Ruinair

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.

United Kingdom

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.’