Good report – Your report proves how important it is to pay full attention during the safety briefing.

Adam

Thanks Adam. Glad you enjoyed it. It does prove that the safety demo is very important which is why I always listen to it even if I can recite Ryanair’s safety demo off by heart now. 😉

Scary stuff for the passengers…although i would have thought the crew probably practiced the same scenario a thousand times in the simulator

I would hope so. It really was the smoothest landing I’ve ever had on Ryanair so the captain was obviously being really careful. 😉

I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Can’t believe I’m defending Ryanair as I hate them, but… I know Ryanair get bad PR for not dealing with some situations well, but I doubt they go out of their way to make things more difficult than they need to be.

So, there was an aircraft already on the ground due to RON in Dublin, and an aircraft coming in 1.5 hours late that wasn’t going to RON in Dublin. They effectively swapped the two aircraft plots around – nothing major, airlines do it all the time and a complication will only arise from swapping the two plots if one of the aircraft is scheduled for a maintenance input at a specific base that night.

As for the standby crew… That’s what they’re on standby for – to recover irregular ops. For all we know, the crew on the delayed inbound might have been delayed enough to be out of hours to operate their final sector, and if so Ryanair would either have had to cancel their last flight (and the resulting first flight the following day as the aircraft would have been out of position), or put the standby crew onto it. Again, that’s what standy crews are for – no point in having crews on standby if you don’t use them, and if this all occurred late on in the day (which it sounds like it did) after all the crew scheduled to operate reported and sickness is therefore not going to be an issue for the remainder of the day, then you might as well use the standby crew to recover a delay.

Andy

I fully agree with all of that, Andy. I was not commenting on the logic of it as it makes complete sense to me. I was merely pointing out that Ryanair do make an effort for their passengers despite the extra expense involved with sending a different aircraft to BRS. As for the inbound crew going out of hours, I hadn’t thought about that. That would be a very good explanation for why they swapped everything around. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that Ryanair are not really as bad as everyone will have you believe and do go out of their way to avoid inconveniencing their customers.

No, you misunderstand. The aircraft they used for us was going to remain in Dublin overnight so by using it and a standby crew they were able to get us out on time but they did not inconvenience any other passengers. I only posted this as it’s the sort of thing I would have expected from the likes of BA but never from Ryanair given their reputation for not giving a sh*t about their passengers. I just wanted to highlight that they are not always bad and very often go out of their way to keep the passengers happy.