Michael O'Leary erupts again

Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary really is the gift that keeps on giving for journalists and bloggers. All it took was a brief shutdown of Scottish airspace, in response to the latest Icelandic volcanic eruption, for him to mount a typical Ryanair stunt, then deliver one of his habitual rants against the government for keeping his planes out of the air.

Let's look at the stunt first. According to O'Leary, Ryanair sent a plane on a roundtrip from Prestwick to Inverness to Aberdeen to Edinburgh and back to Prestwick on Tuesday morning. He reported that when the plane landed, it displayed no traces of volcanic ash, even though the area had been declared a "red zone" with a high ash density.

There's no doubt that the plane flew, but the rest of the story is not so clear. The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) tracked the flight on radar, and reports that the aircraft did not actually fly through the red zone. What's more, if The Guardian is to be believed, the flight was carried out at a height of 41,000 feet. This is significantly above the altitude that Ryanair's usual puddle-jumping flights would normally reach; in fact, you don't often go that high even on transcontinental flights. The presence or absence of ash particles at that height is thus largely irrelevant to the question of whether normal flying operations are safe or not.

The "success" of the test flight prompted O'Leary to urge the CAA to "take their fingers out of their incompetent bureaucratic backsides" and lift the ban on flights. (What a honey-tongued persuader the man is!) Ryanair went so far as to start checking in passengers for flights at Edinburgh, even though the air traffic controllers would never have given take-off clearance. At one level this looks like a low-rent imitation of BA's remarkable powerplay during last year's ash disruption, when the airline set over a dozen long haul flights from around the world on their way to Heathrow, basically defying the CAA to keep them from landing. More likely, however, O'Leary was simply looking to bolster his (not unreasonable) view that if the cancellation of flights takes place at the government's insistence, then it should be the government that picks up the costs involved.

The public's response to the O'Leary-CAA standoff was interesting. One caller to BBC Radio 5-Live called O'Leary "the Arthur Daley of flying"; not much doubt where his sympathies lay. Quite a few others, however, took a more pro-O'Leary view. Consider this reader comment on the Daily Telegraph website:

The government and the met office have a model that they 'know' is right. On the basis if the model alone, they cancel all flights. No cost to them, no unhappy consequences. Easy.

RyanAir however incur some costs. Pissed off passengers, aeroplanes earning no revenue, connsiderable disruption to their plans for a week or so (getting planes and crews back to the right place).

So they go flying to look for the ash. They are the only ones who do so because they are the only ones with an incentive to settle the question. Met Office/Govt have none.

Isn't that risk/reward assessment a bit skewed? If the CAA holds its breath and decides to allow flights to carry on, and then the worst happens and there's an ash-induced disaster, who's going to get blamed? It won't be Michael O'Leary. Ryanair has all the upside here, and the authorities all the downside. As the Transport Secretary Philip Hammond said after the Ryanair "test flight", the authorities can't allow themselves to be bullied. Least of all by "the Arthur Daley of flying".