Boeing will deliver only 40 out of the 57 planned B737-MAX8200 aircraft to Ryanair by June 2024, causing Ryanair to reduce approximately 10 aircraft lines of flying during the peak summer months.
Ryanair will adjust its schedules by reducing frequencies on existing routes rather than cutting new routes, impacting a small portion of its 600-aircraft fleet.
The schedule cuts have been implemented at higher cost airports like Dublin, Milan Malpensa, Warsaw Modlin, and four Portuguese airports with rising costs.
While affected passengers have been notified of schedule changes, Ryanair expects these delivery delays and schedule adjustments to result in decreased FY March 2025 traffic to just under 200m passengers compared to the original target of 205m.
Michael O’Leary said in a written statement: “We are very disappointed at these latest Boeing delivery delays, but we continue to work with Boeing to maximise the number of new B737 aircraft we receive by the end of June, which we can confidently release for sale to customers during the S24 peak. We will now work with Boeing to take delayed aircraft deliveries during Aug and Sept 2024 to help Boeing reduce their delivery backlog. We regret any inconvenience caused to some customers and our airport partners by these enforced S24 schedule changes, which will reduce our full year traffic growth from 184m in FY24 to between 198m to 200m in FY25. We are working with our airport partners to deliver some growth to them, albeit later in Sept and Oct (rather than Jul and Aug). This traffic growth can only be delivered at lower fares during these shoulder months. Boeing continues to have Ryanair’s wholehearted support as they work through these temporary challenges, and we are confident that their senior management team, led by Dave Calhoun (CEO) and Brian West (CFO), will resolve these production delays and quality control issues in both Wichita and Seattle. We expect these latest Boeing delivery delays, which regrettably are beyond Ryanair’s control, combined with the grounding of up to 20% of our Airbus competitors’ A320 fleets in Europe, will lead to more constrained capacity and slightly higher air fares for consumers in Europe in Summer 2024. We therefore urge all Ryanair customers to book early in order to secure the lowest available air fares for Summer 2024.”
