Ryanair cancels 18,000 more flights

Ryanair is to scale back its schedules from November, cancelling 18,000 flights and impacting the travel plans of nearly 400,000 passengers.

The airline said it will fly 25 fewer aircraft from November and 10 fewer from April 2018 in an attempt to create spare aircraft and crew.

In total, 34 winter routes have been suspended altogether, including London Gatwick-Belfast, London Stansted-Glasgow and Edinburgh, Glasgow-Las Palmas, Edinburgh-Hamburg, and Newcastle-Faro and Gdansk.

In a lengthy statement, Ryanair said the ‘sensible schedule changes’ mean it can roster all of the extra pilot leave necessary in the next three months with no backlog.

Affected passengers have received an email today offering alternative flights or full refunds of their airfare, plus a €40 (€80 return) travel voucher.

As they have been given at least five weeks notice, they are not entitled to EU261 compensation.

Passengers who were affected by a first round of cancellations, announced last week, are entitled to claim compensation and have also given the same €40 vouchers.

Ryanair said last week’s 2,100 cancellations would cost it under €25 million and estimates the cost of issuing free flight vouchers to the 400,000 customers affected by today’s announcement will cost it another €25 million.

It told shareholders: "We expect slightly lower yields over the next two months as we promote seat sales. We do not expect these initiatives to alter our current year guidance of between €1.40bn to €1.45bn profit after tax."

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary added: "We sincerely apologise to those customers who have been affected by last week’s flight cancellations, or these sensible schedule changes announced today.

"While over 99% of our 129 million customers will not have been affected by any cancellations or disruptions, we deeply regret any doubt we caused existing customers last week about Ryanair’s reliability, or the risk of further cancellations."

It thanked its 4,200 pilots for their ‘widespread support’ over the past weeks, claiming hundreds had offered to work on their days off, or work one week of their allocated month of leave, and had offered to go public to ‘correct the false claims made about them’,

Ryanair is giving ‘base supplements’ of €10,000 for captains and €5,000 for first officers at Dublin, Stansted, Berlin and Frankfurt from October 1.

It dismissed reports about large numbers of pilots leaving the airline.

"In the current year under 100 captains have left, mainly to retirement or long haul airlines, and less than 160 first officers, mostly to long haul airlines," it said.

"Over the next eight months Ryanair has recruited and will train over 650 pilots not only to replace these leavers/retirees but also to crew up for the 50 new Boeing aircraft we will buy to May 2018 to bring our fleet to 445 for summer 2018.

"Contrary to false claims of pilot shortages, Ryanair has in recent weeks seen a big surge in pilot applications from Gulf carriers and in Germany and Italy where both Air Berlin and Alitalia are in bankruptcy and hundreds of their pilots are facing job losses or steep cuts in their pay and conditions."