Low cost airline Ryanair flies record number of passengers for fourth month in a row despite cancellations caused by air traffic control crisis. Tony McDonough reports
Ryanair carried a record 18.9m passengers in August despite having to cancel 350 flights last week due to the UK’s air traffic control meltdown.
This was 11% higher than in August last year and more than 25% up on the last pre-COVID year in 2009. It was the fourth straight month Ryanair had flown a record number of passengers. July’s number of 18.7m.
In February this year it announced an £80m investment at Liverpool with four new routes, taking the total to 31. During the year to the end of March 2024 Ryanair predicts it will see more than 2m passengers fly to and from Liverpool John Lennon Airport.
In an interview with LBN in June, Ryanair’s head of communications, Jade Kirwan, said: “We have now flown 35m passengers. It is a nice milestone to reach.
“When you look back, 20,000 a year (in 1988) is miniscule in comparison to what we carry now. We were of course much smaller then. When you see we will carry 2m passengers this year – that is 25% higher than last year. It is a massive rise.”
So far in 2023 Dublin-based Ryanair has flown 177.4m passengers – 30m ahead of where it was this time last year.
Last week the UK’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) suffered a major technical meltdown during the Bank Holiday. This led to the cancellation of more than 2,000 flights. Ryanair alone saw 63,000 passengers affected.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary called the disruption “unacceptable” and described Bank Holiday Monday as “very difficult day”.
Johan Lundgren, chief executive of easyJet, which operates more than 25 routes out of Liverpool,, also demanded a “full independent review” be launched into the failure, adding it “must not happen again”.
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Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe told the BBC: “Simply speaking, our systems received some data on an aircraft and it was unable to process it. That is incredibly rare – we process millions of flight plans every year, thousands every day.
“It is safer for us (in that situation) to revert to a manual system, that makes sure no data that is safety critical to people’s travel can ever fall into the hands of a controller, and they can continue to operate at a lower capacity.
“Very occasionally… we end up with a situation which is not possible to fix immediately. While I agree it is not the service we want to provide, the priority is safety.”