Ruinair

Belgium

Ruinair Flight FR44 – Tuesday @ 11.50am – DUB-CRL-DUB

Fare €1 plus taxes, fees and charges €33

I must drive rather than take public transport because Dublin is the only large European capital without a rail link to its airport. I pass the Port Tunnel into which the government has poured €750 million of taxpayers’ money yet the builders want €350 million more to finish it and the tunnel roof leaks water on occasion, making it the most expensive car wash in Dublin. It’s a black hole. I stay out of the bus lanes since these are exclusively reserved for Polish motor cars. On the way to the airport there are Irish roadworks. A sign confirms the M1 is closed and there is a diversion along Griffith Avenue. However, in the best traditions of Irish motoring, all the cars ahead of me carry on along the M1. I follow. As expected, the M1 is open to traffic all the way to the short-term car park opposite the terminal. Sure we only put these sort of alarmist road signs up to present a challenge to our overseas visitors when travelling to the airport.

In a move reminiscent of Al Capone’s hey-day, the Dublin Airport Authority has increased the cost of short-term car parking by 50 per cent, so I drive the fifty miles to the barren wasteland of long-term. To park in short-term, one must now deposit several close family members in a bank vault as a security deposit. The Beautiful People of Dublin used to frequent Brown Thomas, the Ice Bar and Lillie’s Bordello but now they can ostentatiously display their personal wealth in the Lower Level of short-term car park A. In long-term the DAA has kindly provided visual reminder signage of the parking zones to aid those who return from two weeks in Majorca only to utter ‘Jaysus, where did I leave me feckin’ wheels?’ So there’s a Zone G for Guitar, Zone H for Helicopter and more recently Zone c for Criminal, Zone M for Monopoly and Zone R for Rip-off. There’s also a Zone Y as in Y is this car park so fecking far away from the terminal building? It’s only called long-term because of the average time it takes to get from your car by bus to the Departures terminal. I park in Zone F, so-called because today there’s no F’in spaces left anywhere. My parents have given up parking in the long-term because they find it’s too complicated and too difficult to find their car on their return. They claim to have lost several rather desirable and sensible Peugeot 406s here in the past.

It’s freezing in Dublin so on the apron they are de-icing our aircraft. I don’t know why they bother with the expense of de-icing. Why not get Mick to stand near the wings and tail and speak for ten minutes? There is much chaos at the gates, almost a bloodbath. ‘Flights FR206 and FR112 to London are cancelled due to the weather conditions. Would passengers make their way to the baggage carousel to collect their luggage and go to the Ruinair ticket desk in the Departures hall.’ A day ruined. We are the lucky ones. The ramp guy who boards us is professionally attired in a woolly Manchester United bobble hat. ‘Will yez all stop pushing. If yez don’t stop pushing, then none of yez will be gettin’ on de plane.’ They don’t hang about even in freezing weather so some of the passengers who board by the rear steps receive a fine coating of deicer from the man on the gantry who knows there is always a 25-minute turnaround, hail rain or shine.

A University of Miami professor addressing the Airline Pilots Association claimed that in the future the crew in an aircraft will consist of a pilot and a dog. The pilot is in the aircraft to feed and take care of the dog. The dog is in the aircraft to bite the pilot if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons or switches. The primary requirement to becoming a pilot continues to be the ability to speak with a posh accent, and being a pilot means starting your career with a bag full of luck and a bag devoid of experience, the trick being to fill the latter before the former empties. As BBC’s Frank Spencer once said, ‘There are old pilots, there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.’ I wonder do Ruinair pilots place wagers on whether they will be able to find these remote airfields? Our pilot locates Charleroi amongst arable fields. We land. It’s Brussels but not as we know it, Captain. It’s quiet, and I wonder: are they expecting us? The airport is deserted. There have been no air traffic control delays here since Sopwith Camels took part in the Allied offensives in the Great War. Immigration hardly requires a passport; it’s more like a nod and a wink.

There is a tourist desk in the airport and I’m suddenly hopeful that there may be a tourist industry in Charleroi. Five years ago 200,000 passengers passed through here annually. Now it’s two million plus of us annually. Back in the nineteenth century a place on Europe’s rail network could make a city’s fortune. Now it’s a listing in the schedules of a growing list of low fares, low cost, budget, low frills, no frills, etc airlines. Charleroi’s tourist office is in town on Quai des Martyrs de 8 Aout and so I am sure something very grisly happened on that date. But I remain pessimistic. A colleague told me that some years ago when he worked in Brussels, he and some friends went to visit Charleroi one day. They entered the tourist office and asked the charming girl behind the counter what they should go and see. She replied rather sheepishly, ‘Well, there isn’t anything to see.’

Mick has never been a fan of Brussels. ‘Consumers have been ripped off for the past fifty years because governments got together with the airlines after 1945. British Airways got the monopoly in the UK, Air France the monopoly in France and Lufthansa the monopoly in Germany.’ The airline industry is the only industry where the producers are allowed by the idiots in Brussels to get together once or twice a year to fix the fares and route capacities and they get anti-trust immunity to do it. It’s a joke.’ Today’s nearby destination is in the newspapers. The European Commission rules that four million euros of financial incentives received by Ruinair from the Walloon government amounts to illegal state aid.

Mick’s reaction is choice. ‘It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Ruinair to get a fair hearing in Brussels. It’s a complete fuck-up which is going to overturn twenty years of competition in air travel, but it wouldn’t be the first time the EU has made a balls of an investigation. Any time politicians get involved in an industry or regulating an industry, they fuck it up. It’s what they do best. I think we should blow the place up and shoot all the regulators and the airline business might actually prosper. Bureaucrats in Brussels have been blathering on about European unity for ages but the low cost airlines are at the forefront of delivering it. We are the means by which hundreds of thousands can now travel back and forth; they are almost commuting. It looks like the EU are trying to come up with some communist rules. The judgment is just blindingly wrong. There will be a repayment over my dead body. We have written back to say fuck off.’

The chief executive of the almost-Brussels airport replies: ‘A letter is going to be sent shortly to ask the airline to repay the amount.’ Mick retorts: ‘We haven’t received a letter, but if we do I think it would get a pretty short reply. I think it would consist of two words: Foxtrot Oscar. We have spent much more than we have ever received from the Walloon region. We spent over a hundred million euros building the bloody base. We created their airport from nothing. So our reply will say we’re paying nothing, love Mick.’

Mick was not best pleased either when the EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes blocked his bid to take over Aer Lingus when she had previously permitted an Alitalia and Air One merger: ‘She’ll be rolling over like a poodle having her tummy tickled and rubber stamping the thing. We think the EU Commission is biased against us, but then we would say that, wouldn’t we.’ Mick is appealing. Now that doesn’t happen too often. ‘Given our outstanding record with legal actions we’re very confident we’ll be successful. So far the tally’s running at 99 losses and 2 wins.’

Mick is left holding a 29 per cent stake in Aer Lingus which some investors want him to sell: ‘It has been mentioned by our shareholders; the response was two words, and the second word was “off”. It is in the national interest for us to help out our national airline. The €300 million invested by Ruinair in Aer Lingus is just a drop in the ocean, this isn’t a lot of money. I sit in front of our shareholders and say, “I own more shares in the company than you do”.’

At the time of writing Mick is down sixty million euros on the stake in Aer Lingus. ‘I’m celebrating the fall in value in our investment in Aer Lingus. It’s an accurate response to the management’s current performance. Aer Lingus is likely to be taken over and the most likely candidate to take over Aer Lingus is Ruinair, because frankly nobody else has any interest in taking over Aer Lingus. It’s too small and too high-cost to survive as an independent airline.’

Charleroi is not the same as Brussels, and even the Advertising Standards Authority spotted this when it banned Ruinair from claiming its London to Brussels flights were faster and cheaper than the Eurostar train service. The airline’s advertisement compared its one-hour, 10-minute flight to the two-hour, 11-minute train trip. The ASA found that because London’s Stansted airport is around 25 miles (40 km) out of London and Charleroi is around 28 miles (46 km) out of Brussels, travelling from London and Brussels city centres to the two airports adds 1 hour and 45 minutes to the total journey time. A Ruinair spokesman retorted by saying: ‘Only in the parallel universe of the ASA can a one-hour, 10-minute flight be declared to be longer than a two-hour, 11-minute train journey. Even a four-year-old with basic maths could tell you the flight is shorter. Ruinair has today sent a Dummies Guide to Mathematics to the ASA who clearly can’t add and they can’t subtract either. This false ruling should be reversed.’ Not so fast, Ruinair.

But Ruinair did not let the matter lie and shortly after ran the following job search on their website:

Maths Test for Morons: Are you slow enough to work for the UK Advertising Standards Authority?

The UK Advertising Standards Authority is looking for an ‘investigations executive’ but if you want to work for them you’ll have to show that you’re a dummy. Take our test to find out if you are a big enough moron to join the ASA’s crack team.

A Ruinair flight from London to Brussels lasts 1 hour and 10 minutes. The Eurostar train takes 2 hours 11 minutes.

Which is shorter?

A) Ruinair

B) Eurostar

A Ruinair flight from London to Brussels costs £15. A Eurostar train from London to Brussels costs £27.

Which is cheaper?

A) Ruinair

B) Eurostar

If you answered B you’re just the kind of mathematically challenged ‘Investigations Executive’ the ASA is looking for.

I look around the airport and try to decide where to spend the night. I could follow the herd and board the bus north to Brussels; the 46 kilometre trip. But I’ve been to Brussels before. On the first occasion I went to the Grand Place and the famous Manneken Pis, a pitifully small urinating national icon. I didn’t fondle its well-rubbed private parts. It’s the sort of tiny national statue you could stick in your backpack and make off with and no one would miss it much. It’s the same statue that today’s airline used for its aggressive press adverts along the lines of ‘Pissed off with Sabena’s high fares?’ There’s a deal on offer I cannot refuse: a bus ticket and a train ticket to anywhere in Belgium for ten euros. I approach the ticket office in the airport terminal and ask the bored guy inside for a return ticket.

He stares back at me. ‘To where?’

I too stare. ‘Why, back here of course.’

There are three buses outside. One goes to Brussels, one to Charleroi and one to the car park. There is much confusion. Folks who really want to go to Gare du Midi will be deposited in the long-term. Irrespective of my primary issue with going to Brussels (it’s full of Belgians), I am not taking the Brussels bus because I have flown here. I will go to cosmopolitan Charleroi, first metropolis of Wallonia, third city of Belgium, located in the province of Hainaut. Population seventeen, including one dog, in peak season. The glamorous Line A bus takes me to Charleroi in ten minutes. The landscape looks like one of those roadside signs you see for industrial estates, the ones with rows of warehouses and plumes. Chimney stacks here belch smoke into the grey sky. There are many small hills, each perfectly formed with neat peaks, unnaturally so. They are covered with trees, hiding something dirty. Slag heaps.

I am aware Charleroi has suffered from depression and it’s starting to have the same effect on me. This is the Black Country, with important steel, glass and coal mining industries in the nineteenth century. You know the sort of place from Monty Python and the Hovis adverts. Folks here had to get up before they went to bed, walk twenty miles to work barefoot, and eat rough gravel rather than muesli for breakfast. Times here are still hard. Unemployment here is 20 per cent, twice the Belgian national average. I alight at the train station and receive funny looks from the puzzled locals. Yes, we are the people who choose to come here for our annual holidays rather than risk a sunny sandy beach with talented top tottie in southern Spain.

Charleroi was founded in 1666, built as a fort by the Spanish King Charles II and later abbreviated to Charle-Roy. Charles II was a four-year-old child placed on the throne after the death of his father Philip IV. I bet he made some inspired decisions in the first few years of his reign. Free Farley’s rusks and late bedtime for all. It takes some time to get my bearings and orientation in the city. Okay, so I get lost. It reminds me of the time a friend went on a motoring holiday in the UK’S South-East and he and his wife got lost on the roundabouts of Poole. He eventually pulled over and asked a local how to get out of Poole. To which the bemused local paused for thought and replied that first he would have to be in Poole. And don’t ever ask anyone in Ireland for directions. Their response will be, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here if I was you.’ This is a derivation of what is known as Irish Logic, another example being the guy who drinks in one Dublin pub because the pints are so cheap and tells his mates, ‘Sure the more I drink, the more I save.’

The population of Charleroi is 200,000 and all of them drive their lead-spewing cars around the city’s ring roundabouts in a 5pm rush-hour frenzy. I am not sure where they all come from since there is nowhere to leave. There is one office tower block in the city and it’s an incomplete eyesore with scaffolding. The refurbishment is half-finished and it’s so ugly I’m not sure which is the new half and which is the old half. I don’t know what people do around here, apart from engaging in an ongoing competition for the worst parked car in the city centre. I attempt to cross the teeming Boulevard Tirou at the zebra crossing. This is an important test in a new city. Either they will allow pedestrians to cross or run us over. I step onto the first white marks and a local almost takes off my lower leg. Drivers take aim for pedestrians in these parts.

Place Charles II is the heart of the old city and is quite a climb. I recognise the square immediately. The last time I saw it chairs were being thrown through bar windows and the police were spraying water cannon jets over the tourists. It was Euro 2000, when soccer supporters came to play hardball. I sit and wait until an enterprising beggar speaks to me and asks for a few euros. I decline his request but admire his excellent French. Rue de la Montagne is a cobbled pedestrian thoroughfare which links the upper city to the lower city, otherwise known as a sheer vertical drop disguised as a shopping street. I come to rest at Le Pieton café at Rue de Dampremy, the oldest street in the city. The café name is appropriate because I have been walking for miles. I wonder perhaps if there is a sister café a few streets away called Le Pieton Mort, near a zebra crossing. I have a coffee and a big crêpe. A bloke always feels better after a decent crêpe.

Along the way back to my hotel, important sites are marked with monoliths in the shape of upturned oars with text. Near the back of the train station I see a few more local oars, plying their trade. Please do not go to Charleroi solely for the nightlife. It’s Tuesday and 8pm but everywhere is closed or empty. I think the government organised a civil defence exercise for a simulated germ warfare attack and perhaps asked the population to stay indoors for the duration of my stay. Chez Walters bar only has one drinker inside and it looks like Walter himself. A trendy Italian bar I saw open at 4pm is closed as darkness settles. The one and only cinema is doing a roaring business so this is conclusive proof. The highlight of my evening is watching a driver parking his car illegally on a curb. A crowd gathers wherever I stop in the street. I have a paranoid fear of dining in empty restaurants. Either I get poisoned or ripped off. In absolute desperation I dropped into the McDonalds. They do a good Big Mac but they made me wait ten minutes for fries. I suggest if you go there you telephone in advance so they have the fries ready when you arrive.

In a few hours I have done Charleroi. Or rather it’s done me. Next morning I check out and cross the Sambre to the train station. I have a train ticket and I’m not afraid to use it. The next inter-city train to Brussels is due to leave at 10.07am. At 09.52 an IC train arrives at the correct platform. It looks like my train but it cannot be because it’s so early. This is not Germany. I ask the guard, who confirms it is my train. I tell her it’s fifteen minutes early. She shrugs, ‘C’est normale.’ Not where I live, dear. When we depart in the opposite direction, I am the only passenger facing the wrong way. Charleroi is the end of the line.

In Brussels in the mid-afternoon I go to Gare du Midi to catch the bus back to Charleroi airport. The timetable advises this bus serves two flights, one to Dublin and one to Rome Ciampino. I am anxious since this bus can hold a maximum of a hundred people and a Boeing 737 holds 189 people. There seems to be some imbalance here. I make sure to get to the bus on time, to get a seat, to just be on it. I am very early. Low fares airlines love anxious passengers. They are on time. The bus journey takes an hour. It takes an hour to get from Heathrow to Central London by tube, reinforcing the fact that the only airport actually in London is the City Airport in London’s Docklands, used exclusively by suited City Blackberry users. I’m not sure what all the fuss is about the location of this airport. Within a minute I exit the bus and check in.

At the departure gate a couple of Belgian teenage girls study an Irland guidebook excitedly. They are the frequent-flyer Generation Y’ers who fly, not because they want to, but because they can. They are young, young enough never to have lived without Vodafone and DVDS, email and IMS, Playstation and Gameboy, Yahoo! and Google, and pan-European low fares air travel courtesy of Ruinair. But I am from a different generation, where only wealthy adults had mobile telephones and nobody outside of academic and research laboratories possessed an email address. A URL was a really exotic address. Amazon was a river in South America. Orange was a bright colour. A googol was the technical term for an enormous number, a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. XBox, eBay and iPod were typographical errors. An instant message was something you sent via a bloke on a motorbike. No one wanted to drive a Mini. There were little shops on the High Street called travel agents and Ruinair was a small Irish airline which lost money annually and which most Irish people were sure would never amount to much more than an embarrassment.

17.17. A Ruinair Boeing 737 lands and flashes by the huge plate glass window at speed. Such relief.

17.19. The aircraft pulls up outside the gate, only twenty feet away, filling the glass window with its logo. The sun shines suddenly and bounces off the white paint in an almost ecclesiastical experience.

17.21. The first passengers disembark. The ground crew work at speed, actually running around the aircraft. The last time I saw a team work this fast they were refuelling a Ferrari at the Monaco Grand Prix.

17.23. The aircraft is empty. Thumbs up signals are given and reciprocated between ground and cabin crew, the latter immediately coming down the steps to the gate to board us.

17.45. We take off five minutes ahead of the scheduled departure time. I have been flying for twenty years and I have taken hundreds of flights. I can’t ever remember taking off before the scheduled time.

The flight is uneventful except for one announcement from the crew supervisor: ‘If anyone has change of a fifty euro note would they make themselves known to one of the cabin crew.’ They are tight. I sit next to someone I vaguely recognise from Irish politics. I take a second look at the only guy in a suit and risk all.

‘Are you a TD?’ I ask.

‘MEP.’

Myself and an Irish MEP discuss low fares airlines. He seems to be a fan of the concept.

‘I receive a fixed EU allowance to travel to Brussels. I only paid forty euro today. I keep the rest.’

I tell him I’m writing a book about this airline and others and he likes the idea. I agree to send him a copy if it sees the light of day. He offers to attend the book launch and say a few words. I wonder will he? We exchange business cards. A few months later I get a personal invite to his Golf Day. I don’t play golf.