PRAYER Lingus: The FOUR previous times the shamrock nearly went out of business

The headquarters of the national airline is a strange place to encounter a fear of flying. But that is exactly what gripped Aer Lingus in 1992, as it baulked at the huge losses facing it in the skies with Ryanair eating its lunch on the London route and EU deregulation entering its final phase. See also: The story of Aer Lingus.

The contrast between the dilemma of 2026 and how Aer Lingus faced the four major crises in its history in 1950, 1993, 2001 and 2009 show us how much the aviation business has changed.

On May 27 1936 the predecessor of Aer Lingus, Irish Sea Airways, operated their first flight from Baldonnel to Bristol, five passengers on board a cramped de Haviland Dragon aircraft with its new name, Iolar, painted on the nose. The Bristol service was extended to London, and Liverpool and Isle of Man services were added. On January 19 1940 the new Dublin airport at Collinstown was opened in wartime code of secrecy.

In 1937, Jerry Dempsey arrived, a fresh-faced 31-year-old to become the airline’s general manager from an unlikely apprenticeship in Irish tanners in Portlaw. For thirty years he stewarded the airline, and put the post-war growth on a firm foundation by hiring Max Stuart Shaw as commercial manager and Jack Kelly Rogers, who had piloted Churchill during the war, as technical manager.

Seamus O’Kelly, author of the Quidnunc Irishman’s Diary column in the Irish times organised the company’s publicity and each innovation was heralded with a blaze of newspaper publicity. The arrival of the airlines first three hostesses, the reopening of routes to London, Manchester and the Isle of Man after World War II, the addition of Glasgow, Birmingham, Jersey, Paris and Amsterdam to the network, and the grandiose plans to start a trans-Atlantic service.

In 1946, Aer Lingus was given exclusive traffic rights on this route, in exchange for a forty per cent holding by British European Airways. A free run on the most lucrative route on the schedule was a welcome bonus. BEA was more interested in developing routes to the mainland, and considered a forty per cent helping of the revenue on the route to be adequate compensation.

Then things went rapidly awry. In 1948 Aer Lingus bought five long-haul Constellation aircraft, and fuel-hungry Vickers Vikings. A total of 1,500 extra staff were hired to service the new routes. Soon after they went into action, things began to go wrong. A new Dublin-Rome route filled less than ten per cent of its seats and was abandoned within months. Even the BEA shareholding proved troublesome, as BEA’s partners BOAC objected to the trans-Atlantic service being planned by the De Valera government.

In the end they need not have feared. Although a second airline was established, Aerlinte Eireann or Irish International, to introduce this service, and five new Lockheed Constellations ordered, the defeat of the Fianna Fáil administration in 1948 led to the proposed trans-Atlantic route bring cancelled by the new inter-party government, and the Viscounts were sold. Agricultural minister Jim Dillon famously declared that the rabbits would soon over-run the runways of Shannon airport.

Under pressure from Department of Finance secretary J J McElligott subsidies were brought to an end in 1950 and Aer Lingus forced to tighten its belt considerably.

It seemed the airline needed divine assistance to recover. It came, in the form of the new and lucrative pilgrimage business. From the initiation of the Lourdes service in 1952, their pilgrimage business grew in leaps and bounds with the Marian year and the centenary of the Lourdes apparition. Scarcely noticed by the larger airlines, it gained lucrative pilgrimage traffic rights to Barcelona and Rome and even canvassing to carry the Pope from Rome to Lourdes in 1958.

Able to expand again, a set of Vickers Viscounts was purchased in 1954. Edinburgh and Cardiff was added to the schedule.

The trans-Atlantic service was eventually launched in 1958, ten years behind schedule, by Aerlinte with three Boeing 720s, later replaced by 707s.

.n 1963 the brands were integrated, causing initial branding problems for Aer Lingus in New York. Outward passenger movements soared. Chicago and Montreal were added in 1966. The branding issue was overcome with an intensive advertising campaign (‘an extra country at no extra cost’) to such an extent that the Aer Lingus brand is one of the strongest Irish overseas brands, worthy of mention on the Simpsons and drama series West Wing.

National duty was an essential component of the Aer Lingus ethos, despite the fact that British European Airways were shareholders in the company up to 1957.

It became the Irish success-story, the source of immense pride to emigrants and the new generation of Lemass’s Ireland. The sight of the shamrock logo on the new sales offices in Fifth Avenue, New York, Boston’s Staler Hilton, downtown Los Angeles, San Francisco, nine other North American cities, fifteen European, Johannesburg, Sydney and Rio de Janeiro were the source of pride. Aer Lingus were proud ambassadors for a new forward-looking Ireland.

The still-growing charter business bankrolled the airline. Superstitious pilgrims believed that God supported the airline. There was an annual blessing of the fleet at Dublin airport, some of which was recorded on the Gael Linn newsreel. Equally superstitious football clubs Glasgow Celtic and Manchester United for their European Cup winning campaigns in 1967 and 1968.

The airline’s two crashes failed to thwart this swell of pride. Three died in the first, near Ashbourne in 1967. Worse was to follow in March 1968 when 61 people were lost as EI 712 plummeted 17,000 feet into the sea near the Tuskar Rock lighthouse while en-route from Cork to London. The cause of the accident was never established, but there are suspicions that the Viscount, St Phelim, was accidentally shot down by the British Territorial Army during training exercises on a military base in Aberporth in Wales.

Most of the passengers on the plane were from Co Cork. There was also a delegation from the Department of Agriculture going to an international conference, some Americans, Belgians and a group of Swiss fishermen returning home after a fishing holiday.

Nearly half an hour into the flight, when the Viscount was nine miles off Hook Head, County Wexford, the crew acknowledged a message from Shannon Air Control to change to the London Airways frequency.

Half a minute later, just before midday the crew of another scheduled Aer Lingus flight heard 712’s co-pilot give its call sign `Echo India Alpha Oscar Mike, with you’. Then a few seconds after that came the last recorded words from Flight 712: “12,000 feet, descending, spinning rapidly.”

Escaped mishap

Otherwise the airline has escaped mishap since 1967, aside from the attempted hijacking of a plane by an emotional Australian with a bottle of petrol in 1981. He wanted the third secret of Fatima revealed by the pope.

Almost uniquely among government owned airlines, Aer Lingus stayed close to profitability through its first fifty years while other IATA airlines were racking up decades of government funded losses. Aer Lingus survived its first fifty years with an equity injection of £73.6m, less than the cost of a jumbo jet in 1976 when then chief executive David Kennedy pointed this out..

This was the proud airline which took delivery of its first 747s in 1971, just in time to fly them over the route of the St Patrick’s day parade, and looked forward to a new era symbolised by the opening of Dublin Airport’s new terminal, the largest construction contract in the country at the time, in 1972.

The success story was matched on the ground. Staff from 43 countries came to Ireland for training, its hotels were successfully operated in seventeen countries, and the team Aer Lingus services won contracts from a dozen airlines for contract work. Aircraft were leased so successfully that they became a standard sight in the near east. Israel even disguised its bombers as Aer Lingus planes to avoid arousing suspicion while mounting a raid on a Tehran nuclear plant. One of the Aer Lingus executives, Tony Ryan, watched the aircraft leasing business with fascination.

Ryan would later attract colleagues Arthur Walls and George Bourke to Guinness Peat Aviation. Other young tigers of the Aer Lingus management in the 1960s included Niall Gleeson, later managing director of the international air traffic association in Geneva, and future Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

Aer Lingus anxiously covered all its options, even putting down a deposit of $400,000 with Boeing for a supersonic jet in 1964, a project that was eventually cancelled seven years later.

Protectionist policies

At one level, Ireland’s airline was hampered by the protectionist policies it co-operated with. Costs at Aer Lingus were never likely to be brought under control. Like most of the industry, Aer Lingus was run for the benefit of staff rather than the airline. The airlines of Europe were regarded as branches of government. They had bottomless pockets and everyone knew it. Politicians felt free to interfere with the workings of the national carrier.

One government minister insisted that a commuter plane be overnighted at Galway so she could get the first flight to Dublin each day. At election time, brazen north Dublin politicians could offer jobs to constituents. The work there was regarded as among the cushiest in the marketplace, with low expectations of productivity and high expectations of earnings and pension rights.

Since Aer Lingus was first incorporated in a flush of national pride in 1938, it has operated in less favourable conditions than its rivals. Its survival has always depended on efficiency, and a 1992 European survey ranked the airline the third most efficient in Europe.

While other airlines could make their money from business passengers, whose companies foot the bill for over-priced seats at the front of the plane, it was the tourist that has paid Aer Lingus’s way, in particular the diaspora tourist, in the absence of a well-heeled business community in Ireland.

They got over these problems with old-fashioned patriotic loyalty that fired management, staff and customers alike. Jim McMenamin used to travel on Bórd Fáilte roadshows to America as late as the 1980s and mid 1990s, facilitating group travel bookings for tour operators and Irish tourism interests, in contrast to the post 2004 position when group booking were discouraged.

But somewhere along the way Aer Lingus gathered a few too many passengers, and not in its aircraft seats either.

Short stage lengths, mainly to Britain, carried traffic peak volumes that can run at up to eight times the valley levels, and fares that were double the mile-for-mile rates of mainland Europe and between the mainland and Britain.

In 1951 Aer Lingus was boasting it was offering the lowest fares in Europe. But £9/18/- to London was still more than two months wages for a cleaner at the beautiful airport terminal in Collinstown, designed by the brother of future Taoiseach and one of the airline’s most famous employees, Garret FitzGerald. Amsterdam cost a whopping £22/12/-. ‘We are endeavouring to make Aer Lingus an airline for the people,’ airline CEO Jerry Dempsey declared, and pointed out he was bringing down fares as much as IATA would let him. But the airline had serious financial problems, and routes to Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm were never started, even with pick-up rights in Manchester. The airline was able to operate services to Barcelona and Biarritz only because the planes were routed through Lourdes. Aer Lingus reports from the 1950s make interesting reading. They never complain about fares, but on ‘the continuing competitive pressure towards higher and more expensive standards of service and, therefore, eventually towards higher fares.’

English shareholding reduced to 10pc

In 1956 a new Anglo-Irish agreement allowed BEA to enter the market and reduced BEA’s shareholding in Aer Lingus to 10 per cent, an agreement which also cleared the way for a third Irish airport at Ballygarvan outside Cork, eventually opened in 1960. The agreement gave Aer Lingus exclusive rights to Glasgow, Edinburgh, the Isle of Man, jersey, and Bristol, with British airlines allowed to share London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Belfast and Cardiff and new routes to Newcastle and Haverford West. The agreement also allowed a car ferry service from Liverpool to Dublin, operated by a British company. Most importantly of all, it provided that fares should be agreed between Aer Lingus and BEA and profits shared according to the load factor or market share. This arrangement was renewed in 1966.

And then a cold wind blew from the west coast of America, the place somebody invented the Jumbo Jet to change air travel, and where now someone was busy inventing the internet. Everything changed. We all became travel agents.

In the old days, the golden age of travel from where the holidays companies are looking, the agent had control. They controlled the tickets, and perhaps just as importantly, the information. They also offered a service. Until 1995 there was a pretty good chance that the travel agent would find you the best value price for your destination – usually, though not always the lowest – you could find yourself landing at the wrong airport.

After the mid 1990s, customers who were better informed than the people trying to sell them the holiday started showing up in travel agents. They were prepared to do the legwork, or rather the mouse work, on their own. They found phone numbers and email addresses for hotels by themselves.

The problem was that it was still cheaper to book a holiday package than organise a holiday for themselves. The air fares being charged by the airlines were usually cheaper through a preferred agent, who bought discounted tickets from the airline and added in accommodation arrangements. The combined cost of flight and accommodation would often match the airline’s own fare, without accommodation

Stopovers and hotel accommodation

Occasionally Aer Lingus found other ways round the barriers. Airlines were allowed to offer passengers hotel accommodation if the next connecting flight was the next day. The Aer Lingus continental flights arrived in the afternoon. Then as now trans Atlantic fares left in the morning. Aer Lingus used this to offer free overnights in Dublin, without breaking IATA rules.

The IATA regime was rigorous and unyielding. Ticket sectors had to be used in sequence, usually through London. The carrier that issued the tickets collected the money while the carriers that flew the passengers on subsequent legs had to collect that money from the issuing carrier through the IATA clearing house.

The cost of a ticket was not the Dublin-London fare added to the other one, it was done a pro-rate fare, a laid on per centage of the total fare. Before computers, this had to be calculated by the travel agent or sales staff in the Aer Lingus O’Connell Street office. The ticket was a little booklet, with an accounting coupon, flight coupon number two, flight coupon number three held by the passenger, who was given a hand written boarding card. Names of prospective passengers were written in a ledger in pencil. A deft travel agent could have a passenger rubbed out and a good client inserted instead.

The coupon went into a flight batch. Even an Aer Lingus-Aerlinte ticket, from Dublin to Shannon and Shannon to New York, involved a separate invoice from one Irish government airline to another, EI105 to IN105.

Lost your ticket? Airlines charged $100 to resissue one, even after computerisation had cut out the form filing by hand and the ledger with names pencilled in to it on O’Connell St. Even a few years before IATA airlines abolished paper tickets altogether and online check-in became the norm they charged people to reissue tickets.

People modified their behaviour within the IATA restrictions. An excursion return fare was much cheaper than two singles, but required the passenger to stay a Saturday night. People learned to return from the same airport on the same airline and stay a Saturday night and pack large suitcases.

Breaking that mould took years, even after low cost airlines showed that people should do the opposite and mould their behaviour to avoid Friday and Sunday evening travel and to take hand luggage only.

Cartel system

The cartel system brought Aer Lingus into direct conflict with Bord Failte, the Irish Tourism body. The arcane rules of IATA forbade any kind ofdiscounting by scheduled or chartered airlines, but did permit cheap fares for ‘members of a club which has been formed for a purpose other than air travel, who attended regular meetings’ and whose booking had been made three months in advance.

They were known as ‘affinity charters’ and the rules were widely flouted. Some of the clubs were formed by word of mouth, notices in the backs of churches and arrived in Ireland under the guise of the ‘Friendly Sons of St Patrick’ with hastily drafted membership cards, all back dated by three months. Both Aer Lingus and TWA objected to anything which might damage the aggregate price, such as the cheap fares on offer to American military personnel travelling on charters through Shannon using airlines such as Frying Tiger, Transair, Overseas National (ONA) and Towerair.

IATA inspectors swooped on these groups occasionally. And while Aer Lingus was not above taking a booking from a suspect club itself, it joined the campaign against affinity charters during the 1960s.

This threatened to cut off a major supply of incoming American tourists, 27,000 on charters as opposed to 154,500 on scheduled flights in 1970, paying half of the £114 fare paid by Aer Lingus and TWA passengers.

Even the arrival of the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, which brought down aggregate costs, did not soften the mood.

In 1973 eighty members of Dr Eoin McKiernan’s Irish American Cultural Institute also had a charter cancelled. The cause of Irish tourism was less important than Aer Lingus’s ability to overcharge passengers. When a party of 466 Irish American policemen and their families from the Nassau County Emerald Society decided to come to Ireland in July 1974. They contacted Aer Lingus for seats but were told there were none available. They then chartered a plane from Pan Am. Aer Lingus responded by complaining to the US Civil Aeronautics board, who got Pan Am to cancel the charter. The firemen went to a US Federal court and had the order overturned.

It was a sign that the mood was changing in America towards deregulating one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world. It took another decade before the idea began to catch on in Europe.

Tony Ryan, the man who had leased the 747 to Air Siam, sent a proposal to the Irish government in 1980. Anticipating rapid deregulation in Europe he proposed an airline called Irelandia, to be based at Shannon. It would be airborne by 1982 offering one way flights to New York for £99 and London by £49, driven by low overheads, efficient operation and forceful marketing. Ryan was too optimistic. The skies over Europe were not cleared of the cartels until 1997. The Irish government rejected his proposal.

Highly unionised

Like all legacy airlines, the structures were highly unionised. A long strike, as happened in 1977, could always eventually be settled by a phone call from Merrion St to the Aer Lingus headquarters.

Predictably, part of the cosy arrangement between Merrion Street and Collinstown was to prevent anyone else getting a slice of the action. When applications from Irish competitor airlines were sent for new routes, the file was sent to Aer Lingus for an opinion. Invariably it would come back with charts and graphs added pointing out there was no need for the new route, as Aer Lingus already had it covered.

Not that there were many irish competitors. When Gerry Connolly’s Avair started a twice weekly service between Cork and Derry on January thirteen 1982, and followed up with Dublin-Sligo, Dublin-Waterford, Dublin-Cork, Dublin-Derry, Dublin-Blackpool, Dublin-Nottingham, Dublin-East Midlands and Dublin-Leeds Bradford, Aer Lingus was allowed to start up a new separate air line, Aer Lingus commuter, utilising Shorts 330 aircraft to blow Avair off internal routes. Minister Jim Mitchell insisted that Aer Lingus commuter have separate staff and separate maintenance arrangements, but there was no doubt that it was founded for a single purpose and that single purpose was achieved even before it commenced flying. Avair closed in February 1984, having lost £2m in three years. Three months later Aer Lingus commuter launched its first twice daily route to Cork (£42 one way), daily to Shannon (£35 one way) and twice daily on the potentially lucrative route from Dublin to East Midlands.

Aer Lingus Commuter was an expensive failure and was integrated back into the main airline in February 2001. It cannot be blamed for the collapse of Avair but it had ensured that it could not be sold by receiver John McStay as a going concern. The lesson from Avair was that the next entrant in to the Irish airline business would have to have deep pockets. They had. Ryanair cost its founder £20m in its first three years.

Two-year jail sentence

Most absurd of all, Government Minister Jim Mitchell proposed in 1986 that there should be a two-year jail sentence for travel agents or airlines who sold cheap air tickets. If the law had been enacted, Michael O’Leary would be doing a long stretch.

The bill was a ham-fisted attempt to prevent Trans-America undercutting Aer Lingus on the trans-Atlantic routes. Trans-America failed in September 1986, sacrificed on the altar of the vested interests it had taken on.

Just as Mitchell was drawing up his scheme to jail travel agents and aviation salesmen who would dare sell a customer a cheap ticket, the first signs of a breakdown in the cartel system were emerging. Britain and the Netherlands signed a low cost deal that slashed the cost of a return air fare between London and Amsterdam from £100 to £49.

Nelly Kroes, later to become Ryanair’s nemesis as EU commissioner, was a signatory to the deal.

It would be a brave and perhaps desperate airline that would shake this system, take the discounts that were available to travel agents and try to pass them on to customers instead.

When Ryanair was born in 1985, it had no aspirations to be that airline.

Aer Lingus complained that the entry of Ryanair had cost it £20 million in revenue on the cash cow Dublin-London route – a loss of £8 for each passenger carried. Some forty per cent of Aer Lingus’s revenue came from this service.

The safety net of government intervention was about to be loosened, and there was a long way to fall.

By 1992 Aer Lingus employed 7,600 people and was the eighth largest employer in the country. It flew just 3m passengers, as many employees as Ryanair employed in 2009 when it flew 57m passengers. The more standard measurment of efficiency is employees per plane – Aer Lingus had 224, compared with 88 before a new round of cuts in 2009, and 37 for Ryanair. The cut off point between low cost and other airlines is regarded as ninety employees per plane. British Airways has 177.

The Aer Lingus turnover of £849m made it the seventh biggest company on the island. The total exchequer investment was £73.6m. Its fleet of 34 planes was a mixum-gatherum of three ageing Boeing 747s, 21 Boeing 737s of various types, four Saab 340-Bs, and six Fokker 50s. Even after axing five routes to save £15m, it serves 26 destinations from Dublin, nine from Cork, five from Shannon, with four pick-up routes from Manchester and two from Bristol. It offices or representatives in 27 countries.

And it was facing the first of two great crises over a nine year period that would threaten its existence. Dick Spring described the Aer Lingus crisis as the equivalent of Digital, Ford and Dunlop all rolled in together he was not exaggerating.

Somehow the Aer Lingus culture of the 1970s and 1980s failed to emulate the patriotic spirit of their predecessors. The loss-making North Atlantic route proved a mixed blessing, and there was nowhere else for Aer Lingus to turn. The emergence of an Irish airline to challenge the Aer Lingus hegemony for the first time was the least of its problems.

While the airline business continued to grow Aer Lingus managed to fight. The company even managed a £7.6m profit on the trans-Atlantic route in 1991, but the Gulf war, competition from Delta and Aeroflot, the Shannon stop-over and the diversion of a sizeable section of the American business through Britain turned that into a £9.5m loss on the same route in 1992. The two Boeing 767-300s that Aer Lingus leased for the proposed Los Angeles route had to be paid for two years at £214,000 a month after the proposal was grounded by the Shannon stop-over.

Tighter margins meant more trouble for Aer Lingus and the balance sheets began to tell a tale of woe: a loss of £11.8m in 1992 compared with a profit of £8.3m in 1991.

In the 1980s hotels and aircraft maintenance proved nice little money spinners for Aer Lingus, restoring the airline to profit and generating profits of £35m. Meanwhile the airline was losing £37m million getting passengers from A to B, at a stage when it needs money to replace ageing planes such as its two twenty-year-old 747s.

When the entry of Richard Branson and Freddie Laker to the trans Atlantic market forced prices down, Aer Lingus hurts sooner and more than most. The trans-Atlantic route was responsible for thirty per cent of British Airways’ profits, and 85 per cent of Aer Lingus’s losses.

The government decided against a new equity injection. The airline was forced to borrow £500m to replace planes, and then asked to pay £48.5m a year in interest servicing this debt.

Cahill’s rescue

The man charged with turning Aer Lingus around was Bernie Cahill. He pared back Aer Lingus activities to its main core business, flying, including a once-off payment of £175 million in State aid, cost savings, rationalisation, and more than 1,200 redundancies. The government gave a commitment to the European Commission that no further State aid would be given to Aer Lingus on the approval of the State aid package in 1993. Ryanair subsequently lost its European legal challenge to £100 million in Aer Lingus state subsidies in 1994 and 1995. It dropped from seventh to 22nd in the national list of largest companies.

Spinnong off the subsidiary TEAM Aer Lingus, established in 1988, ended up costing Aer Lingus some £190 million before it was eventually sold to the Danish group FLS in 1998. The letters of comfort, by which TEAM employees were guaranteed employment with Aer Lingus, almost bankrupted the airline. The sale was made possible by a deal which averaged £35,000 for each employee transferring from Aer Lingus to FLS.

The punter was slow to feel the benefit of this change, despite fleet innovations. A key innovative step came in 1994 when Aer Lingus introduced the Airbus A330 on transatlantic services, becoming the first airline to operate the type under ETOPS rules over the North Atlantic. The B747, of which Aer LINgus had two, was too expensive and it looked for a while that Aer Lingus would have to exit the trans-Atlantic completely, leaving the routes to Delta. The management, Bernie Cahill, looked at the Airbus A340 but it was too large. With the assistance of Paddy Judge, head of IALPA last the time, the airline negotiated with Airbus salesman Chris Buckley for the much more suitable A330, which did not have ETOPS clearance at the time. Aer Lingus identified the specs as suitable for trans-Atlantic and clearance followed. This allowed more efficient and direct flights from Dublin to the United States, facilitating the gradual retirement of the Boeing 747 fleet by 1995 and modernising long-haul operations. Using the new craft on its first ETPOPS services, the airline built up its North Atlantic service (from a near standstill) to six destinations in New York (JFK and Newark), Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore/Washington.

Flotation was originally proposed for early 2001 and was intended to allow the airline to raise the £300-£400 million it says it needs for investment, mainly in new aircraft. There were suggestions that Aer Lingus be sold off to a major multi-national group or existing flag-carrier such as British Airways.

‘There is absolutely no need for the Government to be a shareholder in Aer Lingus. I don’t think there is any future for major international commercial enterprises which are State-owned. The problem with Aer Lingus had always been that the Government never put equity into the company when it was in a loss-making situation, exactly the reverse of what should happen’, the former CEO David Kennedy said. ‘Aer Lingus cannot survive and prosper by just marketing its own network.’ another former CEO Garry Cullen concluded. IN fact the airline was coming down with former CEO’S. Having had just four in the 56 years between 1937 and 1993, it had fourteen in the following sixteen years.

Then came a new crisis, the September eleven attacks on the Twin Towers in America came at a time when more than half of the world’s passengers were American. The casualty rate of airlines was breath-taking, and included the once-mighty TWA, whose logo had once adorned a building in O’Connell St.

Aer Lingus was six weeks away from bankruptcy when the most important decision in the airline’s history was taken – it would follow Ryanair into the low cost aviation business, on the short haul routes at least.

Another cull of staff followed. The airline cut business class on short haul routes. It played with low cost options on the trans-Atlantic routes. An open skies agreement with the USA seemed to offer new rewards for pointing its planes east (a foray into Dubai was quickly abandoned). In 2006 Aer Lingus was in discussion with thirteen US airports. Eventually it extended its New York, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles services to Washington Dulles, San Francisco and Orlando, before retracting again in 2008-9.

The eventual IPO in 2007 left the government holding on to 25 per cent of the airline but trading shares on the open market meant it was vulnerable to predators for the first time. The first and most brazen was Ryanair, a sagea that had nort resolved itself at the time of going to print. And then came the worst recession to hit America for seventy years. Aer Lingus dropped its trans Atlantic fares, as did all of its competitors. During the year 2008-09 the airline burned through Eu400m of its Eu800m cash reserves. For the fourth time in the airline’s history, it was facing a real threat to its survival.