Irish Times

A long, interesting and amusing interview of Michael O'Leary in the Irish Times, last friday :

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0924/1224279584792.html

Excerpts :

“The great advantage for Ryanair is that we’re now the largest airline in the world. We have governments all over Europe – the Spanish, the Italians, the French – beating a path to our door saying ‘please will you grow here’.”
He claims to have just signed a deal with a European government to open four bases in that country. But he won’t say which one.
“Ah, stop. I’m not going to alert my competition to where I’m opening bases.”

O’Leary has gained huge publicity in the British press of late, talking about flights with just one pilot, and charging for toilets. He insists they’re not just publicity stunts.
“Everybody continues to misunderstand. We don’t want the money for toilets. We want to get rid of two of the three toilets on one-hour flights and put in six extra seats. I’m absolutely serious about that.
“At the moment, the argument from the regulators is that six extra seats will slow passengers in an emergency evacuation. We went back and said, hang on, the two rear toilets are the big bottleneck in emergency evacuations. If you remove those and replace them with seats, you widen the aisles and the flows will be much faster. Now that’s a debating point.”
He sees no reason why, with advances in technology in coming years, a co-pilot can’t hop out and give a hand with the trolley service during flights.
“Do I think we’ll get one-pilot flights? Not in the next 10 years,” he concedes, “but I think that it’s important that we at least raise the issue and ask the question.
“Auto pilots now do most of the flying. Would you take out the second pilot? No, clearly you wouldn’t. But maybe the second pilot could be doing some of the inflight service when the auto pilot is on.”