Ryanair carries more 'posh people' than BA

donnie_darko_3

Barcode wrote: »

I agree with you to an extent. There is a perception that low-cost airlines are, to some extent, unsafe (not true). I agree that it is Ryanairs interest to have stringent safety standards; it's unfortunate that some pilots have made mistakes whilst under pressure. Some of the incidents on my list are not terribly serious in isolation. But the Rome incident report makes for disturbing reading.

I'm not persuaded by claims that they have not yet had a crash. You don't have to crash to be unsafe. I would feel very apprehensive about flying with Onur Air given their record.

I'd have no problems flying with, say, Easyjet or Jet2. I've flown all over the world on more airlines and flights than I care to count. I know I might come across as being overly paranoid. I'm not out to scare anybody about Ryanair, and resent being personally attacked for my interpretation of the facts. It is not just me, but some ryanair pilots themselves that have raised concerns about poor airline management.

I recently had a "near miss" with continental airlines over the atlantic. A Very steep and turbulent climb on bmibaby from Nice, and i think i might have been on that flight to Cork as we landed like a funfair ride skewing left and right. I flew a lot with ryannair and never had a problem other than the scrum to get the best seats on board. I have being flying the world for 25 years.

It would cost the company more in bad publicity to have a crash than to make sure the planes are not safe for flying. Most planes are inspected before each flight and a report produced, it is up to the flight captian how he choses to deal with the defects and i can assure you that most of them fly with being 100% defect free.

My biggest gripe is being sat next to screaming kids. Why dont they put all families at the front of the plane, and us mature gin and tonic, telegraph reading passengers at the back.

Barcode

Are you sure it was a near miss? Did the pilot explain? Often, that is (mostly) due to ATC rather than the pilots themselves. Or did another plane look quite close? Perspective can be skewed, and one thousand feet seperation can visually appear much closer.

Turbulence is a non-entity unless the pilot is stupid enough to fly into a thunderstorm (the Pulkovo crash comes to mind).

I have not said the planes are unsafe. I agree with you about the checks etc, and personally feel confident sitting on most modern aircraft. I have said that Ryanairs management leaves much to be desired. It is often the case that those sorts of things indirectly contribute to accidents when they do occur.

I'm unsure about the 100% defect free remark. I understand it's fairly common to fly with something not working - by this, I mean something very minor that does not affect safety.

Ryanair is not my personal preference. I doubt I'm going to be persuaded otherwise. I do appreciate your post, and agree with most of it. But I still stand by my view that Ryanair have problems with their management which have the potential to impact safety.

JoseChungsDoomsday

ahh ryanair... the one airline you'll never catch me on :money:

alanrowell

At least we now have proof that "low costs airlines mean poor people can travel" is !!!!!!!!

As for why BA has a lower proportion of "the right sort of passenger", it's very simple, BA has a lot of business passengers whose company pays for the flights

ynot2005

its dosent seem that simple to me alanrowell , wether the company pays for the flight or not, the traveller is either an ABC1 type or they are not

shock horror it really does seem that those with money and status are quite happy to fly with ryanair, and why not!, along with millions of others who love ryanair

peterbaker

Only just caught up with this thread. As many of the regular contributors will have guessed, I fully support the spirit of Barcode's reminders. In particular, his reminder that 25 minute turnarounds are not conducive to creating a good safety culture. It should be obvious for any reasonably informed observer to see that for themselves any time they find themselves part of concerted attempts at 25 minute turnarounds if they have their eyes open.

But back to the thread title, I would say that a fair assumption of why Ryanair carries more abc1s than BA is because more abc1s fly than other demographic groups, and Ryanair has a larger overall market share than BA.

Ryanair is not a common man's airline although the common man likes to think of it as such. It's a fact that abc1s are more in control of their own leisure time than less affluent/lower-earning groups and the advent of low cost flights merely enables abc1s to fly far more often than they ever did before.

It's a nonsense statistic really. It's just plucked from an ocean of data which is what you get to manipulate when you are the PR department in a big company. Detailed trend statistics are often more enlightening. Like how has Ryanair's customer profile changed over 20 years, 10 years, 5 years? Have any particular routes got particularly different profiles? Are those any different to when competitors controlled the same routes? Stuff like that.

BTW Barcode, I had not heard of the Aarhus overrun, although I think it must have woken up a few pilots on that route on snowy nights because I think that was around the time when Ryanair diverted the inbound night flight to Billund two nights on the trot leaving me and two planeloads stranded there for up to 48 hours sometime in February 2006. Have you a link to any incident report?

As for those with a penchant for freely using a word which sounds a bit like fishmonger, I respectfully ask that you desist from that form of personal insult unless you can show that the examples asserted and kindly detailed by Barcode did not occur.

I would also remind those who suggest that it is more than Ryanair's reputation is worth to have a fatal accident, that I am fairly sure I read somewhere a while ago now which implied that Michael O'Leary once said (perhaps to insiders) that his company was now of a size to withstand the adverse publicity (or was it just the increased insurance premiums?:p ) of not one, but two fatal accidents. Whether the report I half remember is true or not, when I heard it, it did not surprise me and I did not disagree with its conclusion.