Ruinair. Paul Kilduff

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 €2 plus taxes, fees and charges €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 €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.

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