Seems to me that the most interesting part of this story is:
Most of the cancellations are due to a backlog of staff leave which has seen large numbers of the airline's staff book holidays towards the end of the year.
The airline is changing its holiday year, which currently runs from April to March, to run from January to December instead.
That looks self-inflicted, and entirely predictable. Would anyone care to guess what advantage was intended from changing the holiday year?
I'll have a stab.
Control of commercial pilots' flying hours changed in February 2016 from the
UK▸ Civil Aviation Authority (
CAA» ) to the European Aviation Safety Agency (
EASA» ) to prepare us for Brexit. The EASA rules, like those of the CAA that preceded them, are extremely complex, and impose limitations on total hours of Flight Duty Periods (FDP) at multiple levels covering different periods of time. So there are limits per day, per week, per 28 days etc. Notably;
The total flight time of the sectors on which an individual crew member is assigned as an operating crew member
shall not exceed:
(1) 100 hours of flight time in any 28 consecutive days;
(2) 900 hours of flight time in any calendar year; and
(3) 1 000 hours of flight time in any 12 consecutive calendar months.
If there are limits to a calendar year (which seems a little arbitrary) and a 12-month period, it may be administratively easier to align the leave year to the calendar year. The operator will at least know that he can assume 900 hours per pilot between New Years Day and New Years Eve, and only have to check that they do not exceed the 1000 hours in 12 consecutive months.
I still smell a rat, though. In the days before low-cost airlines arrived, with their cost-cutting working practices, big airlines made sure of flexibility by employing lots of pilots. At one time,
BA» were reported to be struggling to make sure that their pilots were flying the minimum number of hours to keep their licences current - the exact opposite problem. The low-cost model aims to trim the fat from that by getting the maximum 900 hours per year from every member of flight crew. I was told by a former Ryanair pilot, who allowed me the unalloyed pleasure of the jump seat in the cockpit on a flight back from Spain (before 9/11) that Ryanair would aim to get the 900 hours out of a pilot in the minimum time possible - 9 months - then leave it up to them to find a way to stay current in the three months before they could fly again. You cannot even fly passengers as a private pilot in a light aircraft unless you have completed at least three take-offs and landings as "sole manipulator of the controls" in the preceding 90 days. At that time, there was a ready supply of suitably qualified pilots from other airlines and diminishing air forces, but not any more. Not looking after your aircrew, who have an extremely portable skill, means that they will walk away if they get a better offer. Norwegian are expanding rapidly as a low-cost long-haul operator, as are Wow, Icelandair, and others, taking advantage of the open skies policy, and flying
pax▸ via hubs - such as Dublin. They need pilots for both short-haul aircraft (such as A320, Boeing 737) and long haul (A330, B767 etc), and if they offer decent conditions will draw pilots easily. It is no great surprise then that, if crew feel as under-valued as reported in some places, that 140 pilots packed their headsets and walked. 140 pilots equates to a 7,000 hours per month (at two crew per flight) hole in Ryanair's schedule, or 1,400 return flights from Bristol to Spain, for example. With the secondary aim of low cost airlines being maximum occupancy, that hole is substantial, even if it is only 2% of services.
It also remains to be seen how the company will plug the gap. Overtime by pilots is not an option, leaving either recruiting new staff from a shrinking pool, or quietly leaving the cancelled services out of the schedules forever. Mr O'Leary also will have much more to do to restore what was growing customer confidence in his brand. Who remembers the bonfire of the hidden fees, and his statement that if he had known that being nice to passengers was so good for business, he would have started doing it sooner?
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