Budget airline Ryanair has been accused of being "puerile and childish" over its payment policy by business watchdog the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).
That would be the airline run by this cockwallet then...
... you were expecting anything different?
Wild horses could not drag me aboard one of Sky Marshal O'Leary's planes1. No not because he's a twat of the first water or his planes are stuffed to overflowing with burberry clad apes or even, as this report on the beeb's website shows, by the time you've added on the mandatory booking fee, luggage handling fee, being allowed to actually board the fucking plane fee and probably an extra charge which you could have avoided if you performed a sex act with a rutting red deer stag under the port wing before take-off you've ended up paying twice as much as if you had booked with a proper airline.
No, it's because his airline is a menace to everything in the air, birds included.
I've had a couple of conversations with pilots and ATC bods over the years, one of the pilots a former RyanScare employee and he told me that although they stick to the letter of the law they certainly don't do anything that could be called "good airmanship" - pilots are under huge pressure to get the plane in on time and turned round very quickly so they come under pressure to cut corners, get snotty with ATC to get faster and better clearances and low or no hold times (that was confirmed by my acquaintance in ATC) plus there's nothing that can be proven but there's a culture of not erring on the side of caution if a technical fault should be reported - so if the ILS (Instrument Landing System) is not quite reading right but is legally certifiable or - as the ILS isn't a piece of mandatory equipment - it's not working then the fault doesn't get reported and the plane stays flying.
Let's take that ILS example, now ILS approaches are so accurate in a modern plane the plane can use the equipment to land itself in zero visibility, without it you can do other approaches to airports in poor weather but they are "non-precision" and take more work from the pilot. So you're on a crappy weather approach into somewhere surrounded by mountains that Ryanair called, lets say, "Bögbrush" but in reality is some not quite so well equipped airport about 80km from Bögbrush itself. Would you prefer your pilots to be flying a nice, straightforward CAT III ILS approach down to the runway or two stressed out guys, coming up on their max hours, battling with an NDB approach that has a way higher "Decision Height" than the ILS approach and knowing that they are going to get their arses chewed if they miss the approach and go-around delaying the flight?
And that's just in the cockpit. What's going on in the bits that you can't see on the aircraft, especially as all those nice shiny new 737's start to age. Would you think that an engineer working for Ryanair would go "Oh that SpongMonkey that holds the engine to the wing looks a little worn even though the book says it's good for another 6 months. I'll replace it just to be on the safe side, Mr O'Leary won't mind one bit."
Thought not.
Happy flying.
1 which given I'm the one normally running towards wild horses with a bag of oats, a small stepladder and a smile, is something of an achievement for said airline.
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