h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/ryan.htm

http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/R/ryanair_caught_napping/index.html

Did anyone see this programme tonight? Was anyone as shocked as me?
Bearing in mind the revelations, would you fly with them in the future? I certainly will not.

Family and friends will be travelling from Humberside to Dublin in June for my son's wedding. The fare is one pound at the moment. I think we'll risk it.

To be honest the programme did seem to be a bit of a hatchet job centred around Ryanair's lack of customer services, and their lack of respect to their cabin staff. Well at the prices they charge for their flights, I'm not surprised that that happens.

I was encouraged that it seemed that the cost cutting seems to happen only in the passenger areas. The flight crew fly within legal hours, albeit pushed to the limit and not scheduled terribly well. And there was no mention of cost cutting with respect to aircraft safety. So again I would hark back to the prices charged and ask, what did you expect.

I don't buy the cabin crew cost cutting as a security issue. Over the years I have travelled in and out of UK airports to Canada and the States, plus package flights to European holiday resorts. In no case was my passport scrutinised as I was boarded the plane. In fact the only times when I have been asked about my identity and reason for travel etc was back in the 80s when I used to do the Manchester to Belfast run, and the war against the IRA was still hot.

No, overall my opinion of that Dispatches show is that is was a bit of sloppy journalism, spinning a non-story and a bit of a waste of time.

"And there was no mention of cost cutting with respect to aircraft safety"

Except for the inflatable escape chute that was possibly showing an error but wasn't reported and wasn't checked. And the 'who cares' attitude to life jackets. But hey, that only matters if you crash.

I agree fully that if you pay nothing for your fair you can't really complain if you get nothing back. Except that people are stupid enough to think otherwise and think they get normal service for a sub standard fare. Hopefully this programme will show some of the problesm with that approach.

I certainly wouldn;t fly with them, but then I wouldn't have done so anyway on principle.

"And the 'who cares' attitude to life jackets."

Lets face it... If several hundred tonnes of aircraft makes contact with the ocean at several hundred miles an hour, the only thing life jackets are any use for is to make it easier for the emergency services to pick up whats left of the bodies

true. But it's still a safety requirement and they weren't doing it due to the tight turnaround times. So they are cutting into safety for the sake of money.

"Except for the inflatable escape chute that was possibly showing an error but wasn't reported and wasn't checked. And the 'who cares' attitude to life jackets."

I didn't buy those two either. The escape shute error was only a possible, we certainly didn't see any shots of there being a real error there. It might be something, it might not.

As for lifejackets, I always assumed that they were included on planes to mark the crash site when a plane goes down over water! Off the top of my head I can only think of two crashes on water where there were survivors - 14th Street Bridge crash in '82 and Ethiopean Airlines hijack crash in the Indian Ocean in '95(?) - and as such a life jacket would be useful.

But anyway as you say, I wouldn't fly with them either. I like travelling in a bit more comfort.

I hate tp bang on but if those life jackets saved 1 life then it'd be worth it. And if they weren't there then you definitly wouldn't be able to use them to survive.

"The escape shute error was only a possible, we certainly didn't see any shots of there being a real error there. It might be something, it might not."
but it wasn't checked! It might be/it might not be is not good enough wghen it comes to a blazing plane and the lives of a couple of hundred people.

It should have been checked, even if there was nowt wrong with it so that it was known that there was nowt wrong with it. Huger gert big things hurtling through the air at several hundred miles an hour loaded up with gallons of av gas are exactly the sort of things to be paranoid about safety with.

As I said in the other thread on this subject, the pressure on journos to fill the 60 minute slot with the expected story is immense.

If a journo goes 'undercover' (ie obtains a job by deception) and 'reports' on what they 'discover' they are presurised by their own employers not to say "well, actually, XYZ isn't a bad company to work for, their safety standards are industry average, the majority of their staff are reasonably content with their lot though of course there's the odd wingeing plonker, but you find them everywhere."

I've been sceptical about this form of journalism since the company of a friend of mine was effectively destroyed by just such a hatchet job. The most astonishing thing was listening to his wife feeling sorry for the journalist, put under pressure to turn the story in the way the tv company wanted it. I wish I could have that much grace in the face of that much gratuitous venom.

B

I'm sure if the same thing had happened in BA, or American Airlines, or Eurostar, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, or TGI Fridays or what have you, and the journos had sufficiently long enough time to find problems, then they could do equally as good a hatchet job. I don't know about others, but I have worked in private companies for 16 years and I have yet to see perfection, or anything close to it.

Ryanair continuously gets slammed because everybody expects that cheap flight somehow shouldn't happen. Somehow it's not quite right. It's a perversion against the natural law of things. We bought the line for years that all that money we were paying the airlines was going into safety and better food and nicer flights. Well in general, it wasn't. Lots of people were paid to do things that nobody either wanted or needed. And many of these companies ended up making huge losses or going bankrupt. Now I don't know about you, but I would prefer any day to work with a cheap profitable company than a loss-making expensive one, because the pressures and the desire to cut corners would be a lot less in the first example than in the second example.

Pretty underwhelming, I thought, given how much time they were recording stuff.

If someone really wanted to do a thorough hatchet job on airlines (and not just Ryanair), they'd do it on the basis of engineering metallurgy, and fatigue cracks in airframes. It would still be disingenuous, though. You get what you pay for.

If people insist on flying places, sooner or later they'll meet something nasty. I think I'd settle for my rude awakening being as benign as a seat that the last passenger sicked up in.

(Having said all that, the "1A, Seat of Death" story was quite entertaining...)

Apparently the "seat of death" affects *all* Boeing planes of that calibre, and it has been passed as safe by the FAA and the CAA, the world safety experts on such things.

Qoute - If someone really wanted to do a thorough hatchet job on airlines (and not just Ryanair), they'd do it on the basis of engineering metallurgy, and fatigue cracks in airframes. It would still be disingenuous, though. You get what you pay for.

Soooo.......let me get this right. If you pay £500 for a seat, then fatigue cracks (et al) are not acceptable, but if you pay £1, then you are not bothered?

No.

Planes would be safer if their flying hours were to be limited, because their components would be further from their fatigue limit when taken out of service.
If you throw something away before it's (nearly) worn out, though, you will pay more in the long run for the more-frequent replacements.
Every year, I would guess that a few hundred people die because of fatigue failure in aircraft.
They wouldn't die with tighter engineering standards, but we'd all pay more to fly.

This is the kind of thing it's easy to scaremonger with, but the logic is dubious. It's partly that people don't feel very happy with the (necessary) idea of a net-worth model for human life. The statistics also look terrifying to the layman : if you add up the length of the cracks in a long-service airframe, it'll come to kilometres rather than metres.

And that's regardless of the airline. I did say this doesn't just apply to Ryanair, note. You might even speculate that Ryanair are safer aircraft-failure-wise than full-cost airlines, because they're more closely scrutinised.

Why are they offering 3 million seats free? How can they make money? How very odd....

http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/

Wilma, very perturbed

Quote - And that's regardless of the airline. I did say this doesn't just apply to Ryanair, note. You might even speculate that Ryanair are safer aircraft-failure-wise than full-cost airlines, because they're more closely scrutinised.


Completely incorrect. Irrespective of the airline, the maintenance schedule and inspection periods for each aircraft is laid down by the manufacturer of the aircraft and reviewed and enforced by the (in our case) the CAA. Ryanair's aircraft will therefore not be scrutinised any more closely than any other airlines. What WILL make a difference though is if the maintenance schedule is merely carried out, or does the maintenance company go above and beyond. For example, a licensed aircraft engineer could choose to let certain faults pass until the next check (due to time/money constraints)or they could choose to replace/correct faulty items if downtime permits.

As an ex aircraft engineer, I have personally seen aircraft in the hanger in an appalling state, but because the operator insists that the minimum standard is met we have had to let them go with faults that we would ordinarily correct.

It really depends on who does the maintenance, how long the aircraft is out of service and how diligent the engineers concerned are. Technically, an engineer can ground an aircraft anytime he feels airworthiness is threatened - problem is that some choose not to do this if pressure is applied. I am not for one second suggesting that Ryanair would apply pressure to put aircraft back in service with faults, but maintenance standards are affected depending on time available to do thorough servicing.

>>> maintenance standards are affected depending on time available to do thorough servicing.<<<
Mr CP - that is truly truly scary. Are there safety "league tables" for airlines?
Wilma

As an engineer, you'll know that what I'm talking about has got nothing to do with maintenance.

Fatigue, right? You don't fix it. At best, you watch it.

'You might even speculate...' OK, so I was being provocative. Still, better than being pedantic, innit?

'Completely incorrect' is a sentiment that has no place in h2g2. IMHO, anyway.

Pin

Ryanair have some of the *newest* aircraft in the world, so again, metal fatigue might be a slightly bigger problem for those carriers with an ageing fleet.

Second of all - how can Ryanair make money when they are giving away 3 million tickets for free? Think of any flight you have ever been on: did you see empty seats there? Probably. Now what if that empty seat was populated instead by a passenger who got their ticket for free. What if he or she was willing to buy a cup of coffee or a duty-free item? The net effect is that an otherwise empty, loss making seat has been replaced by someone who might pay Ryanair for something. The 3 million tickets, in the main, will be for unpopular routes or unpopular times. Most other passengers will be paying, some quite a bit, because they booked late etc.

Ryanair's business model is based on South West's. I don't know much about how Ryanair has implemented, but the South West model was designed from the ground up to cut down on administration, (ie cost), weight, (ie cost), turnaround times, (ie cost), and staff inflexibility, (ie cost).

Because South West started as a new airline in the 1970s with a very specific business model, it simply did not have the legacy assumptions about what was necessary to run an airline. The simplest example of this is that the checking in system does not allocate a seat. This saves staff time, (ie cost) and computer systems, (ie cost).

This model has been successfully copied by Ryanair and EasyJet as well as other low-cost operators. Interestingly, though 'normal' airlines have tried to copy the model, for example BA with GO, for the most part when existing airlines have tried to do this, they have failed.

This is for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that there is very little overlap between the ways that they do business. The low-cost airline does not use, benefit from or help pay for the check-in system which allocates seats, for example, nor does it contribute to or benefit from the AirMiles reward schemes. There may be existing agreements with unions about roles and responsibilities which result in a less flexible workforce. And so on.

The low cost model was not developed to compete with airlines but with trains and busses. It is less obvious that this is the case in the UK, where wet stuff like sea gets between us and most of our destinations, but this is explicit and implicit in the way that South West has conducted its business and its advertising in the US in the last 30 years.

The long and the short is that most airlines have frills such as check-in systems, air-miles, onboard catering, and so on built into their costs, and they cannot simply ditch those frills. They have dug themselves into a hole that they cannot get out of.

Ben