Conversation

In the past fortnight, I have hard the benefit of travelling on “full service” airlines (Virgin, American, Air France), two of which are flag carriers, and on RyanAir, this morning.

I’m a RyanAir frequent flyer, but it’s been ages since I’ve been on another airline, long or short haul. However, the experience of recent days has allowed me to contrast things, and … what a contrast.

Ryanair cultivate a public image as being “low budget”, and they do this quite deliberately, but the reality is quite different. By way of illustrating, I’m going to compete two flights I took.

The first was American Airlines Miami to St Maarten. The second was RyanAir Stansted to Faro.

Each flight took place on a 737-800. Each plane was full. Each was about 2 1/2 - 3 hours. Ostensibly very similar flights.

The first thing I noticed is that AA can’t turn around a 737 in under about 2 hours, and even that may be optimistic. They use jetways, having eschewed the air stairs that RyanAir buy their aircraft with. They also only use the front door. Ryanair use both.

American have business class on short haul. Ryanair do not, but you can pay around 40 euros to sit in the front row and have as much legroom as you want. I usually do this.

American board in groups. This is a mathematically terrible way to board a plane. They are also very permissive about what may be taken as cabin luggage, and people take the piss. As a result, boarding is slow and cumbersome as people block the aisle looking for the dwindling amounts of overhead locker space.

So the two boarding experiences: from the start of boarding, when they started putting people on the aircraft, American took over 40 minutes to have everyone seated before they closed the door.

Ryanair, in contrast, checked everyone through and divided them into two queues on the apron: front door and back door. Then they started boarding,

It took RyanAir 15 minutes to fill a 737-800 and close the door with everyone seated. 2 minutes later, they pushed back. The engines started. A minute later we taxied. The crew had finished the safety briefing within 3 minutes of pushback and with military like precision, using movements which were pretty much choreographed, they prepared the cabin for flight. It took them about a minute.

When the captain said, “cabin crew, seats for takeoff”, they were already in them.

We took off 32 minutes after boarding started. At the same point American were closing the doors and thinking about pushback, RyanAir was at cruising altitude, heading towards Faro, and had started the hot food service.

Which they also did much more efficiently than American, by the way.

American turned a 2-3 hour flight into a 3-5 hour experience because they are just utterly terrible at the process of getting people on and off a plane, and preparing it for departure. It was similar when we landed. American waited ages for the jetway, then pissed about while the crew bumbled with no thought apparently given to efficiency and reproducibility of process.

RyanAir, on the other hand, arrived at the gate, stopped the fans, and had the stairs down within a minute. 30 seconds later I was off the plane. 45 seconds after that, I was in the queue for passport control.

This isn’t just American, although I picked them because of the very similar nature of the flights. I also used Air France short haul, and Virgin and Air France long haul, and it’s the same story. They are just horribly inefficient. Cabin crew don’t seem to know what they should be doing, or rather they do, but nothing is in a consistent place, people seem unsure of their roles, and everything seems so adhoc.

Watching RyanAir crew prep a plane is like watching a military operation. Watching the others is like watching a bunch of amateurs do a military reenactment, badly.

There is a huge irony in this. In the age of late stage capitalist enshittification, I often lament that there are certain areas where you simply cannot buy a quality product, at any price, because it’s not available.

In this case, you can, and contrary to their reputation, I genuinely think that RyanAir offer the highest quality short haul air travel experience in the world. They don’t have fancy business class seating, they don’t use jetways they don’t have “boarding groups”, or frequent flyer perks.

But what they do do is fly you from point A to point B more or less when they say that’s going to, and don’t waste 1-2 hours of your time pissing about with zero regard to efficiency with a plane before and after.

My flight this morning with RyanAir was scheduled for 09:50. That often refers to boarding complete. In this case, it took off at 09:52.

I didn’t even go to the gate until 09:10.

I am an utter, utter convert. What I don’t understand is why the flag carriers are so bad at applying the same sort of scientific approach to process to their own operations. They charge a fortune, and act with inefficiency and complacency, neglecting their core business of moving people from A to B in favour of trying to sell you stupid shit, which obstructs their ability to offer an efficient and timely service.

Now RyanAir also try to sell you stupid shit, but they do that while the plane is in the air, not as part of some endless ground operation with a vague promise that the plane might go somewhere, eventually.

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