Ruinair. Paul Kilduff

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 €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 €300 plus taxes, fees and charges €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