I admire your stance Comet. The more Ryanair get a foothold in the market (selling cheap seats that then cost you a fortune in train fares to get to the city you actually wanted to be in!) the more our decent airlines will be under pressure to survive. If you got a ferry from Calais to Dover would you accept it dropping you off 50 miles away from Dover? How are Ryanair allowed to mis-sell like this?

My third hand (and free) Nokia 3210 is the biz. It makes calls and receives them. Isn’t that what mobiles are supposed to do?

Rough field take off/landing technique involves protecting the nosewheels as much as possible rather than trying to put as much energy as possible through them!

regards
wys

All that cost cutting yet such vast golden handshakes to management. Surely it’s not too difficult to see where the accountants axe should be directed.

Mongu – I don’t disagree with anything you have put in your post and in fact I think it is essential that the costings are given a high priority. However what I am trying to say is that if you consider a ratio between cost balancing and staff morale, it is my opinion (and appears to be most other peoples opinion too) that the balance has done from 50/50 a few years ago to 80/20 now and in Ryanairs case 100/0.
To put it another way, I believe a Managing Director must be a balanced individual capable of seeing all sides of the argument but strong enough to follow his/her own gut instinct when necessary. The MD will get pressure from 2 primary sides – his accountants and his managers. Success comes from blending the two, but if one is given too much influence you are set for a fall. If the accountant is not reigned in the company will initially show great success but then fail because of total depression within the workforce, and if the management make it too staff orientated the company will suffer from the workers not being hungry enough for success.

There are 2 things that limit carrying capacity, actual weight limitations and internal volume/layout. The volume/layout case is best shown by the excellent Shorts 330/360 as the square fuselage section is ideal for putting in large number of square boxes which do not fit well in a round section fuselage. Opening up the galley areas on Concorde would help in the volume/layout case but this is the smaller part of the problem. The major consideration is the max payload which is much more restrictive and pretty well set in stone. If the aircraft is currently running at the max design payload, raising that figure with the licensing authorities would require massive structural reworking of the aircraft plus a complete reworking of all the performance side of the operations. Again for such a small number of airframes I cannot see this being viable.

As somebody recently said this is purely a prestige exercise and one that I don’t think even Virgin can be affording to do with another Gulf War imminent.

Batbay – delighted to help. I’d like to post more along these lines but I don’t want to be considered a bore!

Bhoy – thanks for reminding me of one of my most favourite moments of television…and how relevant your quote!

There are times when I like to let a thread run for a while before I make a comment and this has been the case with the age concern mentioned in this thread. I think it is very easy to say ground all old aircraft as a knee jerk reaction but the reality is more complex than that. An airline is only as good as its engineering department. I would rather fly on a 30+ year old but well maintained jet than a brand new jet operated by some third world regions with dubious line maintenance programs. I know of an outfit that has 5 ex-Russian operated 757’s. The Russian operator obtained the airframes new but there is no known maintenance record for this period of time. The new operator accepted the 5 aircraft on condition that Boeing did a complete inspection on these aircraft before taking up the leases, which they did and now the aircraft are maintained to UK CAA standards. Now if I had to chose whether I’d rather fly on them now or when they were Russian…

regards
wys