Tell the government you are going to shut down and will lay off the workforce unless you get rights to fly to London’s newest out of town airport, Stansted. Invest £20 million additional cash when no one believes your airline can fly. Send the chap called Mick to Southwest Airlines in Texas, USA: a low fares airline flying only one type of plane to out of the way airports with quick turnaround times and high flight frequency and where passengers find their own seats on board and pay for drinks and food. Allow Mick to nick all Southwest’s best ideas as he returns to Dublin to implement a new and identical business model. Employ 493 staff and fly 745,000 passengers.
1991
Commence Dublin to Stansted flights. The Gulf War causes traffic to plummet as passengers prefer to stay at home and watch tanks guarding Heathrow on their TV. Move your main UK base from Lootin’ to Stansted. Watch Dan Air go bust. Agree with Mick privately that he will be paid 25 per cent of the annual profits of the airline in excess of £2 million. Employ 477 staff and fly 651,000 passengers, the only year of such a decrease, but for the first time ever make an annual profit of a mere £293,000.
1992
Reduce routes from nineteen to six between Ireland and the UK. Employ 507 staff and fly 945,000 passengers.
1993
Buy six second-hand Boeing 737s from Britannia. Employ 503 staff and fly 1,120,000 passengers.
1994
Appoint Mick as Chief Executive Officer. Chuck out the old BAC planes and use only Boeing 737s. Employ 523 staff and fly 1,666,000 passengers.
1995
Overtake BA and Aer Lingus to become the biggest passenger carrier on the Dublin to London route, the busiest international air route in Europe, largely due to the water, making train travel difficult and driving even more hazardous. Open your first UK domestic route, flying from Stansted to Glasgow Prestwick. Celebrate your tenth anniversary in business. Buy four Boeings from Dutch airline Transavia bringing the fleet size to eleven 737s. Employ 523 staff and fly 2,260,000 passengers.
1996
Open new routes to Leeds, Bradford, Cardiff and the Bournemouth Riviera. Buy eight more ‘slightly used with one careful owner’ Boeings from Lufthansa. The EU completes the Open Skies deregulation of airlines in Europe allowing free competition on all internal routes. Cancel Mick’s lucrative profit-sharing deal and give him 22 per cent of the airline instead. Employ 605 staff and fly 2,950,000 passengers.
1997
Jet off to the continent and start four new routes to Stockholm, Oslo, Paris and Brussels, or at least within sixty miles of these cities. Buy two more 737s bringing the fleet to 21 aircraft. Float your company on the Dublin and New York NASDAQ Stock Exchanges and watch the airline’s share price double on the first day of trading, valuing the company at €300 million. Employ 659 staff and fly 3,730,000 passengers.
1998
Open new routes to Malmo, St Etienne, Carcassonne (where?), Venice (or close), Pisa and Rimini. Order 45 new Boeings for two billion US dollars, being 25 firm orders and 20 options, an option being a sort of Irish aircraft order—sure we might buy the planes or we might not, but sure they’re only seventy million bucks a shot so sure well let you know either way later on…like. Employ 892 staff and fly 4,629,000 passengers.
1999
Go mad and open new routes to Frankfurt (close), Biarritz, Ostend (where now?), Ancona, Genoa, Turin, Derry and Aarhus. Employ 1,094 staff and fly 5,358,000 passengers.
2000
Launch an online flight booking facility which garners 50,000 bookings per week. Live with the eternal shame of one of your cabin crew named Brian Dowling winning Big Brother. Sponsor the Sky News weather forecast to raise your profile. Employ 1,262 staff and fly 7,002,000 passengers using 26 aircraft.
2001
Fly Tony Blair and family to their holidays in Carcassonne in France and milk the resultant publicity for all it is worth. Post 9/11 watch other airlines panic and oil prices soar but immediately order 100 new Boeings plus options on 50 more, the biggest aircraft order of the year. Open your first continental base at Brussels Charleroi and drive Belgium’s Sabena Airlines livid (an airline that only made a profit in one of the prior forty years and thus soon to be bankrupt and whose name stands for Such A Bad Experience, Never Again). Employ 1,467 staff and fly 9,355,000 passengers using 36 aircraft.
2002
Open your second continental base in the small peasant village of Hahn, seventy miles from Frankfurt. Start flying on 26 new routes in all. Become Europe’s number one airline in terms of punctuality, fewest cancellations and least lost luggage. Employ 1,547 staff and fly 13,419,000 passengers using 41 aircraft.
2003
Buy out a competitor, Buzz, from KLM for 24 million euros and relaunch their routes for half the fares. Become the largest airline operating at London Stansted. Open new continental bases in Milan (or Bergamo) and Stockholm (or Skavsta). Another Gulf War. Mount a mock invasion of Lootin’ airport in a tank for the publicity. Launch 73 new routes. Overtake British Airways for the first time by carrying more passengers in a month in Europe. Employ 1,746 staff and fly 19,490,000 passengers using 54 aircraft.
2004
Become the most searched airline on the web as ranked by the teenage billionaire gurus at Google. Open bases near Rome and Barcelona. Warn of a ‘bloodbath’ on fares in the winter months and consequently watch your own share price nosedive in a freefall. Watch the European Union expand eastwards and salivate at the prospect of all those potential passengers. Employ 2,288 staff and fly 24,635,000 passengers using 72 aircraft.
2005
Fly ten UK Conservative Party officials to their annual conference at Blackpool for a fare of one penny. Mick turns down an offer from the BBC to play the Alan Sugar role in the hit TV series The Apprentice. Open new bases at Liverpool, Pisa, East Midlands, Cork and Shannon. Order another 70 Boeings just for the heck of it but tell Boeing to skip the window shades, reclining seats and seat pockets to save a few euros. Note that you can squeeze 59 more seats into a new Boeing 737-800 than in an old Boeing 737-200. Carry more passengers in August than British Airways on their entire worldwide network, and thus claim to be ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’ (despite the fact that Southwest Airlines in the us carry twice as many passengers). Go on at length always about a ‘no fuel surcharge ever’ guarantee as oil prices soar. Employ 2,700 staff and fly 30,946,000 passengers using 87 aircraft.
2006
Open bases in Bremen, Madrid and Marseilles. Accept the delivery of your hundredth shiny new Boeing 737. Fly for the first time outside Europe by opening new routes to Morocco. Launch an online check-in service which was free but now, like everything else, costs money. Make an all-cash offer for Aer Lingus and refer to it as a ‘small regional airline’ despite the fact that Aer Lingus flies to the us and Middle East and your airline doesn’t. Employ 4,200 staff (of 25 different nationalities but 24 of them being Eastern European) and fly 42,500,000 passengers using 103 aircraft.
2007
Open bases in Alicante, Valencia, Belfast, Bristol and Dusseldorf Weeze. For the first time sell seats for one cent including taxes, fees and charges and watch your bookings website grind to a halt with four million hits on a single day. Launch ‘BING’ which delivers fare specials direct to customers’ computers. Discuss the possibility of a future low fares airline flying between Europe and the USA with fares from ten euros and consider calling it RuinAtlantic or Ego Air. Mourn the passing of Tony Ruin, accede to his last request and fly one Ruinair Boeing 737 aircraft over his funeral in County Kildare in a not so silent final tribute. Employ 4,500 staff and fly 50,000,000 passengers using 133 aircraft.
2008
Open bases in Birmingham and Bournemouth. Announce that the possible new low fares airline to the USA will have ‘beds and blowjobs’ in Business Class and see the related press conference video ‘climax’ on YouTube. Watch helplessly as the price of a barrel of oil goes to $148. Take the cheap option and park your excess aircraft at airports in the wintertime. Be sued by President Nicolas Sarkozy over a press advertisement featuring his wife-to-be. See XL Airways go bust. Continue to criticise the BAA ‘Britain’s Awful Airports’. Maintain an average fare of €44. Employ 5,200 staff and fly 58,000,000 passengers using 163 aircraft.
2009 etc.
More of the same. See above, ad nauseum. Specifically, annoy the hell out of everyone else. Retire.
The Low Fares Airline (1) (#ulink_58555676-c089-5f22-9dc6-b482fbf86ff9)
THE IN-LAW FARES AIRLINE
Rod Stewart may be about to pledge ‘for richer for poorer’ as he weds Penny Lancaster. But the famously skinflint rocker, 62, isn’t about to let costs go sky-high—as he has made his kids take a no-frills budget flight to the bash in Italy. Daughter Ruby, 20, joked as they boarded the Ruinair jet at Stansted: ‘We should all take it in turns to stand up at the end of the wedding and say my dad’s really cheap!’
THE MIRROR
THE LAW FARES AIRLINE
Ruinair is the choice of actor Jude Law, who was heading for an Easter holiday break with his kids. A few months ago he claimed he was broke after a pricey divorce settlement with his ex-wife Sadie Frost. ‘I lost everything in order to get the right to visit my children. My bank account is therefore almost always empty.’
WWW.CELEBRITY-GOSSIP.NET
THE LOW BLAIRS AIRLINE
Tony Blair gave budget travellers a shock when he boarded their low-cost flight back to London at the end of a week-long Italian holiday. Blair and a seven-member entourage flew from Rome on a commercial flight with no-frills carrier Ruinair, according to Rome’s Ciampino airport. The prime minister has drawn unwelcome attention from British newspapers in the past for using more costly state flights for holiday trips abroad. Ruinair’s press office could not immediately say how much Blair paid for his ticket. After all other passengers boarding the Stansted-bound Boeing 737 had been double-checked by security, Mr Blair’s party was ushered to specially-reserved seats at the front of the plane. The flight left the Rome airport 25 minutes late following the additional security checks. Showing his thirst for budget travel had its limits, Blair was met on the London airstrip by a limousine. A passenger said. ‘We only paid £49 for our tickets so, assuming he did the same, he must have saved the country a fortune.’
REUTERS
United Kingdom (#ulink_5636d9b8-be10-59d3-bdb4-12c3a9fa2181)
Ruinair Flight FR206 – Tuesday @ 8.30am – DUB-STN-DUB
Fare €2 plus taxes, fees and charges €42
Ruinair have a proud history of stopping passengers. In 2003 they refused boarding to ‘IT girl’ and Bollinger babe Tara Palmer Tomkinson because she did not have a required passport, despite travelling on an internal flight within the UK. She forgot IT. Apparently she retorted, ‘Do you know who I am?’ She was lucky not to suffer the fate of a us domestic passenger who once shrieked the same riposte, before a check-in agent used a public address system to speak to the entire Departures terminal: ‘May I have your attention please. We have a passenger here who does not know who he is. If anyone can help him find his identity, please step forward to this counter.’ Also in 2003 they refused boarding to Jeremy Beadle, much to the relief of the other passengers on the flight. They stopped Marian Finucane, one of Ireland’s best known media personalities, because she had no ID. They refused boarding to a John O’Donoghue on a flight from Cork to Dublin because he did not have any picture ID and he was the Irish government’s Minister for Tourism. They stopped ‘Iron Mike’ Tyson from boarding a Gatwick to Dublin flight because he arrived late. The brutal, aggressive yet floored Tyson was quoted as saying, ‘As long as I am not too late, then it’s okay.’
But I am not truly convinced. Ruinair flew the oldest football in the world from Glasgow Prestwick to Hamburg Lubeck to take pride of place at a World Cup exhibition in Hamburg. Checking in under the name of Mr A. Football, the sixteenth-century pig’s bladder, reputed to have been kicked about by Mary Queen of Scots at her weekly five-a-side game in Linlithgow, travelled in a specially designed box, had its own seat and I am told selected a pizza and Bovril from the in-flight menu. I am sure that ball had no passport. I always heed Mick’s advice. ‘On the photo identification, we are sorry for the old people who do not have a passport, although it only applies between Ireland and the United Kingdom, but our handling people are in an impossible position. We cannot include old age pension books as a form of identification when we are dealing with sixteen different countries coming through Stansted. The handling people on the ground simply cannot handle it. It has to be very simple, which is the reason we require a passport, driving licence or the international student card. We do not want the university student card or the Blockbuster video card.’
Never engage Ruinair check-in staff in voluntary conversation for fear they find an obscure reason to deny boarding. ‘Sorry sir, that couldn’t possibly be you in that awful passport photograph.’ Today is not the day to naively ask for a good window seat near the front and see their reaction. Be conscious of the small print they put on page 173 of their standard email confirmation. This states the following. ‘Look mate, no matter what happens at any stage in this flight, it’s your own fault not ours, so don’t ever try to mess with us.’ I worry they will get me soon at check-in. They get us all eventually. I will be late. I will have no ID. I will forget the email confirmation. The check-in queue will be too long. I will not have shaved. They won’t like my jumper. Some braver folk dice with death and bring a Post-it note with their confirmation reference. But I always bring along my emailed itinerary so I can show the check-in girl that I only paid one euro.
Ruinair weigh passenger checked luggage as carefully as the us Department of the Treasury weigh gold bars leaving the Fort Knox Bullion Depository in Kentucky. I watch other passengers on their knees on the floor, opening suitcases and dividing their life’s possessions into heavy items and not-so-heavy items, all being somewhat reminiscent of that U2 song ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’. Someone spots an unused check-in desk with a weighing scales so others check the weight of their baggage with fingers crossed, but the cashiers who double as check-in agents are not happy that the rabble are using the scales. A reading of 15 kg on the red display is joy; 16 kg is despair. ‘She wants to charge me for one feckin’ kilo over.’ The guy ahead with a huge suitcase is about to be badly screwed until the cashier asks him to weigh his backpack which is a tiny 2 kg. He moves about 5 kg of dirty laundry from suitcase to backpack and so avoids excess baggage charges but holds us up for ages and all his baggage is still going in the aircraft, whether it’s in the hold or the overhead bin, and all their petty baggage rules suddenly seem so pointless.
I heard a rumour that Ruinair may introduce charges for customers who travel with emotional baggage, in an attempt to avoid delays caused by family arguments at check-in and at boarding. They will have a strict rule of ‘maximum of one divorce case per passenger’ with no pooling of cases allowed. So if a mother turns up at the airport with her children from a first marriage, and she is still not talking to her second husband, the check-in girl will ask her a series of questions about the divorce and all the suppressed anger and guilt felt by the family, and Ruinair will charge her an extra ten euros. If the mother complains that this money-grabbing reminds her of the absent father who just took, took, took and left her nothing in his will, Ruinair will add another five euros.
What do you think Mick? ‘People are overly obsessed with charges. They complain we are charging for check-in, but people who use web check-in and only have carry-on luggage are getting even cheaper fares. We are absolutely upfront about charges and the baggage charges and the check-in charges will rise. We will keep raising them until we can persuade the 40% to 50% of passengers who travel with us for one or two days to bring just one carry-on bag. I can go away for two weeks with just my overnight bag. Instead of packing a hairdryer, why not buy one when you get there?’
I have long since tired of playing their checked baggage game. It’s easier to pay the checked baggage fee of when booking a trip of any longer than a few days. So on the day of travel I can put the baggage in the hold or else carry it on and I have found that once you pay the fee they never bother to look at your carry-on baggage and I can take as much as I can carry with me on board so they don’t lose my baggage. This arrangement suits both parties since they have their blood money and I can do what I want with my luggage. A few euros to transport a suitcase to Europe is a steal in every sense. I mean, FedEx or DHL would charge me a hundred euros or more and they would not be as quick.
Check-in is fairly ugly with many long queues snaking around the Departures area but no clue as to which desks they lead to. Lost Ruinair staff with less than perfect English stand and look at us. There’s a queue beside me for a flight to Bournemouth and I’m not sure why. Maybe Bournemouth is close to somewhere more exciting. Near the check-in queue are a gang of teenage Nike Hoodie boys, apparently wearing legitimate tracksuits emblazoned with the names of various Dublin boxing clubs. A gent asks where they are going. One of the freckled shaven-head terriers clenches up a fist. ‘We’re off to kill the feckin’ English.’
This airline, like any multi-million Boeing, is a well-oiled machine. Their operating system is simple. Each aircraft departs from its base on the first wave of flights early in the day (much like when the Japanese set off en masse early one morning for Pearl Harbour), and by the end of the operating day at midnight all crew and aircraft are back home. There is no scheduled over-nighting away from base, so there are no nasty hotel bills to pay. Each aircraft usually makes eight flights per day, from 6am to midnight. I saw a programme on RTE where their pilots said the ‘earlies’ are getting earlier, they don’t get a break for nine hours and cannot even get off the plane to buy a sandwich because they must supervise the refuelling. Landing and taking off many times per day is a more stressful job than flying intercontinental long haul. But on the upside Ruinair pilots do not have to fly to congested hubs like Heathrow and Schiphol.
One cabin crew team works the first four flights, or sectors, then another cabin crew takes the last four flights. Sometimes the pilots can fly a six-sector day which involves three return flights from Ireland to the UK. This airline rosters pilots on a pattern of five early-start days and two days off, followed by five late-start days and two days off, known as 5/2/5/2, which some crews like because of the predictability. But many of their pilots fly so much that they reach the 900-hour annual maximum limit specified by Europe’s aviation regulations before the year is over, and as the airline runs the same rostering year for everyone from 1 April to 31 March, this can lead to a crew crisis and lack of pilots at the end of every March when the pilots can sit around for weeks with their feet up since it would be illegal for them to take to the air.
Some of the pilots feel overworked so they set up a covert website for the Ruinair European Pilots Association called www.repaweb.org in order to communicate privately with each other. Ruinair do not approve but the Irish High Court dismissed an application by Ruinair seeking disclosure of the identities of pilots using the website. Ruinair contended that some of their pilots had been intimidated by postings by anonymous individuals using code names including ‘I hate Ruinair’ and ‘Can’t fly, Won’t fly’. However, the Justice refused to allow their identities to be revealed. He said that there was no evidence of bullying by the defendants to the action and the only evidence of bullying in the case was by the plaintiff, Ruinair. Mick doesn’t agree that his pilots are under pressure. ‘I don’t even know how I would put a pilot under pressure. What do you do? Call him up as he’s coming in to land? They are paid €100,000 a year for flying eighteen hours a week. How could you be fatigued working nine days in every two weeks? They can afford to buy yachts. If this is such a Siberian salt mine and I am such an ogre then why are they still working for the airline?’
All aircraft are left at their home base overnight so fault fixing is easier. There is no slack in the operating system. Turnarounds are scheduled to take only 25 minutes, and any delays are subject to immediate scrutiny. Timing is so tight that the only chance the pilots get to have a break is when they are safely up in the air. If the cabin is absolutely full, 25 minutes is simply impossible, so pilots rely on arriving early at the gate to achieve an on-time departure. If any aircraft become unserviceable, Ruinair has four standby aircraft at the ready: at the time of writing one is based at Dublin, one at Rome Ciampino and two at Stansted. Daily at 8am after the first wave of departures, all the base operations chiefs in Europe join a conference phone call. Each centre sends an email to the Dublin headquarters detailing performance. If there is a reason even for a one-minute delay it is discussed to see if a recurrence can be prevented. At 8.30am every Monday at the Dublin headquarters, all the department heads meet Mick and they review the week’s operational performance. That must be fun. ‘Late? What do you mean f****** late?’
So it’s not surprising that our aircraft is on time. I watch the disembarking passengers trudge past us. There’s also an incoming flight from Liverpool so every second passenger who alights wears full Liverpool FC replica kit. Mick likes Liverpool. ‘Liverpool is the low fares regional airport for the north-west of England. Liverpool doesn’t have all the glass, bells and whistles that Manchester has, but passengers don’t want glass, bells and whistles. It’s always good to see Liverpool give Manchester a good kicking.’ All of the passengers are bleary-eyed and fatigued. I woke up at 6am to catch my flight. I dread to think at what time these fellow travellers awoke. It was hardly worth even going to bed. Often low fares comes at a high price. Having aircraft lying around doing nothing at night-time must ruin this airline. Soon there’ll be 3am flights.
On the plane I read Ruinair, the first edition of their in-flight magazine, which I keep because it will surely be worth a lot of money in years to come. There is an advertisement from the printers of the magazine based in Warsaw. I bet they’re low-cost printers. The magazine includes a model Boeing to buy; a push-fit plastic model requiring no glue or paint, with realistic take-off sounds and flashing lights, like what we fly in today. I read Mick’s message on the first page. I can’t believe he writes this piece himself because of the absence of swear words. He describes the amazing in-flight Movie-Star system. There’s a sample on-screen picture, showing Mick getting on board an aircraft, hands on hips, open-neck shirt and jeans. I think that’s the same shirt. I hope we don’t have to pay €7 to listen to him. Six months of trials later they can the movie system because no one wants to pay to use it. There is an editorial with a quote from Saint Augustine who is the patron saint of low fares air travel. ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel, read only a page’ I keep my copy of the magazine for research purposes but the crew come through the cabin to retrieve all copies. So I sit on my magazine. They pass by. I triumph but there will be a downside. They print 70,000 copies of every issue, and 50 per cent of passengers spend thirty minutes reading it. Tonight the employee who counts the magazines in the warehouse in Dublin airport will shout over to his foreman: ‘Hey, Seamus, it’s happened again. We’re down to 69,999 copies. Some fecker has nicked a copy.’
The magazine has a tacky insert called Buy As You Fly, which features mail order products that no one would ever need or use or want as a gift. There’s a wooden rocking chair. I mean who ever uses a rocking chair except Val Doonican or the elderly gentleman in the TV advertisements for Werthers Original sweets? There’s a Hercules Winch which will uproot an unwanted tree, pull a vehicle out of a ditch or winch in a boat but I don’t have any unwanted trees, I don’t often drive my car into ditches (of which there are few where I live and in any event I would be calling the AA) and, like most of the population, I don’t own a boat. There’s a Snail and Slug Trap which is filled with beer to entice the slimy rascals inside where they drown but go with a big smile on their faces. What a waste of good beer. There’s the Garden Kneeler Bench, a real life-saver for the avid but badly crippled gardener. There’s the dog bark control collar, the sonic mole repeller and the ultrasonic cat repeller; all repelling. There’s the appropriately named Sudoku for Dummies. There are Exclusive Football Stadium Framed Prints. How exclusive can they be if I can buy one by mail order? There’s an anti-frost mat to prevent icy build-up in my freezer. What a load of rubbish.
In 1942 the us Air Force established an airfield at Stansted for its Marauder bomber squadron. In the early days of this low fares Mecca everyone flew from here for free courtesy of the us government, but mostly it was on daytime bombing runs to Berlin. Later the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command abandoned the airfield, leaving a civil airport with one of the longest runways in Europe, but with zero passengers. The airport was designated as London’s third and re-opened in 1991 as the greatest white elephant of its time. There was no train link from London to the airport. Air UK flew there and Cubana Airlines operated a weekly flight to Havana via Gander on a Russian-made Ilyushin jet. The BAA, with noted starchitect Norman Foster on board, spent £300 million on a terminal building with a floating roof supported by a frame of inverted-pyramid roof trusses, a glass and steel masterpiece in the middle of nowhere. Ideal for Ruinair.
Why do we need architects to design airports? Let’s build a building and have glass walls so it’s bright inside. Let’s put a flat roof on it. Let’s have a train station underneath and how about some bus stops outside? And then let’s build a Toytown train to take people to the piers—we’ll have two of those. Let’s call them A & B. And hey, how about we make one half for Departures and the other for Arrivals? But Stansted is revolutionary for one genuine reason. Before Stansted, airports used to have roofs full of cabling, air conditioning and insulation. Foster put them all under the floor and opened the roof to the sky, safe in the knowledge that sunlight is considerably cheaper than paying a monthly London Electricity bill. This is the airport of choice for the authorities when a hijacked aircraft wants to land in the South-East. I rest my case. When a Sudanese airliner was hijacked and landed here, Ruinair responded with an advertisement headlined: ‘It’s amazing what lengths people will go to to fly cheaper than Ruinair.’ As Mick says, ‘Usually someone gets offended by our ads, which is fantastic. You get a whole lot more bang for your buck if somebody is upset.’
The BAA plan to build a new runway at Stansted. The analysis of the £4 billion spend includes £90 million for a runway, £1 billion plus for a terminal building and an amazing £350 million for earthmoving and landscaping, the latter representing a gardening event of truly Alan Titchmarsh proportions. Mick as usual offers his modest opinion. ‘The BAA are on a cocaine-induced spending spree. They are an overcharging, gold-plating monopoly which should be broken up. BAA have no particular skills in building airports and are the worst airport builders in the western world. A break-up of BAA would be the greatest thing that has happened to British aviation since the founding of Ruinair. Then airline customers would not be forced to endure the black hole of Calcutta that is Heathrow, or the unnecessary, overpriced palace being planned at Stansted. The BAA want to spend £4 billion on an airport which should cost £100 million. £3.9 billion is for tree planting, new roadways and Norman Foster’s Noddy railway so they can mortgage away the future of low-cost airlines. This plan is for the birds. People can drive up the M11, they will walk barefoot over the fields for a cheap fare. What they are not going to do is pay for some bloody marble Taj Mahal.’
Mick is even considering ways to avoid incurring the charges at the check-in desks at BAA’S Stansted airport: ‘I could check in people in the car park, which would be cheaper than BAA. If they don’t let me use their car parks we might let them check in at the truckers’ car park on the M11.’ Equally the BAA CEO enjoys a public spat with his biggest customer at Stansted and rebuts Mick. ‘You could probably build the runway for £100 million if you had a flat piece of ground, were not worried about where you parked the aircraft and were not worried about how to get the passengers on and off the planes. The runway would only cost £100m if all we had to do was fly some Irish labourers over to lay some tarmac down the drive.’
It’s a rough landing at Stansted in gale force winds but it’s not a bad landing. A good landing is one where the pilot plants the wheels onto the asphalt and comes to a stop. A bad landing is any other sort of landing. I don’t know how much these aircraft can take, but if it had been my motor car, it would now be scrap. I turn to a guy in the aisle seat. ‘Not a great landing?’ I suggest. All he can do is mumble and then show me the open palm of his hand, slam it down hard on his thigh and utter the single word ‘Splat.’ I am reminded of the note written by a girl to the captain on a Qantas flight. ‘Dear captain. My name is Nicola. I am 8 years old. This is my first flight but I’m not scared. I like to watch the clouds go by. My mum says the crew is nice. I think your plane is good. Thanks for a nice flight. Don’t fuck up the landing. Luv Nicola.’
Shortly after we land, a loud trumpet fanfare is broadcast through the cabin, followed by ‘Congratulations, you’ve arrived at your destination ahead of schedule.’ I look at the crew members in disbelief and they are evidently mortified at having to play such a tacky announcement but it’s company policy. It’s also odd because they are congratulating us for an early arrival but we didn’t make the aircraft go faster. As soon as we stop we all feel the need to instantly power up our mobile telephones. The cabin interior is suddenly a cacophony of harmonised Nokia tunes. One rough-looking older gentleman close to me immediately has to take an incoming telephone call. He swears loudly. ‘Jaysus, who the hell is this? This call will cost me a fucking fortune, what with their roaming charges when I’m away from me home.’
There is an air-bridge when we arrive at the pier but we don’t use it, in line with this airline’s stated policy. ‘When we used Jet-Way airbridges, we found that they were the fourth largest cause of delays. Either the Jet-Way wasn’t there when we arrived, or the buffoon who was driving it was out by a few inches, and had to take the whole thing back and forth again before landing up at our doors. If it’s raining, people will just walk a little faster.’ It is sometimes necessary to take the Skytrain from the arrival gate to the Arrivals hall. This can be confusing for some travellers. I once arrived here on a flight, got on the Skytrain and sat beside an elderly Irish lady. She turned to me in the tiny train without a driver and asked, ‘Is this the Piccadilly line?’ Needless to say, I told her it was and if she stayed on board for the next fifty minutes, she would be in the West End.
Today I join the long march from the gate to the Arrivals hall, largely reminiscent of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1812, although fewer of us die from hypothermia, but some are picked off by snipers or succumb to the changing seasons, dysentery or the dreaded tetsi fly. My taxes and charges today include the arbitrary Wheelchair Levy, so next time I’m asking for one to take me to Arrivals.
If Ruinair didn’t exist, would Stansted airport shut down simply for lack of use? One in six flights out of Stansted is taken by some of the one million British people visiting second homes abroad, which they do on average six times a year. Ruinair flights here are like hailing a taxi. If you wait long enough, one will soon come along. Their aircraft are everywhere, like some bubonic plague. In the future, Boeing will manufacture all 737 aircraft with the Ruinair logo as the default livery. Boeing does not disclose production rates, but it is believed to build about twenty-eight 737s a month, or one every day. I read in the newspaper that a delay in the delivery of four new Boeing aircraft to Ruinair meant the airline was forced to cancel 1,200 flights, affecting an estimated 300,000 passengers. It is not untrue to conclude that the growth of this airline is only being impeded by Boeing’s failure to build new aircraft fast enough.
The UK aerospace industry’s trade surplus with the rest of the world shrank by a third one year, because of the huge volume of Boeing aircraft being brought into the UK by this single airline. Ruinair now have so many Boeing aircraft that they could easily lose one and then accidentally locate it again at some lesser-known airport.
Ruinair gave its flying angel logo bigger breasts. Mick ordered the change on all new Boeing 737-800 aircraft. The image boost was first spotted by Ruinair workers at Stansted airport. A spokesman said: ‘We decided to give our customers a more uplifting experience. We think she is rather aerodynamic.’ Ruinair’s spokeswoman for the Nordic region said: ‘We do not wish to milk the situation.’
