Ruinair

How to be treated like shite in 15 different countries…and still quite like it

Paul Kilduff

‘For years flying has been the preserve of rich fuckers. Now everyone can afford to fly.’

MICK O’LEERY, CHIEF EXECUTIVE

RUINAIR HOLDINGS PLC

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

Spain…not quite

Mick’s Plane Speaking

France

How to Build Your Own Five Billion Euro Airline

The Low Fares Airline (1)

United Kingdom

The Low Fares Airline (2)

Belgium

The Low Fares Airline (3)

The Rough Guide—An official handbook for Crewlink staff working on Ruinair aircraft

Netherlands

Flying for Peanuts

Luxembourg

Easy

Greece

Germany…not quite

Germany…again

Berlin

Austria

Germany…more

Ireland

Switzerland

Liechtenstein

United Kingdom…again

Spain…again

Spain…more

Andorra

Italy

San Marino

The Low Fares Airline (4)

Most Definitely…‘Not Ruinair’

Norway

Annual General Meeting

Some Appreciation

Aero-Naughty-Cal-Endar

Denmark (and Sweden)

www.airlinemeals.net

The Only Official Ruinair Joke in the Universe

Bus Excursions from Airports Ruinair fly to

Finland

Wheel Share

France…encore

Taxes, Fees and Charges

Portugal

Caught Napping

Ireland…again

Financial Ruination

The Low Fares Airline (5)

Christmas Presence

Epilogue

Sources

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Ruinair Flight FR206 – Tuesday @ 8.30am – DUB-STN

Is that Mick? I stare ahead at the check-in queue for London Stansted. Others spot him too and peer over. It looks like Mick. He wears faded denim jeans and a creased check shirt, with buttons undone and sleeves rolled up. He is active and agitated. So it must be Mick. I have never stood so close to a man worth six hundred million euro who doesn’t possess a tie, nor apparently an iron. Mick is the closest thing we have to a real cult in Ireland.

I wonder why he bothers to stand in a queue, five or six people ahead of me, taking another flight to his Mecca. He could have jumped the line; instead he joins the Great Unwashed. I’m vaguely impressed. I wonder if he really purchased a ticket like I did, how long ago he booked it and if it’s as cheap as my flight.

There’s no sign of Mick when I reach the departure gate so he must be in the VIP area. But suddenly he stands up like a Messiah in our midst and assists his staff to take our boarding cards. I purposefully join his personal queue and he rips my boarding card in two with a practised ease. Mick doesn’t look at me. We don’t bond.

I have an aisle seat in the centre of the B-737. Mick sits a few rows ahead, reads an Irish Times at speed, then grazes some business papers. He chats to a colleague who sits opposite. The crew are on their very best behaviour today. So is their boss. He hasn’t sworn at anyone yet, us passengers included. I wonder where it all went wrong. We both attended private schools in Ireland favoured by the cream of the country: rich and thick. We were at university in Dublin at the same time. We joined large accounting firms in Dublin. He almost qualified as an accountant, but I did. He left the profession to buy a few corner shops in Dublin, but I took a proper day job. One of us is now a multi-millionaire and one of us writes books.

How does he do it? There isn’t a spare seat on the flight. I paid a teeny ten euro return fare for the trip. It’s cheaper than parking a car at the airport, cheaper than the books on sale in the terminal, cheaper than the sandwich and coffee available on board, cheaper than the train to civilisation at the other end. The taxes, fees and charges are still a mystery to me. I paid forty penal euros. Mick had the gall to charge me a &euro;6 credit card handling fee, yet I did it all online. I mean, who ever handled my credit card but myself?

Today we fly to a place to the north-east of London called Stansted, which is Connexted by rail to Liverpool Street. This modern accessible airport is an essential component of this airline’s strategy. Experience shows that passengers will fly from somewhere to nowhere, but will not fly from nowhere to nowhere. I stalk Mick along the corridors on our communal route march towards Arrivals. I spy a row of five middle-aged men in grey suits wearing shiny British Airport Authority ID badges. They are on bended knee as they shake his hand. Mick delivers 60 per cent of all passengers arriving at their airport. It’s like a visit from the Pope.

The new world order is in the concourse. Ruinair have half the floor space. EzJet have the rest. Herr Berlin is the latest upstart. Buzz were badly stung. DebonAir went out of fashion. Go are long gone. The walls of the terminal are adorned with Ruinair’s smiley bulbous aircraft, their route map cobweb and must-see website address. The latter is the most searched travel website in Europe and the world’s most searched airline brand according to Google. Ruinair is the world’s largest international scheduled airline by passenger numbers, ahead of Lufthansa, Air France and British Airways, and is the third most valuable airline in the world, surpassed only by Southwest Airlines and Singapore Airlines. Even with its millions of passengers, Ruinair only enjoys an 8 per cent market share of the 600 million people who fly annually within Europe.

We are the Ruinair generation who take flights abroad in the same way our parents took bus trips into town. Ruinair takes us from A to somewhere remotely near B; from Aarhus to Zaragoza (Pyrenees). They fly to every hamlet in Europe: Altenburg, Billund, Brno, Lamezia, Pau, Vaxjo (which sounds like a toilet cleaner), Weeze, Zadar; places that I doubt even exist. RuinWhere? They fly to the vague destination of Karlsruhe Baden-Baden (Stuttgart), so Bad they named it twice. They fly to Balaton in Hungary, which is not a city, but a lake. Fifty million passengers travel annually on 550 routes between 26 countries on our own Eireflot.

This is no longer a little Irish airline. It’s an epidemic of biblical proportions. As I study the Ruinair route map, I am reminded of their Spanish routes. I decide I will book another flight, this time to Malaga. I am confident the fare will be as low, and the experience as painless, as today. Surely Mick and his very cheap airline couldn’t ruin my precious summer holiday.

Spain…not quite

Ruinair Flight FR7043 – Saturday @ 2.10pm – DUB-AGP-DUB

Fare &euro;300 plus taxes, fees and charges &euro;40

The first sign of terminal trouble is the subtle inactivity at the Malaga departure gate. Our scheduled boarding time passes quite uneventfully. Growing mumblings of discontent and half-truths circulate like gossip. A lady with us has a daughter who works for this airline, such an admission to make, think of the public shame and humiliation, but she telephones her daughter. There is an aircraft outside so there’s hope, but she learns it has technical problems. The screens show ‘Retrasado’. This is Spanish for ‘Your Aircraft Is Fucked’. We wait in a void of passenger information and customer service. Every Ruinair flight number has an FR prefix. If the R stands for Ruinair, someone tell me please, what does the F stand for?

One brave passenger walks up to the desk and comes back with his hands outstretched, holding up ten fingers in full view to us. We will board in ten minutes time? He announces: ‘Delayed until ten o’clock tonight.’ Eight hours late. An engineer is flying out on another aircraft to rescue us from our fate. I recall Mick’s statement: ‘If a plane is cancelled will we put you up in a hotel overnight? Absolutely not. If a plane is delayed, will we give you a voucher for a restaurant? Absolutely not.’ I paid an arm and a leg for this trip, not to mention other essential body parts. Three hundred euros plus taxes, twenty euros less than our green national flag carrier Aer Lingus. And if Aer Lingus will now fly me from Dublin to London for one euro, does that make them a low fares airline? Ruinair is not a low fares airline. It’s only a lower fares airline.

My fellow passengers are middle-aged couples returning from their place in the sun with a tan to demonstrate that they’re loaded, glamorous leathery mothers and svelte daughters swapping copies of chick-lit and Hello, and gangs of forty-something businessmen still dressed in their garish checked golfing gear, all owning their little piece of Marbella or Puerto Banus. There is utter incredulity from four Americans who have lost all faith in European air travel. Airline credibility is like virginity. You can only lose it once. There are two Spaniards who can go home, eat, sleep, shop, clean, procreate and still return in time to depart. We sit near the screens showing departure times. In the past I have looked at these screens and gained much amusement from various charter airlines’ delays of, not hours, but days or weeks. Our flight is top of the list with a now nine-hour delay. Others pass by and smile over at us. Today the joke is on us.

I find a girl from Iberia; that’s the airline, not the peninsula. She checks her screens and tells me my flight has now completely disappeared and she doesn’t know what gate it might leave from. She is baffled because she says she used to work with the little Irish airline but she left. Wise woman. Somehow I survive nine hours in the terminal. You can only read the small print on the reverse side of your boarding card so many times. I visit every shop ten times, doze, read all known English language newspapers, down fries and Cokes, but still there are eons to kill until departure. At a time like this I harp back to Mick and his wise words: ‘An airplane is nothing more than a bus with wings on. Are we are trying to blow up the notion that flying is some kind of orgasmic experience rather than a glorified bus service? Yes, we are.’ Success.

We are drawn to the gate like moths to a flame as midnight approaches. A few Irish guys are drunk and enter the Ladies by mistake. Inside naked sunburnt babies are bathed in the hand basins by irate mothers. Passengers lie on the airport floor, their energy levels as depleted as their mobile telephone batteries. We prepare to board but there is mass confusion. Some of us have yellow fluorescent pen ‘P’s hand-written on our boarding cards. We think it means Priority. Others behind in the scrum ask if anyone has a yellow pen they can use. The Americans ask what the ‘P’ means. I tell them it stands for Pissed Off.

On board it’s clear some passengers are well and truly hammered, having spent nine hours in the airport bar knocking back rounds of San Miguel. ‘Same again.’ A guy sitting in the emergency exit aisle is swapped by Gavin the cabin supervisor with another passenger, because he’s too drunk to do anything in the event of an emergency, save a burp, stagger or a Ralph and Huey. He carries a plastic beaker of beer with him as he rises to move seats. The crew say nothing. Apparently you can now bring your own alcohol on board. He takes the proffered seat and asks Gavin for a Heineken. Gavin tells him to wait until we are airborne.

We get a vague explanation from the pilot as to the technical problem. It’s something to do with the ‘data management’ system. So that’s okay. It’s not like it’s important or anything, like a wheel, an engine or a wing. The pilot is female, called Carole somebody. She introduces her colleague on the flight deck, another female. The Americans look at each other and become very non-PC. ‘Two women pilots?’

Our aircraft is one of those pre-historic 23-year-old Boeing 737s, one evidently previously owned by Lufthansa because all the warning signs are in a language I don’t immediately understand. Schwimmweste unter Ihrem Sitz. Nicht Rauchen. Ausgang. I start looking for old pre-WWII signs like Gott im Himmel and Hände Hoch. The aircraft is so old that there’s a receptacle in the WC for the disposal of used lethal razor blades. I sit in one of those tired sunken velour seats where I worry my butt will become permanently wedged and I won’t ever be able to get up, and I might have to spend the rest of my life going back and forth on this aircraft, never getting any help from the crew, what with their fast turnaround times. As Mick says about this unique low fares travel experience: ‘You want luxury? Go somewhere else.’

The in-flight service is uneventful save for the resentment of the Americans. When it is announced there are drinks and snacks available for purchase, they exclaim to Gavin, ‘You’re kidding. Ten hours on the ground and you don’t even give us a goddamn cup of water?’ They have not heard Mick’s proclamation: ‘No, we shouldn’t give you a bloody cup of coffee. We only charge 19 euros for the ticket.’ One of the Americans is creative and asks the crew, ‘Do you have ice cubes? Can you give me a cup of ice? You don’t charge for ice?’ She denies his request. The American isn’t beaten. ‘Can we drink the water from the taps in the toilets?’ he perseveres. She stares back blankly. ‘That is forbidden.’ Later the crew come past with plastic bags and one girl says to me ‘Rubbish?’ and I wonder if she’s asking for my opinion about this airline.

Flights which depart late often arrive on time because airlines brazenly lie about journey times. Not this time. We land in Dublin at 1am local time on the next day. When I checked in thirteen hours ago I was clean-shaven but after this journey of Palinesque proportions, I now have a beard like Santa’s. We had religious education classes at school where a Holy Ghost priest educated us on the concept of eternity. He told us to think of time as a grain of sand and then add all the grains in the world together to gain a concept of eternity. Now I know I need to additionally include the delay on this flight to fully comprehend eternity.

I am still seething days later but consider myself fortunate to have escaped from Malaga. I mean, I could still be there today. My Ruinair experience demonstrates that sometimes it can be better to arrive than to travel. I crave a feeble revenge of sorts. I don’t hold out much hope but I craft a stroppy letter.

Customer Service

Ruinair Ltd

Dublin Airport

Dear Sirs,

I had the great misfortune to travel on FR7043 from Malaga to Dublin where our departure time was delayed by a record-breaking ten hours. In these circumstances can you firstly advise me of the exact reason for this delay since at the time all we got was the usual vague explanation?

Can you explain why no information was given to us at any time by any of your staff and why do you have zero staff located at Malaga airport? Why was it necessary to fly an engineer all the way out from Dublin when surely you could use local contractors to do maintenance work? Can you confirm the defective aircraft in question, a Boeing 737, is twenty-three years old, and if so, isn’t this three years longer than the useful life of twenty years as recommended by the makers?

Can you explain the utterly chaotic boarding process where some of us had handwritten ‘P’s on our boarding cards, which some thought meant ‘Priority’, and if so why was this not used when boarding as opposed to the ugly scrum we endured?

Can you advise why drunk passengers were allowed to board the flight after ten hours spent in the airport bar; one male passenger being moved by the cabin supervisor from a seat in the emergency exit row since he was too inebriated to do anything in the event of an emergency save barfing, and when moved he had a plastic beaker of beer in his hand; and do you now allow passengers to bring their own alcoholic drinks on board direct from the terminal bar?

Lastly please confirm you will reimburse me for my evening meal in the airport and the extra day’s car parking at the airport when a seven-day holiday became an eight-day human endurance test. If I had paid ten euros for this return flight I wouldn’t bother with this letter, but I paid a whopping &euro;300 which isn’t so wonderfully low fares after all.

Yours etc,

Disgusted of Dublin

I am amazed to receive a reply the very next day by email. It must be all the practice they get.

Dear Mr Kilduff,

Thank you for your letter received today. We regret any inconvenience caused due to the delay to your flight FR7043. Regrettably on the day in question your flight developed a technical fault on arrival at Malaga. Unfortunately the local engineer, after a detailed inspection, advised that a part was required for the aircraft and therefore it was necessary to transport the part from our service centre in Dublin. Despite our rigorous maintenance standards, technical problems occasionally arise and may cause delays.

I do sincerely regret that our sequential boarding policy was not adhered to by the agents at Malaga. We have clearly instructed all airports and handling agents to board all flights by boarding card number sequence and please be assured that this lapse in policy will be taken up with our agents at Malaga.

We have strict guidelines for the carriage of passengers who are under the influence of alcohol. Our in-flight personnel are particularly vigilant and tactful in relation to passengers who, although creating no disturbance, may have being drinking prior to departure and in this regard such passengers are monitored throughout the flight. I do assure you, had it been visible to the crew that any passengers were consuming their own alcohol on board it would have been confiscated by the crew.

As you may appreciate, we are a very efficient low fare airline and whilst we pride ourselves upon not charging extortionate fares that many of our competitors do, equally our low fares do not permit us to meet consequential expenses of passengers who may on rare occasions be inconvenienced. In this regard, I regret that we are not in a position to accede to your request for reimbursement. This should be claimed from your travel insurers.

I do hope that despite your dissatisfaction on this occasion, you will afford us the opportunity of welcoming you on board a flight in the near future and providing you with our normal friendly and efficient service, this time without interruption.

Yours sincerely

For and on Behalf of

RUINAIR LIMITED

Mick knows how best to describe this carefully worded, cut and pasted, utterly useless reply since he has coined a choice expletive to be used by his airline in one-to-one print media interviews to describe any simple procedure which other airlines claim to be complex. Mick’s word is Bolloxology.

Mick’s Plane Speaking

On low fares: ‘People ask how we can have such low fares. I tell them our pilots work for nothing.’

On destination airports: ‘Sometimes there is not even a road to the airports we fly to.’

On flying gangs of lager louts on stag weekends: ‘We call them the Chianti louts heading to villas in Tuscany and the South of France.’

On competition: ‘Any idiot can paint a plane and start out offering low fares. It’s about sustainability. We’ve been profitable now for twenty years. Nobody else can compete with us. They’re all screwed.’

On in-flight gambling: ‘A lot of people are, frankly, bored on flights. We believe they have a high propensity to get involved in all sorts of games. We might have the pilot calling out the bingo numbers.’

On how his airline might fail: ‘Nuclear war in Europe, a major accident or believing our own bullshit. In any airline there is always a strong possibility of management stupidity. The biggest threat we face is a management fuckup.’

On future fares: ‘I have a vision in the future that we will be flying everyone for free, but I’m damned if I’m going to pay for them to fly.’

On future travel: ‘We may not be even flying in 2030. We may be all beamed about like Star Trek.’

On opening new routes: ‘We never want to be the explorers, they always get their heads shot off.’

On trains: ‘Trains are incredibly over-subsidised and don’t service people’s needs. The trains were fine in Victorian times when if you didn’t have a stable you walked, but no one needs to use them now.’

On politics: ‘I think the most influential person in Europe in the last twenty to thirty years has without doubt been Margaret Thatcher, who has left a lasting legacy that has driven us towards lower taxes and greater efficiency. And without her we’d all be living in some bloody inefficient unemployed French republic.’

On women: ‘I generally get on very well with women, but I used to work seven days a week and usually sixteen-hour days. I had no time for girlfriends. I didn’t have girlfriends for ten or fifteen years.’

On fatherhood: ‘I want to spend more time at the office. I am staying in the guest room and I don’t plan to re-emerge until my son is at least two years old and ready to take instructions. I’m taking the company approach to it: I am subcontracting everything.’

On retirement: ‘It will be some time after we have established world domination, then it will be time for me to go. I will leave the airline when it’s not growing rapidly and when it’s getting dull and boring. I won’t be gone in three or five years’ time. But I have promised my wife that I will be.’

On succession: ‘In the future the company will need a chief executive who is different than I am. As the biggest carrier in Europe, they would have no use for someone who runs around in jeans and calls politicians idiots and says that the EU Commission is made up of Communists. I’m good at doing the loud-mouth and fighting everyone but it will be inappropriate to have somebody here shouting, swearing, abusing the competition. We will need more professional management than me.’

On regrets: ‘I don’t look back at all. I’m forty-seven and I’m not going to be sitting here pulling wool out of my navel wishing I had done something differently. This is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.’

On personal popularity: ‘I don’t give a shite if nobody likes me. I am not a cloud bunny, I am not an aerosexual. I don’t like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other platoons of goons who populate the airline industry. I’m probably just an obnoxious little bollocks. Who cares? The purpose is not to be loved. The purpose is to have the passengers on board.’

France

Ruinair Flight FR42 – Sunday @ 7.55am – DUB-BVA-DUB

Fare &euro;2 plus taxes, fees and charges &euro;33

I plan to exact my revenge, to beat them at their low fares game and see all fifteen countries in Western Europe for the price of my ruined trip to Spain. And if I can purchase some cheap flights then gradually I will single-handedly reduce their average revenue per seat. My idea might fly but I am not sure if I can do it. I’m not certain if anyone cheap flies to Liechtenstein.

Mick approves of cheap flying. ‘We gave away 15 per cent of our seats last year for free. If we didn’t give them away, they’d be empty, but this way we have got the chance to sell car hire, a sandwich or a cup of tea. We’re working on the multiplex cinema model—they make most of their money from the sale of popcorn, drinks and sweets, not cinema tickets. It is our ultimate ambition to get to a stage where the fare is free.’

So I am doing something I’ve never done before: travelling to a place I never knew I wanted to go to, which is probably not quite where I think it is, and I am not sure what I will do once I get there. My ticket was purchased in one of those unlimited ‘limited offers’, the sort of special fares promotion that they only have on the front page of their website every single week. It was the Irish comedian Dara O’Briain who first noted that when you search for the Ruinair website address on the internet, you are first taken to a nearby website, from where you can catch a bus to get to the intended website address. The fare is two teeny euros. I have lost more through a hole in my pocket or put more into the collection plate at Sunday mass. These low fares are advertised in the media but often garner free publicity, such as the time Ruinair was criticised by the UK’S Advertising Standards Authority for using offensive language in an advertisement. Published before Bonfire Night, the advertisement had depicted fireworks with the headline ‘Fawking great offers’. Even worse was the reaction to their advertisement showing the soles of a pair of feet on top of another pair of feet, with a ‘fare for 2’ of £69, and the slogan above ‘Blow me, these fares are hard to swallow!’ How low.

It’s good to fly to France for lunch. I could have taken the 46A bus into Dublin city centre for a bite instead but the bus fare into town is &euro;1.90 each way, so it’s much cheaper to travel to France for one euro each way. Mick likes these low prices: ‘Our strategy is like Wal-Mart and Dell. We pile it high and sell it cheap. If anyone beats us on price, we will lower ours. We are the Tesco of the airline industry.’ This is cheaper than staying at home for two days. Forget the fact that the taxes, fees and charges are 1,650 per cent of the fare. The only things cheaper are the ‘free’ Christmas cards I receive annually from the Disabled Artists Association.

I am certain that it’s costing this airline more than one euro in aviation fuel to move my butt six hundred miles eastwards towards France. I agree with Sir Bob Geldof’s opinion on low air fares to unknown destinations: ‘If I can get a £7 flight to somewhere within two hundred miles of Venice, you know, destination unknown, magical mystery tour, well, I’ll take it. Seven quid, I don’t care where I fucking go.’

Flying is now all about queuing. We queue at the check-in to receive a boarding card, we queue at security to show the boarding card and we queue at the gate while they take back a piece of the boarding card they gave us earlier. After twenty years of flying from Dublin, Ruinair’s boarding cards still show a space for Seat Number, albeit unused. With fifty minutes to go to the scheduled departure time, some passengers are already standing around at the gate. These are the passengers classified by this airline at an Investors’ Day presentation as ‘well-trained passengers’. More specifically, airline pilots officially refer to us passengers as ‘SLF’ (self-loading freight). There are signs and lines to queue but Irish people as a rule don’t queue. The same guy who put the chocks under the nose-wheel asks us to form two orderly queues. ‘Jaysuswha’didhesay?’ I hear.

This airline has inadvertently created two classes of travel: early class and late class, much like business class and economy class in the old days. If you are late for check-in, you are doomed, and Mick agrees. ‘We don’t care if you don’t show up.’ Many of my fellow passengers have evidently passed the Advanced Masters Degree in Queue-Jumping. This airline formerly used the same policy as on the Titanic when they used to invite passengers with children to go first. It was almost worth borrowing a child for the day. Now, like everything else on this airline, they charge passengers to stand in a queue. If you are a parent and you wish to be sure of a seat alongside your child, then that will be three euros each. I don’t know what the mad rush is for anyway. I mean, we’re all going to get seats. It’s not like some of us will be left sitting on the cabin crew’s knees or on the toilet seats if we are the last to clamber on board.

Or maybe we will. A few years ago Ruinair flew from Girona in Spain to Stansted with people seated in the aircraft’s toilets. The airline, which was reported to the regulator following the incident, acknowledged that the flight was overcrowded and that it should not have happened. ‘Ruinair does not overbook its flights,’ a spokesman said. ‘We are taking it very seriously and it is the subject of an internal investigation.’ The passengers seated on the toilets for the duration of the flight were Ruinair staff. Other staff not on duty on the particular flight sat in jump-seats in the passenger cabin. Ruinair said the incident occurred because too many off-duty staff were allowed on board. This is what’s known as a Loo Fares Airline.

Today the arriving passengers are still deplaning as we begin to get ready to board. Someday soon we will rush them at the two doors, like on the Tube. In fact this airline reminds me of the London Underground in many respects, but without the sense of personal space I enjoy on the Tube. Boarding is monitored in a simple manner. None of this new-fangled computer or electronic rubbish, as used by other airlines, is required. A staff member sits at a desk with an A4 page of numbers 1 to 189 and uses a highlighter marker to cross off our sequence number as we board. When a few of us have passed him by I expect him to leap up with joy, show us his completed fluorescent grid of work and shout Full House.

Getting onto the plane is by the scrum method. Two packs of burly passengers line up in opposite directions, wait for the signal and charge. ‘Crouch…touch…hold…engage.’ Like the Six Nations. We don’t depart the terminal, rather we escape in a circuitous double-pronged pincer movement. Obstacles such as passing freight traffic, abandoned electrical machinery and lethal rotating jet engines don’t matter because we want to get the best fucking seat. It’s such a race that it seems other passengers genuinely do not believe there will be seats for all. I’m on the inside and past the departure gate, but a girl cuts through the walkway and comes up fast on my rear, so without indicating left or right, I move ahead and speed to the rear steps, until the girl breaks into a fast stride last seen in that ludicrous Olympic walking race and makes towards the same rear steps, so I edge her off at the steps with a shoulder charge and we board the aircraft with myself in pole position to find…there are lots of vacant seats so we’re both gutted. I wonder if we boarded only by the rear steps, could the arriving passengers exit by the front steps simultaneously and save time?

My preference is to use the rear steps to board. There’s no point using the front steps unless you’re the pilot. It’s also proven to be safer to sit at the rear because you never hear of aircraft reversing into mountains. Also the ‘Black Box’ flight recorder is located in the tail and even when jets plunge into the Florida Everglades or the Amazonian rainforest, they always find the ‘Black Box’ intact, so that’s encouraging. It’s great to choose your own seat on board to avoid sitting beside large, loud or drunk people, teary babies or beardy loonies. I rarely sit in the emergency row with the extra leg room. Firstly you will spend the next two hours sitting ten feet away from the noisiest mother of all jet engines. And if that over-wing door blows out, you’re hoovered.

The tray tables of the seats in a few of the back rows of the aircraft are down and have tatty photo-copied multi-lingual notices advising we cannot sit there. I don’t know why. Maybe the crew dine there? I try to sit in one of these blocked seats but the cabin crew are having none of it and propel me along the aisle. This certainly undermines their treasured principle that we can sit anywhere we like when we board. ‘I think we certainly have democratised flight, in that there’s no curtains anymore, there’s no business class anymore, you’re not made to feel, you know, two inches tall, like, “Here you go, down with the poor people at the back.” Everybody is the same on Ruinair,’ says Mick.

I take a row of seats only to find others before me had a food fight here and I’m sitting on their bread and crisps. The new B737-800 aircraft sports a nausea-inducing puce-yellow interior. This is the only airline in the world who employ an interior designer suffering from colour blindness. It’s the same colour they use in McDonalds restaurants. Yellow is inviting and instantly warming but once you’re sitting for ten minutes you want to vacate your seat and leave. This is not so easily done at 500 mph and at 32,000 feet.

A fellow passenger holds her boarding card towards me. ‘Where is the seat number, please?’

‘You can sit anywhere,’ I advise helpfully. She is a veritable virgin. So rare these days.

Getting the optimal seat is a priority and it’s not easy because there is some excellent top-notch competition out there these days, so practice and discipline are essential. It’s important because the average elbow is wider than the seat’s armrest and the middle seats create a war zone on two fronts. I am entitled to the entire armrest, and that means both of them. When selecting an aisle or window seat, do so depending on your strongest arm. I prefer an aisle seat. We all wish to establish our personal comfort zone with no one sitting next to us. Years of research by Boeing’s head of aircraft seating found that one single factor most powerfully affects perceived passenger in-flight comfort: whether or not the seat next to you is empty. Even if the aircraft only has one free seat, then that free seat needs to be right beside me. Today I take an aisle seat where the window seat is already occupied by another solo flyer. We nod in an unspoken agreement and pile everything we own in this world into the empty middle seat: coats, newspapers, books, food, bags, scarves, the kitchen sink and a few dead rabid dogs. It usually works. The seat remains empty.

More extreme strategies are required to keep an entire row of three seats all to yourself. First take the aisle seat to block easy access for others. The Bag technique is where I take a sick bag and hold it over my mouth and as people come past I heave into the bag and make eye contact with my tired teary eyes looking for sympathy. The Zombie technique is where I sit tall in the seat, eyes wide and staring straight ahead and from that position I bounce my head back and forth until I am dizzy. The Busy technique is where I put down all the trays in the row, spread out my papers, lunch, water, mobile telephone, briefcase, pens, books and whatever else I can muster and look too busy and annoyed to move anything for anyone who dares ask me if the seats are free. The One-Liner technique includes saying to any would-be neighbour, ‘It sure feels good to be out of prison.’ Another technique which works only for men is the Love technique where I grab an aisle seat and as passengers walk past, I boldly look them up and down, smile at them and occasionally give them a nice stare. Women think I am trying to pull them and men don’t really want to know what I am thinking. If someone makes a move for the two seats I reach over and pat the seats and wink. This latter technique never fails. Either way, I am sitting on my own in an empty row.

Today there are lucky latecomers. The penultimate passengers are two flustered red-faced Dublin girls. ‘Jaysus, we wus sittin’ at the right gate but lookin’ at the wrong screen. I don’t know wha’. We’re the ones hirin’ a car when we get there. How are we gonna find our way around northern France when we can’t find our way outta the bleedin’ terminal building?’ The very last passengers to board don’t seem bothered at all as they stand around like a bunch of eejits in the aisles. They are all French. Naturellement. The aircraft is about 85 per cent full, which is typical for this airline. I am convinced they would achieve their average load factor of 85 per cent if they commenced a new daily service with one cent fares from Dublin to Timbuktu (South).

I wind my watch forward by one hour because France is one hour ahead of Ireland, plus about ten years. It was the Irish writer and Nobel prize-winner George Bernard Shaw who said that Ireland is the safest place to be on earth during an earthquake, since everything happens here forty years later. The pilot announces there will be a delay in departing. He says there is fog in France. All Ruinair pilots graduate with highest honours from the Aviation School of Expectation Management. We are advised we will sit in the aircraft going nowhere for one hour. We get another explanation. ‘We were also a bit delayed here earlier with all the planes moving about at this hour of the morning. We had to get the plane from the hangar.’ So that’s where they keep them. I have seen them tow many aircraft to gates at 7am, as if they manufacture them around the corner. We groan and curse, anger rising. He announces later it’s only a thirty-minute delay and we all smile. We take off thirty minutes late but somehow we all feel ecstatically happy about it. One excited child becomes vocal before the take-off: ‘We’re leaving. Quick. Put something in your mouth.’ The same child will later utter upon our planned descent: ‘We’re going down. Watch out. Mind the road.’

On board there are unending announcements made at foghorn volume about smoking, the lavatories or asking us to buy things. I know why they make so many announcements. Because they cost nothing. What’s wrong with putting a sign up somewhere and letting us rest in peace? When I get on a train, no one stands in the aisle each time to announce I can’t use the lavatory when the train is in a station. They put up a sign instead. And I just know it. We all do. The safety announcements are unintelligible since they are delivered in a language unique to this airline, referred to as Spanglish. A gentleman behind mutters under his breath, ‘Sure, I’d understand it better if she spoke it all in Spanish.’ The girl has such a heavy Spanish accent that I doubt even a genuine Spanish passenger could understand her chesty pronouncements.

One part of the safety announcement always grates. ‘In the event that we land on water, life vests are located under your seat.’ I’m not sure that if we do land on water this will be the first matter on my mind. More distracting matters such as staring at the fish outside the windows may take precedence. A life vest? Who’s going to need a life vest? I would rather have scuba diving equipment under my seat. But the most annoying aspect is when they ask us to read the safety card stuck on the back of the seat and some guy across the aisle leans forward and starts reading it intently. We are all experienced, nonchalant, big-time travellers so no one dares to follow suit and read the instructions, but we all sit there and worry that if we hit a mountain, he will appear on the RTE News to explain how he alone survived and watched us perish at Mach One. ‘The safety card I read made it clear what I should do in the event of plunging into a mountain.’

The cabin crew are vaguely good-looking in a lost, vacant sort of way. The lights are on but there’s no one on board. Some might be Eastern European since they don’t have much English. All they can utter is ‘Any drinks or snacks to buy?’ These are the people who will save us in the event of an emergency. They joined this airline to see all of Europe but now they only get to spend 25 minutes (maximum) in a range of ex-military airbases, where one of them draws the short straw to go face us passengers in the terminal.

There’s something fairly awful about these blue staff uniforms. The female crew are either very tall or very short, or are very thin or very not-so-thin but they all wear the same size uniform. I don’t know if Ruinair would consider doing uniform fittings for their staff? A small sum spent on what people would call uniform rules would go a long way to raising personal pride and corporate appearance. Grown men with bad haircuts wearing stained jackets and grubby off-white shirts try to sell us scratch cards, then tickets and telephone cards and Baggies of neat alcohol (and if we drink too many Baggies they will sell us a Lifeline ‘hangover preventer’ cure for three euros) and then perfumes and toys on this flying hypermarket.

The secret of success of this airline is that the seats are free but everything else costs us big-time, including checking in, boarding, luggage, food, drinks and even wheelchairs. They operate like Gillette where razors are cheap but blades are expensive; or like Vodafone where mobile telephones are cheap but minutes cost. Ruinair management don’t think like other airline management, they think like supermarket retailers. No passenger purchases a scratch card so evidently we’re not as stupid as we may appear. Mick has a view on selling scratch cards and so much more to passengers. ‘They’re for morons. On board our flights we don’t allow anybody to sleep because we are too busy selling them products.’

The coffee on sale on board is Fairtrade coffee but not for the right reasons. Mick says: ‘The fact that our tea and coffee supplier is a Fairtrade brand is a welcome bonus, but the decision was based on lowering costs. We’d change to a non-Fairtrade brand in the morning if it was cheaper.’ I never purchase their tea on board on principle. Ruinair charge &euro;2.75 for a cup of tea. Last time I was in Tesco, 80 Lyons tea bags cost &euro;2.78. Once they sell the first cup, Ruinair are making a profit. But I am thirsty.

‘Can I have a bottle of water please?’ I ask.

‘Still?’

‘Yes, I still want it.’

I always carefully read the description on the label of the bottle. A few years ago this airline’s highly profitable brand of bottled water did not come from a pure mountain stream or a rocky highland spring. It was mere tap water. Ruinair’s Blue Rock water, which cost £1.85 for a 500 ml bottle, was supplied by Britvic Soft Drinks in the UK. While the label did not claim the water to be genuine spring water, neither did it make it clear that it was tap water. The same product was pumped into thousands of homes by Thames Water at a cost to consumers of only o.o6p per litre. This is what is known as a L’eau Fares Airline.

It’s an inevitable fact of aviation that when people are stuck in a small metal tube for several hours with not much to do, one of the few distractions open to them to pass the time is to look at the cabin crew. The cashiers and shelf-stackers who double as flight attendants have exotic European makey-up unisex names such as Rosalba, Vaida, Danija (email me!), Edyna and Lorana but blondie Beata still remains the happiest crew member I will meet on my extensive travels. Most of the cabin crew appear to still be of schoolgoing age and are bunking off from lessons by having these day jobs. Their job description is to make really sure we don’t want anything to eat or drink. I buy something else for the one-hour flight but the girl leaves me twenty cents short in change. I assume she’ll return with the change but she doesn’t remember or care. I don’t bother asking. Twenty cents from each of their 50 million passengers will add an extra &euro;10 million to their profit. Never in the field of human transportation was so much owed by so few to so many. Before we land we pass any of our rubbish to the crew, thereby becoming the world’s first self-cleaning aircraft.

There is a programme on BBC where the actor Tony Robinson looks at The Worst Jobs in History. He’s included jobs like Public Executioner, Rat Catcher, Sewer Cleaner and Collector of Bodies during the Bubonic Plague. In the next series he’s looking at working as cabin crew for this airline. This is in contrast to the best jobs in the world, such as coach to the Swedish women’s soccer team or Chief Taster for the Guinness quality assurance team with responsibility for all pubs in the greater Dublin area, who drive vans around Dublin on which locals have handwritten on the side: Emergency Response Unit. Or indeed the easiest jobs in the world, e.g. weather forecaster in southern Spain (er…tomorrow it’s going to be hot).

However, never dare to confront a member of the Ruinair crew. They might be armed and dangerous. Ruinair once sacked an air hostess who admitted keeping an illegal stun gun at her Strabane home. Sinead McDermott had worked for the airline for four years and was dismissed for gross misconduct and bringing the company into disrepute. The stun gun, which was shown in court, was capable of discharging 500,000 volts and could incapacitate somebody causing localised pain for up to five minutes. The brunette, who appeared in court wearing a low-cut top, skirt and boots, received a 200 hour community service order. McDermott listed the reasons for having the stun gun, saying she had received nuisance phone calls, her car had been burned, she had been followed and she feared for her safety. The resident magistrate said he took into account the fact McDermott had pleaded guilty at the first opportunity, which showed an element of remorse, her clear record and the fact she had lost a ‘good job’ as Ruinair cabin crew.

France is a country with the same population as the UK and has double the land mass of the UK, yet there is not a single domestic French low fares airline, thanks to the state-sponsored monopoly of Air France. In a war amongst low fares carriers, providing cheap flights to all five corners of France is the last remaining battle yet to be fought. The French countryside is a clichéd patchwork of manicured fields and dense forests but, as widely rumoured, Beauvais airport terminal is a tent. The Departures end has white metal walls and a canvas top which flutters nicely in the soft breeze. This may be the only airport in the world at risk of being closed in the event of high winds, not because aircraft are unable to land, but because the airport blew away. The runway is so basic that the pilot has to execute a u-turn and come back the same way, only to stop as a tiny two-seater Piper aircraft comes across in front. We disembark as the ground staff place a sign saying Dublin on the tarmac for those taking the return trip. It’s unnecessary because there are only two aircraft in the entire airport and all 189 passengers are not going to fit into that Piper. Twenty paces later and we are inside the terminal. Ten more paces and through passport control. Ten more paces to the WC or the baggage carousel, whichever is deemed more urgent. Ten paces to outside. Paris Beauvais airport is closer to the city of Amiens than it is to the French capital, but who would fly to Amiens?

Paris is the world’s top destination for tourists but it ranks as only the world’s 53rd friendliest city. I admit I have never warmed to the Parisians. They are so annoyingly arrogant about everything. Most locals in any European capital will take the chance to speak a few words of English but Parisians wouldn’t lower themselves. If you have dinner in Paris, the locals excel. They instantly recognise the best dishes on the menu and ask the sommelier if he knows which side of the hill the Pinot Noir grapes were grown on. As you dine on the finest food, they will find something to criticise. And all this from a nation who gladly dine on horses, snails and frogs. And every two years we dare to visit them at Stade de France when their brutal rugby team administers a regular thrashing to our brave boys in green (we have won once in 35 years). The only redeeming feature about the French in general is that they cannot manufacture a decent motor car for love or money. P.G. Wodehouse conceded that the French invented the only known cure for dandruff, called the Guillotine.

There is a bus to Paris but the fare costs more than the flight and the duration of the bus journey is longer than the duration of the flight. I could hire a car today but I have seen too much of Parisian driving skills to risk that option. When you buy a new car in Paris you must go out on the first day with a claw hammer and knock lots of dents and holes in the side of the car, because if you don’t, some other lunatic driver will do it for you in a 2CV the next day. I enquire at the airport information desk about taking a local bus into the town.

One of the girls points outside. ‘Voila, ze bus.’

I almost get on the bus but I check first. ‘To Beauvais?’

She shakes her head. ‘Non. A Paris.’

I stand my ground. ‘I want to go to Beauvais.’

She turns to her colleague. ‘Il veut aller a Beauvais.’ Incredulity. They stare as if I’m on day release.

I persevere. ‘The bus?’

Much shaking of heads. ‘No bus. Rien.’

I’m sure there’s a bus. ‘Not on a Sunday?’ I ask.

‘Jamais, jamais. Taxi.’

Beauvais is the capital of the Oise region of Picardy and has 60,000 inhabitants. The Hotel le Chenal is in the town centre. It’s not a three-star hotel, it’s the three-star hotel. I once stayed in a two-star hotel but I broke out into a rash at the lack of stars, and I once stayed in a hotel where the maid did not fold the toilet roll into a nice point daily so I checked out immediately. This hotel offers typical French hospitality. It takes me ten minutes to convince the duty manager I have a reservation, not that I want to make one. He fumes behind the counter and utters his first words of a genuine French welcome. ‘You pay me eighty euro now.’ It’s fairly quiet here. If ten more guests check in, that’ll make eleven in all.

The manager asks me if I want breakfast. I tell him that it’s the most important meal of the day and of course I do, since I have paid for it, but then I realise he’s only determining if he needs to employ a chef. My room overlooks the train station. There are exotic lights outside which change from red to amber to green and back. The bath is diamond-shaped, too big for one. I saw the same bath in a documentary I was forced to watch on a brothel in the Nevada desert. I accidentally stumble upon filth on the TV. Channel 17 features Priscilla upon a chaise longue, who has a compulsion to slowly undress. I am shocked. This sort of stuff should only be shown on pay TV. After her comes Natalia. Then Eva. Olga. Maria. Claudia. Etc.

The history of Beauvais is as potted as shrimps. In 1357 a peasant revolt began here, the Jacquerie. History shows me that the peasants are always revolting: poor dental hygiene, inappropriate dress sense and a lack of proper table manners are endemic. Beauvais’s main products are blankets, carpets, ceramic tiles, brushes, bricks, chemicals, felt and tractors. Beauvais’s only famous citizen is a lady named Jeanne Hachette. In 1472 the Duke of Burgundy laid siege to the town and all was lost until Jeanne killed an enemy soldier with an axe, tore down his Burgundy flag and rallied the troops. Her statue lies in the main town square and she is good-looking and well-built, in a bronze-casting sort of way. Her achievements are celebrated every October with a procession through the town where the women take precedence over the men. This day must be especially difficult for the French male.

The city centre was destroyed by WWII bombardments so the buildings are new but still ugly. I stroll along the main street, Rue Carnot, where there are estate agents who have perfected the pricing of houses to an amazing science, their windows displaying exact prices such as &euro;183,564 and &euro;242,973. I immediately stick out in the streets because I am the only person not carrying a huge baguette as if I plan to mug someone with it. I use my excellent command of French to buy my own baguette for lunch, and also largely for self-protection. A few people stop me to ask me questions. Do I look like I know about metered car parking and the one-way system?

The Cathedral of Saint-Pierre is a spectacular disaster. It was begun in 1225 and was to be the largest cathedral in Europe but its vaults collapsed in 1272. The French builders had another go soon after and built a 128-metre spire but this collapsed in 1284. Today it’s a stub of a cathedral, having a chapel, a choir and a transept, and there’s another church where the nave should be located. The cathedral’s astronomical clock required the co-ordinated assembly in the 1860s of 90,000 different parts, surely a feat only equalled by the average irate IKEA flat-pack customer. If this clock had been assembled in Ireland, we would have many pieces left, surplus to requirements. These would be discarded on the sly as a workman looks at his trusty Casio watch and announces, ‘Sure, it’s keeping good time, like.’ I stare at the clock for some time and realise it’s completely useless. I cannot tell the time by looking at the face.

There is a Son et Lumiére show but there’s quite a crowd here so I buy a ticket in good time. There are 100 chairs with headsets in front of the clock and I get a great seat in the front. The crowds thin as the show starts. No one else bought a ticket. The lights go up and people walk over to gawk but the area is roped off to stop freeloaders. They see me sitting on my own and maybe they can see a corner of the clock. The narrator in my headset begins an explanation, in much detail, of the first of the fifty-two different clock faces. The onlookers start taking photographs, the oldies with cameras and the young with mobile phones. I don’t know whether they photograph me or the clock but they send the photograph back to their mates. ‘This is the one guy who bought the ticket to watch that crap clock show in that half-built church.’ Towards the end of the show various wooden religious figures repeatedly move around the clock on wooden runners but, like BBC chat show hosts, there are few moving parts. The angels wave their arms about a bit and Jesus gives me a nod and a wink a few times. I’m not that impressed. I bet this happens every time.

I am not a huge fan of museums, especially the Imperial War Museum in London, which contains the three worst words in the English language, but the National Tapestry Museum is a top attraction. The huge carpets should be underfoot rather than on walls. Some of the tapestries took five years to make. My mother used to have a Singer like that. I walk the town in the evening but fail to find anything happening in any bars or restaurants. I slowly realise that by merely being here, I am in grave danger of becoming the nightlife. I return in despair to the hotel at 8.30pm. The manager prematurely wishes me Bon nuit. He knows nothing happens here. I am aghast to find Channel 17 has shut down for the night so I retire for a long soak in my brothel bath.

I always look forward to a large hotel breakfast, avoiding only melon balls on principle, what with the awful suffering caused to the poor melons. Today there’s a buzz of sombre conversation at the front bar where locals perch on bar stools as they down espressos, but they glare back. The manager waves me away as if I’m a beggar on the take. ‘Petit déjeuner. Ze back room.’ I sit at one of only two place settings, have cornflakes from one of two bowls, take OJ in one of the two glasses and eat two of the last four croissants. It would not be unreasonable for me to assume that one remaining guest has yet to dine.

Before I check out, I surf the TV and accidentally stumble upon Channel 17. I get twenty seconds of Olga on the same chaise longue until the broadcast ends precisely at 10am. I wait ten polite minutes to check out but the manager gives me that knowing look. ‘That porno channel just finished, eh?’ Upon my polite enquiry the manager shows me the timetable of the bus from the Gare to the airport. One bus leaves at 8.04am and the next leaves at 11.50am. I have missed the first bus and the second is too late for me. There are four hours between buses. They don’t use a bus timetable around here, they use a calendar.

I arrive by taxi at Beauvais terminal one nano-second after the Paris bus deposits ninety ginger Irish passengers plus bags. I stand in line out the door, drag my bag across bare concrete and check in by the building site hoardings. The overhead screens have twee pictures of little thatched cottages because all Irish houses still look this. Past security I wait inside the tent, which upon close inspection is a marquee in need of a party. One moment the apron is deserted and the next there’s 210 million dollars of Boeing’s finest hardware; all three aircrafts sporting the angelic harp on the tail with the tricolour and the EI aircraft number on the fuselage. The aircraft are bound for Dublin, Shannon and Milan.

Who ever thought a Paddy airline could fly Italians from an airport 80 km from Paris to near Milan for one euro? I enjoy a swirl of national pride. I want to strut my stuff inside the tent and tell everyone that those shiny aircraft are ours. Sure, it’s all we have as a nation: Guinness, Waterford Crystal (now made in Poland), Bono and the lads, Boyzone, Westlife, Saint Bob, the baldy girl who did the Prince cover, Terry Wogan, the ex-James Bond actor, St Paddy’s Day, Riverdance, the shamrock, the craic and this airline. Plus literary chaps like Joyce, Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, Swift and meself, and also the Corrs, particularly Andrea. And not forgetting Sharon of the RTE News, Noodles Carey from the weather and Lisa who does the weather forecast on Sky News.

Mick shares my patriotic enthusiasm. ‘They don’t call us the fighting Irish for nothing. We have been the travel innovators of Europe. We built the roads and laid the rails. Now it’s the airlines. I’m Irish and we don’t have to prove anything. We are God’s own children. We bow down to nobody. The airline industry is full of bullshitters, liars and drunks and we excel at all three in Ireland. We will be the world’s biggest airline. There is no shortage of ambition here. We’ll stuff every one of them in Europe, we won’t be second or third and saying, “Didn’t we do well?” We are a small Irish company, out there stuffing it to the biggest airlines all over Europe, and of course that feels good.’

Customer Service

Ruinair Ltd

Dublin Airport

Dear Sirs,

I wish to complain about my recent flight from Dublin to Beauvais.

I boarded early to get a good seat at the rear of the aircraft. I remind you that your website states the following: ‘We operate a free seating policy, so seats cannot be pre-booked. However, we operate a priority boarding system which allows you to choose your own seat on board.’ There were seats vacant in rows at the rear but when I went to sit there a cabin crew girl told me I could not sit in these rows. When I asked her why not, she replied, ‘Balance.’ I said I was fine and I hadn’t touched a drop of hard liquor all day. When I asked her what she meant, she did not know, but kept saying ‘For balance.’ Clearly she was repeating something she had been told without fully understanding it. I have travelled on many other airlines and have seen passengers sit in these rows and we all lived to tell the tale to our loved ones. Now I am worried that if I sit ever again in these rows on any aircraft I may single-handedly cause the aircraft to topple over and plunge to mother earth, and all because of very little old me. I might add there were some rather large Americans on board who sat randomly all over the aircraft and they were a far greater danger to the ‘balance’ of the aircraft, since I am only a mere 12 stone and they were humungous.

My complaint is that although you state passengers can choose their own seat on board, clearly this is not the case. I look forward to your detailed and ‘balanced’ reply.

Yours etc,

Disgusted of Dublin

Four days later…

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
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 &euro;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 &euro;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)
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

Ruinair Flight FR206 – Tuesday @ 8.30am – DUB-STN-DUB

Fare &euro;2 plus taxes, fees and charges &euro;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 &euro;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 &euro;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.’

Mick adores Boeing and he sometimes visits Seattle to collect new aircraft in person. ‘Boeing made a lot of bullshit promises in 1999 but uniquely in the history of aviation they have beaten them. This is the best bloody aircraft in the world for short-haul operations. You people build the best god-damn aircraft in the world. My three favourite words are ‘Made in Seattle’. I promise I won’t say anything like ‘Screw Airbus’. Bravo Boeing! Adios Airbus! Fuck the French. We are an oasis of Boeings in a sea of Airbuses in Europe. And I can’t fly the bloody things. I can’t even turn them on.’ Once he bought 9 billion US dollars worth of aircraft from Boeing at a significant discount, believed to be at $28 million each rather than the list price of $60 million: ‘We raped them. I wouldn’t even tell my priest what discount I got.’ Mick doesn’t like the wider Airbus A320. ‘I’ve heard a lot of horseshit about a wider fuselage. I’ve yet in fifteen years in this industry to meet one passenger who booked his ticket based on a wider fuselage.’

The terminal walls are plastered with advertisements for this airline. ‘This is the home of low fares.’ Here we live and breathe their Eurobrand. There is a route map but Western Europe has disappeared under a swathe of yellow arrows emanating from Stansted. This airline adds new routes at a rate only exceeded by the inflation rate in Zimbabwe. Along the way there’s a Ruinair aircraft outside with the words Arrividerci Alitalia. Stuff it to the Eyeties, but don’t get too xenophobic. Other aircraft announce Auf Wiedersehen Lufthansa. It must be great for a Lufthansa pilot to park at an airport stand and look at that jingoism out your cockpit window for 25 minutes (usual turnaround time). Other aircraft in the fleet have the slogans Say No to Lufthansa’s Fuel Tax, Say No to BA Fuel Levy, Bye Bye SkyEurope, Bye Bye EasyJet and Bye Bye Baby, the latter a reference to competitor BMI Baby rather than to a 1970s pop song. They might as well put on the side of every aircraft, To All Other European Airlines—Go Fuck Yourselves.

I walk the concourse. The newspaper headlines in W. H. Smith catch my eye. The Evening Standard has ‘Children Must Not Use Mobile Phones’. Unlikely. The Daily Sport has ‘TV Star’s Sex with Poodle Next Door’. Equally unlikely, I fear. The Sun has ‘One Hundred Thousand Holidays for a Fiver’. Is this news? Another Daily is asking its readers ‘What does it mean to be British?’ The best reply to date is from a man in Switzerland: ‘Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Chinese on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American soap shows on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign.’

The Stansted Express to Liverpool Street is punctual, not cheap. It’s worth taking the train because the BAA tell us that last year there were 178 days of roadworks on the motorway to London and there are 571 sets of traffic lights between here and Central London. I gaze around. Airports, there’s nothing like them. The variety of people and cultures, excitement and expectation, arrival and escape, the last-minute crises, the personal dramas, the tearful partings and joyful reunions. I could live in an airport. Jesus, maybe I do.

I have always loved airlines and travel; eschewing a structured social order and a daily routine of life for a flight of fancy to a new world less familiar; cheating the four seasons. Mick is not such a fan. ‘The problem with the airline industry is it is so populated with people who grew up in the 1940s or 1950s who got their excitement looking at airplanes flying overhead. They wanted to be close to airplanes. Mercifully I was a child of the 1960s and a trained accountant, so aircraft don’t do anything for me. There’s a lot of big egos in this industry. That might be a better title for them, including myself rather than entrepreneurs. It’s a stupid business, which generally loses a lot of money. With the exception of Southwest and ourselves, and EzJet to a lesser extent, nobody makes a lot of money at it.’

But why go to Central London when I have shops, restaurants, cafés, a viewing gallery, ample seating and more tourists than I could ever encounter on Oxford Street or at Madame Tussauds? I decide to spend the remaining five hours of my allotted time in the UK here, and I engage in my continuing observation of my fellow users of this airport.

1. Italian Students. They reside permanently in Departures, sorted into large groups, surrounded by backpacks piled high on luggage trolleys. They are dressed by FCUK, Diesel and Quicksilver. They survive on communal bottles of mineral water and occasional trips to Prêt a Manger. They rarely venture into Central London. They keep in touch with the world via Dell laptops and Wifi G-mail. They grow goatee beards or shave only weekly. They fly home for significant events such as births, marriages or funerals but promptly return to their place of permanent residence, irresistibly drawn by fares of one euro and the absence of rent at Stansted. I don’t engage in voluntary conversation because the guys wear T-shirts which advise ‘Practice Safe Sex, Go Fuck Yourself’ or else ‘If You Don’t Like Oral Sex, Then Shut Your Mouth.’ Their spiky bohemian girlfriends wear T-shirts which advise ‘Your Son is in Good Hands’. These passengers are the key to success in the low fares airline business since they will happily take 6am flights to nowhere and catch two-hour-long bus excursions, whilst businessmen love Heathrow and BA. The difference is time. Businessmen are time poor. No one has more time to spare than an Italian student.

2. Old Dears. They sometimes gather around in a huddle, take out a sliced white loaf, add some Utterly Butterly spread, select ham and cheese from assorted baskets and self-assemble their own sandwiches in a manufacturing operation of such operational efficiency as to impress even Henry Ford.

3. Old Blokes. They cluster together in teams and are identifiable in sporting matching blazers and grey slacks, possibly either rightly proud veterans or members of a lawn bowling club. Often they break out into Welsh accents and talk about getting up at 4am to catch a mini-bus up the motorway to Stansted.

4. Foursomes. Two pairs of Old Dears and Old Blokes off on holidays. One Old Bloke is hyper-active and so refuses to sit, preferring to go for newspapers for all tastes and to search airport desks for luggage tags. His Old Dear recalls she left a cucumber in the fridge at home so she telephones her daughter to use it. The second Old Bloke is not budging and wonders aloud why anyone needs luggage tags since they advertise to all that your home is empty for two weeks. His Old Dear decides to re-lace her gleaming new sneakers. Eventually she gives up. ‘Good job I don’t work in a shoe shop. I’d be there for hours doing up laces.’

5. Check-in Ladies. These females of a certain age wear blue uniforms which are two sizes too small. The ladies are wide, rather than tall, and teeter about on precarious six-inch heels. They wander amidst the ever-lengthening queues of the Great Unwashed disappearing over the horizon, occasionally looking at impressive clipboards and lists of flight timings, scribbling notes with Bic biros. Their job is to never make eye contact or engage any passengers, and particularly not to intervene when any check-in delays arise. But beware. Cross these ladies once and you will never fly anywhere anytime ever again.

6. Check-in Gents. These thirty-ish males stand in the raised areas overlooking each check-in area. They are only visible from the waist upwards, unfortunately often much like Fiona Bruce on the BBC. They wear excessive assorted BAA security ID dog tags hung around their necks like Vietnam GIs and sport tight officialdom haircuts. The Check-in Gent’s job is to closely examine all the female talent below and to nod approvingly in small groups when a fit Italian brunette or a Nordic blonde with big tits leans over the desk below.

7. Trolley Dollies. Not flight attendants but guys in luminous jackets who gather the baggage trolleys from the concourse. Their job is to steal back the trolleys from sleeping Italian students, make the world’s longest snake of inter-connected trolleys, apply for an entry in the Guinness World Records and drive their trolley snake through the heart of the dormant student population, forcing them to rise from their slumber and scatter like the parting of the Red Sea by Moses. ‘Sorry mate, I didn’t see you down there.’

8. Dixon’s Homing Businessman. Guys in suits with an overnight bag, laptop PC, briefcase and duty free bag. They stand carrying all four items whilst on a mobile telephone, broadcast to the Departures lounge about sales forecasts and cash budgets, refuse to sit and lessen the load, instead irresistibly drawn to the threshold of Dixon’s electrical store, worried that the latest digital nano-gadget might pass them by.

9. The Well-Heeled Couple. He is tall with proud features and silver hair and wears chinos with a crease, open-neck Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and blue blazer with gold buttons. She wears make-up, a tan, jewels, and heels. Both are fifty-something. Their luggage matches, mostly it’s Louis Vuitton, and they lug golf bags or skis over to the oversize baggage. They ask for directions around Stansted since they are only used to the confines of Heathrow Terminal 1 or 5. ‘We usually fly BA Club Europe but this cheap little Irish airline flies to somewhere near our summer holiday home / winter ski chalet / golf course / friend’s yacht.’

10. Lost Elderly Irishman. He is alone and is bewildered by Stansted, having left his Cricklewood or Kilburn digs on a rarely taken journey back to his roots, usually to Knock Ireland West, maybe sadly to a funeral. Or I suspect some well-meaning relative bought him a ticket home for two pence so he feels obliged to use it. I doubt he is sitting at home Googling away all day looking for free seat sales. Personally I blame low fares airlines for upsetting his ordered life. He wears his Sunday best, an old navy suit, perhaps his only suit, and his passport shakes in his rough hands. I always offer him as much assistance as possible.

I am early for check-in. It’s two hours to departure. I sit opposite a screen showing my flight. The desk opens soon after and I amble over. I am overtaken by a woman with a walking stick who runs to the same check-in desk. She is using the established Old Woman with Fake Walking Stick ploy to get ahead in the queue.

In the security area we watch a statuesque six-foot-plus lady passenger. She sets off the X-ray machine so she stops by the BAA staff, holds her arms out and waits to be frisked. It’s a male staff member, about five foot five and his eyes are at the level of her breasts.

He smiles. ‘Darling, I’d love to search you but I’d lose my job.’ A female staff member rescues him.

The Metro Café in Departures is crammed with Ruinair staff; less passenger fare and more works canteen. It’s terrifying to sit near the departure gates at Stansted, with the constant stream of threats they unleash at us poor passengers over the tannoy. ‘Pre-boarding call. Come immediately to Gate 42. Last few remaining passengers. The gate is now closing. Your luggage will be offloaded. You will be denied boarding. Last and final boarding call.’ And there’s the public shaming of passengers by name.

If you wish to break a terrorist suspect, don’t play white noise. Make them spend a day at Stansted.

The Low Fares Airline (2)
THE LOO FARES AIRLINE

Picture the scene. The plane lifts off. Then only minutes into the flight the fasten-seat-belts signs throughout the cabin start to flash. You return to your seat, anxiously awaiting turbulence, perhaps worse. The next thing you see is your captain striding purposefully up the aisle to the cupboard-sized water closet. Pinned to your seat in terror, you wonder who is flying the plane in his absence. But a few minutes later the pilot saunters back down the gangway and the emergency lights are extinguished. Only then do you discover that the whole performance was just to ensure the pilot can visit the facilities without having to join a queue. And the airline where this is standard procedure? Well, it’s Ruinair. Mick O’Leery explains: ‘Look, even the captain has to take a leak occasionally. When such times arise, it is normal procedure to switch the seat-belt sign on to ensure all passengers are seated.’ One of our readers, who was interrupted while ensconced in the lavatory, isn’t reassured. ‘It was very alarming,’ says the flyer, who was 20 minutes into a two-hour journey to the south of France when the seatbelt lights lit up and the stewardess announced that the plane was beginning to land. ‘The passengers were confused, we were all looking at our watches. Then the stewardess came on again to say we weren’t landing and that the captain had just needed to relieve himself.’ But O’Leery remains unrepentant. ‘I agree it’s not ideal interrupting customers mid-pee for the captain, but it’s all part of ensuring a fast turnaround at the other end.’

DAILY TELEGRAPH

THE LOW IQ AIRLINE

Three Norwegian tourists who planned a holiday on the Greek island of Rhodes landed in the south-western French town of Rodez after misunderstanding their destination on a Ruinair internet booking, officials said. The three, identified as Bente, Marit and Knut, appear to have been surprised when their Ruinair flight landed in Rodez, which boasts a medieval town centre with a 13th century cathedral but none of the Greek island’s beach resorts. ‘We were told of the mistake when the three tourists arrived at the airport and we tried to make their stay as agreeable as possible before they decided to return to Norway,’ said Florence Taillefer, the head of the Rodez tourism office.

REUTERS

THE LOW FEES AIRLINE

Aware of the need to step up its promotional efforts in an increasingly uncertain market, Truro School in Cornwall has mounted a publicity campaign in Essex to capitalise on cheap Ruinair flights from Stansted to Newquay. Simon Price, the boarding school’s deputy head, said: ‘It would make perfect sense for someone from the Stansted area to board here. The flights are normally £10 if you book in advance, although we’ve got someone coming to visit this week who paid 79p.’ Bill Levene, 17, who is studying chemistry, physics and maths at A level, said: ‘The boys learn about co-operation and teamwork living in a boarding house. And I’ve learnt how to use the washing machine,’ he added.

TIMES ONLINE

THE LOW ESTEEM AIRLINE

A man who made bizarre attempts to kidnap female Ruinair staff had a toy gun and pieces of rope in his pocket when he was arrested. Gavin Plumb, 20, targeted women wearing the low-cost airline’s distinctive blue uniform as they travelled by train from Bishop’s Stortford to Stansted Airport. He sat in front of Ruinair employee Katazyna Pasek and handed her a note which read, ‘I will do anything’. She moved to another seat, but Plumb followed and showed her a piece of paper which read, ‘I will do anything, so keep quiet and get off with me at the next station. Otherwise I will shoot you and everyone on this train.’ He put his finger to his lip, indicating she should keep quiet, a prosecutor told Chelmsford Crown Court. Fearing she was going to be killed, Miss Pasek became upset and other passengers intervened. Plumb moved down the carriage and got off. Two days later, air stewardess Marlene Gaborit, also wearing her uniform, was in an almost empty carriage when Plumb sat beside her. He showed her a note which read, ‘I’m a police officer. You have to get off at the next station for a quick chat.’ He asked her if she wanted to see his ID and he produced a card. As Plumb got off he touched her leg and said: ‘No worries.’ He was still on the platform when transport police saw him later. He was asked if he had claimed to be a police officer, which he denied, but seemed agitated, said the prosecution. When asked if he had any police ID, he said: ‘My little brother uses my coat. He pretends to be a police officer. I’ve just remembered, there’s a gun in my pocket.’ He had a black toy handgun and three pieces of rope on him. When arrested, he said that he wanted to be a police community support officer. During questioning, he said that it had all been a silly prank because he was bored at home. Plumb, of Upper Stonyfields, Harlow, pleaded guilty to two charges of attempted kidnap. Defence counsel described the offences as very unusual with disturbing undertones and said Plumb, who was of previous good character, was a vulnerable young man who suffered from low self-esteem.

THE GUARDIAN

THE LOW AIRLINE

A Ruinair pilot was demoted following a serious incident on a flight carrying 128 passengers from Stansted to Cork, it has emerged. Poor communications between the pilot and co-pilot led to the incident, where the Boeing 737-800 aircraft flew too low over Bishopstown. The Air Accident Investigation Unit of the Department of Transport (AAIU) has published its investigation into the incident, which took place with 134 people on board. The AAIU report says the flight over Bishopstown was reported to the Cork Airport Authority by ‘at least 16 upset residents, whose independent and consistent complaints, submitted by telephone and in writing, referred to noise and how low the aircraft was being flown.’

THE IRISH TIMES

THE LOW VISIBILITY AIRLINE

A passenger jet which was destined for City of Derry Airport has landed at an Army base six miles away by mistake. The Liverpool to Derry service, operated by Eirjet on behalf of Ruinair, landed at Ballykelly airstrip. Ruinair said in a statement it was due to an ‘error by the pilot who mistakenly believed he was on a visual approach to City of Derry airport’. Ballykelly airfield, formerly RAF Ballykelly, has 2,000m of partially-paved strip, of which only around half is understood to be usable, not least since it is now intersected by a railway line. It has not been used for fixed wing aircraft since 1971. One of the passengers said ‘The pilot apologised and said, “We have arrived at the wrong airport. I ask you to be patient.”’ Another passenger said he knew the flight was landing at the wrong airport. ‘I tried to tell the crew that we were landing in the wrong place, but it was too late to do anything because the descent was almost over. It was hilarious.’ Brian Mather, a passenger, said the soldiers treated the passengers well. ‘They could see the funny side of it. Some of the soldiers came on board and laughingly welcomed us to their international airport.’ Captain Mervyn Granshaw, chairman of the British Airline Pilots’ Association, said there were several reasons why such an incident could occur. ‘Human beings are fallible—from simple things like putting teabags in a milk jug to the other end of the spectrum of landing at the wrong runway.’ Ruinair chief executive Mick O’Leery said, ‘The pilot seems to have made a stupid mistake.’

BBC NEWS

RUINAIR ANNOUNCES 16th EUROPEAN BASE IN DERRY BALLYKELLY

Ruinair, Europe’s largest low fares airline, today announced its 16th European base, in Derry Ballykelly airport. On Wednesday last, the independent surveyors, Eirjet, working on behalf of Ruinair held an impromptu meeting with representatives from Ballykelly Airport Loading and Logistics Services (BALLS). The military precision of the operation, un-congested, low cost facilities, impeccable turn out and well-drilled staff led Eirjet to advise Ruinair that these were clearly people it could do business with. Announcing the new base today, Leo Hairy Camel, Ruinair’s CEO designate, said: ‘This is not a load of Barracks. Since its inception, Ruinair has been waging war on high cost airports, and our announcement today of a new base at Costa Del Ballykelly is just another of our military manoeuvres to continue to lower fares for European consumers. Ballykelly Airport is a breath of fresh air and this development marks the demise of Taj-Mahal airports run by fat cats. Ballykelly secured this base by fluke despite intense competition from over so airports throughout Europe. Airport operators the length and breadth of Europe are today taking note that the future of airports lies in simple, functional, low cost facilities. Ruinair’s new route from Ballykelly to Nocincz (pronounced Nochance) go on sale today on www.ruinair.com/aprilfooledyou.

WWW.RUINAIR.COM

Belgium

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

Fare &euro;1 plus taxes, fees and charges &euro;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 &euro;750 million of taxpayers’ money yet the builders want &euro;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 &euro;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.

After one hour the eastern coastline of Ireland is in view, with the undulating hills and pastures of Wicklow sweeping seamlessly towards the finest coastal residences of Killiney and Dalkey, home to Bono, The Edge, Enya, Eddie Irvine and Neil Jordan, and of course little old me. We cruise over Dublin Bay, past lush golf courses and white sands to touch down on cue. Ireland never looked so good.

We land in Dublin at 18.10, twenty minutes ahead of our scheduled arrival time. What with the one-hour time difference, I think we landed before we took off, which is surely impossible. I’m amazed, since this is an Irish airline. Sure, we’re always late for everything. Stephen Hawking’s weighty tome called A Brief History of Time was not a great seller in Ireland. Oscar Wilde once remarked there’s no point in being on time for anything in Ireland since there will be no one else there to appreciate it. The poet Patrick Kavanagh advised there were thirty words in the Irish language equivalent to the Spanish mañana but none conveys the same sense of urgency. When God made time here, sure didn’t he make plenty of it.

Inside the terminal building at passport control, our queue is stopped by the officer sitting in the box.

‘Where are you travelling from today, madam?’ he asks the elderly lady ahead of me.

‘From Murcia. In Spain,’ she replies.

That should be sufficient information but it’s not. ‘Did you have a pleasant time?’

What? She nods. ‘Yes, it was good enough. Weather was a bit mixed. Cloudy for a few days.’

‘But you enjoyed the break?’ he perseveres.

Jesus Christ. The rest of us need to get home sometime today. ‘Yes, it was nice.’

That must be it. But not so. ‘Would you go back there?’

‘Ah, I think I would. But not this year. Maybe next year.’

They don’t know each other. I am sure of that. ‘Right then, all the best.’

‘Thanks again.’

He bids her fond farewell. ‘Safe home.’

Next it’s my turn. I am dreading another Spanish inquisition. He gives my passport a quick glance. ‘Fine, Paul.’ I mean, I don’t know him or anything either. I don’t travel that much. It’s only an Irish welcome.

I am beginning to understand the real challenge I have set myself. It’s not the getting there and back that’s the difficult part. It’s having to spend time in these continental places much beloved by Ruinair.

The Low Fares Airline (3)
THE LOW FARES TAXI

A row over security at Stansted Airport has broken out after it was alleged an aircraft was flagged down ‘like a London taxi’ as it moved towards the runway for takeoff. The GMB union says a Ruinair plane was stopped by one of the airline’s employees, breaching safety and security rules. Ruinair has confirmed the incident took place, but says safety was not compromised. A GMB spokesman said the plane, with approximately 100 passengers on board, was flagged down as it taxied towards the runway. Ruinair denies the plane was taxiing but admits it had moved off its stand. In a statement the airline said one of its co-pilots had asked to travel home to Esbjerg as a supernumerary crew member. The airline’s statement confirmed that the co-pilot, who had a fully authorised air-side access pass and was wearing full reflective clothing, did board the plane. ‘He boarded after the aircraft had pushed back early from the stand, and before the engines had been started up. While it was unorthodox and the co-pilot was disciplined, there was no breach of safety procedures and no delay to the aircraft. The flight continued onwards on its journey and arrived 22 minutes ahead of schedule in Esbjerg.’

BBC NEWS

THE NO FARES TAXI

The head of Ruinair has come up with a novel way to beat Dublin’s notorious traffic jams – his own taxi licence. Tired of crawling through the capital’s frequent gridlocks, multi-millionaire O’Leery has bought a taxi licence, number MG99, which allows him to drive his luxury Mercedes S500 saloon in restricted bus lanes. Since the deregulation of the taxi industry three years ago, the number of licences in circulation in the city has tripled to around 10,000. A spokesperson for Ruinair confirmed the move by O’Leery. ‘To the best of my knowledge it’s true and what is reported in the papers is correct,’ the spokesperson said. While it is not illegal to use the licence, O’Leery would be obliged to pick up customers if hailed while driving without a passenger in his car, the papers said. O’Leery was quoted as follows: ‘Last time I checked this was a democratic republic. As long as I pay my taxes I’m free to do with my money what I like. It’s a black taxi registered in Mullingar. I have a driver who drives it for me. It appears to be alright if I rent a taxi but if I own a taxi there’s a problem. If you’re in Mullingar then give me a call. I’d be happy to look after you. If they want to amend the taxi regulations which says I’m allowed to pick up people in Dublin, I’ll be happy to pick up people in Dublin. And I’ll do it a lot cheaper.’ There is a meter in his taxi and it produces receipts. The fare from Mullingar to Dublin Airport is eighty euros. ‘We are a low-cost airline so we wouldn’t entertain mileage allowances like that,’ he added.

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