The battlefields of Eastern Europe would be familiar to Ireland’s most famous soldier of fortune, Barry Lyndon.
In William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel the young Redmond Barry of Ballybarry leaves his native Ireland after a duel and finds himself pressed into the ranks of the armies during the Seven Years’ War. The campaigns take him across the plains and forests of central and eastern Europe, where the armies of Frederick the Great clash with Austrian and Russian forces.
Barry describes the muddy tracks near Minden, the shattered villages after Kunersdorf and the cold discipline of the Prussian camps. He deserts one uniform for another, first British then Prussian, surviving by sharp wits and a readiness to seize any advantage that fortune offers. The landscapes he traverses are open and often bleak, marked by rivers that freeze in winter and fields that turn to dust under marching feet. Thackeray presents him as an unreliable narrator whose boasts conceal a hard calculation of self-interest, a man who treats war as a marketplace of opportunity rather than a theatre of honour.
Ireland’s most famous modern soldier of fortune, Michael O’Leary, is about to join similar battlefields in similar landscapes.
Five-year proposal
The chief executive of Ryanair has confirmed a five-year investment proposal for the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that aims to double the airline’s traffic in the region. The plan, revealed on 17 September 2026, would place sixteen based aircraft across the Baltics by 2031 and deliver eleven million annual seats. Ryanair describes the commitment as a €1.
47bn investment, converting the stated United States dollar figure at prevailing rates. The timing is deliberate. Days earlier airBaltic, the Latvian carrier, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York after fuel prices doubled following the conflict involving Iran.
The Latvian government has already directed more than €550m of taxpayer funds into the airline since 2020 through equity injections, loans and compensation payments. AirBaltic now intends to shrink its fleet from fifty-four aircraft to thirty-six by the end of 2026 and has deferred or cancelled outstanding orders for additional Airbus A220s.
Opportunistic manoeuvres
O’Leary’s approach mirrors the opportunistic manoeuvres of Barry Lyndon. Where the fictional Irishman switched sides to improve his position, the Ryanair chief redirects capacity according to the price of airport access. In Riga the airport lowered charges, prompting Ryanair to add winter flights on ten routes including services to Milan, Alicante and Barcelona and to record a six per cent rise in seats. I
n Tallinn and Vilnius, where charges rose sharply, the airline will cut winter capacity by twenty-five per cent and redeploy the aircraft to Slovakia, Poland, Italy and Sweden. The contrast is analytical rather than sentimental. Low-cost carriers operate on thin margins in the quieter months of the year, and the difference of a few euro per passenger can decide whether a route continues.
Ryanair’s statement notes that Latvia alone has secured growth this winter while its neighbours have not.
Looking east
The wider Eastern European market presents further openings. Wizz Air, long a rival in the region, has revealed a five per cent reduction in planned capacity for the second half of its fiscal year.
The Hungarian carrier continues to wrestle with Pratt and Whitney geared turbofan engine inspections that have grounded aircraft and with the same surge in jet-fuel costs that forced airBaltic into restructuring. Wizz Air still holds liquidity above €2.2bn and maintains fuel hedges covering 80pc of requirements at favourable rates, but the decision to trim winter flying signals caution.
Ryanair, by contrast, presses forward with broader Central and Eastern European growth. Earlier in 2026 the airline added a fourth based Boeing 737 in Bratislava, supporting a schedule of twenty-three routes and projected traffic of more than 2.2m passengers. In Poland it has increased based aircraft at Gdańsk, Poznań and Warsaw Modlin. The pattern is consistent: capacity moves toward airports and governments that reduce access costs and away from those that raise them.
Reading the field
Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon survives the Seven Years’ War by reading the field more accurately than his comrades. He understands that the real contest lies less in the formal order of battle than in the ability to exploit disorder.
O’Leary applies a similar reading to the contemporary aviation market. The Iran conflict has raised operating costs across the industry and exposed the weaker balance sheets. AirBaltic’s decision to seek creditor protection removes a substantial portion of regional capacity at a moment when passenger demand for low fares remains resilient.
Ryanair’s proposal to base sixteen aircraft in the Baltics would fill part of that gap and generate thousands of jobs in flight crew, ground handling and associated services. The airline’s longer-term target of three hundredm annual passengers by 2034, supported by the delivery of three hundred Boeing 737 MAX 10 aircraft from 2027, supplies the fleet needed to sustain such expansion.
Flat expanses
The landscapes themselves invite the comparison. The flat expanses of Latvia, the forested approaches to Tallinn and the river valleys around Vilnius recall the open ground across which eighteenth-century armies manoeuvred.
Modern travellers cross the same distances in a few hours rather than weeks, but the strategic logic endures.
Control of the routes that connect secondary cities to the rest of Europe confers commercial advantage. Ryanair already operates from more than a dozen Polish airports and has grown rapidly in Slovakia after the government lowered environmental taxes and air-traffic-control fees. The same calculus now applies to the Baltics.
Where airBaltic once planned a fleet approaching one hundred aircraft, the carrier will operate fewer than forty. The space left behind is precisely the territory into which a low-cost operator can expand.
Cost discipline
Critics of Ryanair’s model often focus on the intensity of its cost discipline. The airline’s public statements leave little doubt that growth depends on competitive airport charges. In Estonia the seventy per cent rise in fees at Tallinn in 2025 prompted an immediate capacity reduction.
In Lithuania the cumulative increase of more than thirty per cent since 2023 produced the same result. Latvia’s decision to lower charges produced the opposite outcome. The analytical point is straightforward. An ultra-low-cost carrier cannot absorb rising fixed costs without either raising fares or withdrawing service.
Passengers benefit when governments choose the former path of lower charges and suffer when they choose the latter. The €550m already spent on airBaltic illustrates the alternative: continued subsidy of a shrinking operation rather than the creation of new private-sector capacity.
Military style campaign
Barry Lyndon ends his military career with a mixture of cunning and residual luck, later turning his attention to the marriage market and the pursuit of social rank. O’Leary’s campaign remains firmly commercial.
The Ryanair proposal for the Baltics is framed as an investment contingent on the continuation of competitive conditions. Should Estonia and Lithuania reverse their recent fee increases, the airline has indicated that capacity can return. The five-year horizon to 2031 allows time for governments to adjust policy and for the airline to phase in aircraft and crew.
The eleven million annual seats projected for the region would roughly double current Ryanair traffic and would restore connectivity lost through airBaltic’s retrenchment.
The parallel with Thackeray’s novel is therefore more than literary colour. Both the fictional soldier of fortune and the modern airline executive operate in environments of sudden disruption. The Seven Years’ War redistributed power across the European continent; the present fuel-price shock and the consequent financial stress of certain carriers are redistributing market share across the European aviation map. In each case an Irish figure recognises the opportunity early and moves to occupy the vacated ground.
Different flags
Barry Lyndon marched under different flags according to the needs of the moment. Michael O’Leary reallocates aircraft according to the price of access. The landscapes remain recognisable, the calculation of advantage remains the same, and the outcome will be decided by the same mixture of preparation and timing that has always governed such contests.
Ryanair’s Winter 2026 schedule from Riga already demonstrates the practical effect. Two based aircraft and sixteen routes will carry an additional forty thousand seats, a six per cent increase.
The same period will see capacity fall by five hundred and fifty thousand seats across Estonia and Lithuania. The aircraft released from those markets will appear instead in Bratislava, Polish secondary airports and other destinations judged more competitive.
The process is continuous and data-driven. Load factors, yield and cost per available seat kilometre determine the allocation far more than any patriotic attachment to a particular capital. In this respect the modern battlefield is measured in euro cents rather than in musket balls, but the underlying principle of seizing the advantageous position endures.
Industry context
The broader industry context reinforces the analysis. Wizz Air’s decision to cut second-half capacity by five per cent, even while raising its near-term revenue outlook after a stronger summer, shows that even the better-capitalised low-cost carriers are adjusting to higher fuel prices.
AirBaltic’s Chapter 11 filing, complete with debtor-in-possession financing of €350m and plans to return surplus aircraft, removes a further competitor from full-scale expansion. Ryanair enters the vacuum with a clear proposal and the fleet capacity to implement it.
The historical resonance with Barry Lyndon’s campaigns is therefore analytical rather than ornamental. The same open country that once witnessed the movements of Prussian and Austrian columns now witnesses the movement of Boeing 737s.
The Irish adventurer of the eighteenth century and the Irish airline executive of the twenty-first century both understand that fortune favours the side that reads the ground correctly and acts without delay.
Shared recognition
In the end the comparison rests on a shared recognition that disruption creates space. Thackeray’s novel shows Barry Lyndon exploiting the chaos of continental war to rise from private soldier to a position of temporary influence. O’Leary’s latest proposal shows Ryanair exploiting the financial distress of a regional carrier and the cost pressures on another to enlarge its footprint across the Baltics and the wider Eastern European network.
The numbers are precise: sixteen based aircraft, eleven million seats, a €1.47bn investment over five years, and the redeployment of capacity away from high-cost airports toward those that have reduced charges. The landscapes are familiar.
The calculation is the same. The modern soldier of fortune advances.
