MICHAEL O’LEARY’S ability to spin a tale has reached a new level this week. Along with the gullibility of parts of the media in accepting it. Hook, line and sinker.
“Ryanair cuts Stansted winter capacity by 40 per cent,” claimed his press release. The assertion was patently rubbish. But it is almost universally already accepted as fact. On the most charitable assessment, he is planning to cut Stansted winter capacity by 14 per cent.
The probability is that the year-on-year decline in Ryanair passenger numbers at Stansted will be much lower even than that. BAA, Stansted’s owner, is forecasting a drop of 6 to 7 per cent.
To get to the claim of a drop of 40 per cent O’Leary is comparing an apple with a pear. He is comparing the number of aircraft he is operating from Stansted, his biggest base, this summer (40) with the number he plans to deploy in the winter (24). But the airline industry is highly seasonal. Comparing Ryanair’s summer capacity with its winter capacity at any airport is about as useful as saying “ice-cream sales to fall by 40 per cent this winter” or “temperature to fall by 40 per cent”. Shock horror.
Last winter Ryanair operated between 26 and 28 aircraft at Stansted. This year it is planning to operate 24, a decline of at most 14 per cent year-on-year and a long way from the claimed fall of 40 per cent. The decline will doubtless be even less in the number of flights operated year-on-year. O’Leary chose to describe only the number of aircraft overnighting at Stansted. He gave no numbers for the volume of weekly flights that includes services operating in and out of Stansted from other Ryanair bases.
The summer/winter capacity comparison is about as silly as comparing profits/losses between different quarters of the year rather than year-on-year. Not even Ryanair has yet adopted that approach as a new accounting standard.
This week’s spin was egregious even by O’Leary’s standards. A year ago, when he staged the same show over cutbacks at Stansted, at least he had the good grace to compare an apple with an apple. But the result was much less impressive.
