Eddie Wilson, CEO of Ryanair, has said that if the Dubin airport cap remained unchanged, the airline would have faced a 50pc reduction in capacity next November and December, something that would lead to increased airfares.
Mr Wilson has reiteerated that Dublin Airport has the infrastructure to support 60 million passengers, yet a cap of 32 million restricts growth opportunities for airlines operating there.
He questioned the delay in government action to address outdated planning restrictions that hinder the capacity and expansion of Dublin Airport.
In a radio interview with Antón Savage, Mr Wilson stressed that Dublin Airport competes with other European airports for capacity and that attracting airlines requires a more integrated approach to planning and reducing access costs.
Eddie Wilson shared: The slots are allocated each year. The IAA has to allocate those slots in terms of the capacity. Sometimes you have capacity at airports because the terminal can’t take a certain amount of passengers or the runway doesn’t have sufficient capacity.
But in the case of Dublin Airport, what happens is that if you’ve got slots from the previous year, you get to keep those, okay? Then people give up slots because they’re not going to use them, and then there’s additional slots. And that all fits into the movements at airports.
And if you put an artificial cap on that, that means that you can’t put in any extra capacity. So that’s why you had this silly thing of, whereby like this winter, if the cap hadn’t been lifted by the courts here in Ireland while it’s been held in Europe, you would have had capacity cut back by 50% in November and December of this year, which would have sent airfares through the roof.
Because a sufficient amount of the slots were used in the summer, and then you have to squeeze the remaining amount into the winter, and the only way to comply with it was to take ones away.
So, in other words, if you go out today at 6 o’clock this morning, and the summer season, there will be 34 Ryanair aircraft lined up and ready to go. And it’s the first wave slots that are always of a premium, because everybody needs to get out when the airport opens and get out on time.
And then you’ll have some arrival slots. But if you go out to Dublin Airport at 12 o’clock in the day, there will be less activity because there will be less aircraft. Because those aircraft that took off this morning are down in Spain or France or the Canary Islands, and then they’ve got to come back.
So you set the capacity. I mean, like, we get into it too, like, that part of it is quite technical, but what happens is that if the passenger number of 32 million is the maximum that you could do, then that’s divided down into the amount of slots. And if it doesn’t add up, you can’t grow. You can’t put anything additional in.
What happened during COVID was that they should, the airport authorities should have, the DAA should have applied to have that increased in good time. It wasn’t. It then caught up with the growth that came back and everyone said, oh, we’ve got a problem here.
Then you couldn’t grow and the growth went elsewhere. And, you know, the cap was really about an outdated planning constraint back in 2007, about, we won’t be able to get people to the airport because we don’t have the road infrastructure and all that. And that was pre-M50 and all that.
Once the cap was lifted, we put in one extra aircraft this year. If the cap was still there, that aircraft would have gone elsewhere.
And it would have been part of a schedule. It may have gone to London Stansted and then done eight flights a day for the entire season, rather than bringing that capacity into Dublin. So, and then if it got to November and December this year, where it was cut by 50%, well, then the amount of based aircraft would have had to go somewhere in the network because we got to fly them.
So, it doesn’t mean that the planes are flying day to day. You got to think about, I got 600 aircraft, okay? 34 of them start and end the day in Dublin.
Three of them start and end the day in Shannon. Three start, well, four for the summer in Cork. Four start and end the day in Cork, 52 of them in Stansted, two in Prestwick. So, that’s where it is, and then they build the schedule. So, as you look at Dublin Airport, one of those aircraft landing today could either be one of the Dublin aircraft that left this morning and is coming back, or it could be the aircraft from Stansted that comes into Dublin and then goes back to Stansted.
So, it’s a mixture. But the question is, if you put in an aircraft into Dublin, that generates about another 400,000 passengers for the year, because it goes backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.
It has been lifted now temporarily because of the European courts, because they’ve said, look, essentially, you’ve got slots are like property rights. You have the right to take off once you use the slots. And the European courts have taken, it’s been referred and said, look, while we’re thinking about this, you’ve got to lift the cap temporarily.
But it doesn’t do much for planning. You want this to be gone, you want it to be gone now. Because we’re coming to the end of the order.
We have another 29 odd aircraft to come, 30 aircraft to come next year. And then there’s a slight break and then there’s 300 aircraft coming. We’re already planning those.
Like all the aircraft for next winter are more or less planned. All the ones for next summer are already planned. You gotta get them on sale.
Takes six months a year to do that. And if you’ve got any uncertainty, you’re not going to do that. “So if you have a doubt that the cap is going to stay away, what you’ll do is say, well, okay, rather than risking planning based on that aircraft in Dublin, we’ll put it out to Frankfort or Stansett or wherever else.
And then that aircraft will essentially live there, okay? And the crew will be associated with that.
I really don’t understand why the government doesn’t do something about this. It is blatantly obvious that we have a gateway into the economy. It has to grow.
And the idea that it’s going to not grow because of an outdated planning restriction to do with an M50 that’s clearly there and a bus infrastructure that’s clearly there. The runway is there. The additional runway, which we can’t use the capacity.
The terminals are there. And, you know, it’s going to happen. The question is, I don’t know why governments just don’t grab the net.
We had a Minister for Transport before this who just abdicated his responsibility and said it’s to do with the planning application. I mean, it’s a planning application about, it’s not like you’re building a skyscraper. You’re not doing anything.
You’re lifting a notional number. And the only reason that number is there is because nobody did anything about it during COVID. So let’s just make it up and make it up now by passing the legislation and getting it over and done with.
Like, if you’ve got national infrastructure, electricity, gas networks, road networks, they should be planned centrally. Not, as I said in the article, given the same attention as an attic conversion in a bungalow in North County Dublin.
Planning will go backwards. It’s not building anything. The runway is built. We already built, we’ve now got two runways at Dublin Airport, two parallel runways, which the mathematicians amongst us would say, well, that’s got a double capacity, except it’s less than where we started from. And it’s only because they didn’t look at this in time, the government are supposed to serve the people, the infrastructure, business, and say, well, we’ve got to do runways, we better do something. We were the ones that were in this radio studio trying to get everyone back flying. I mean, it was up to the DAA at the time, but let’s not go back over that. It was up to them to apply for that to be extended or to be abolished.
It is a notional number. It is nothing to do with, do you have the runway capacity? Do you have the buildings?
Do you have the road network? It’s all there. Someone just forgot to do their job. “ou generally have an issue of competitiveness across Europe, which the Draghi Report has addressed. But you look at last week, where by the, Heidi Alexander, the Minister, the Secretary of State of Transport, England has just made a decision to increase the capacity at Gatwick, to increase the capacity at Luton, to increase the capacity at Stansted, to build the third runway. Now, some of this is just making announcements, but in other words, central government can actually control that without it going to the local sort of planning applications.
I mean, we need airports. We’re on a peripheral island. We need to get people in and out of this country. We built the runway. All you want to do is use it.
Belfast and Shannon can take the capacity, but they can take it for their, largely for their own hinterland. You know, like this thing is demand driven rather than supply driven. And what happens is that if a German wants to come to Dublin, not unsurprisingly, they type into the search engine, flights to Dublin.
They don’t type in flights to Shannon. Shannon has done spectacularly well. We’ve doubled our passenger numbers in Shannon.
We’ve doubled our passenger numbers in Cork. We’ve doubled our passenger numbers in Notte pre and post COVID. So they’re doing spectacularly well.
I mean, people talk about these things. I mean, like if if Arsenal are playing PSG and all the flights into into into Paris are full, people will get creative for that weekend to say, well, I could fly to Charlotte or I could fly here, whatever it is, but not on an ongoing basis.
You can get quicker at the Stanstedt than you can from Gatwick in a lot of cases. And, you know, all the airports compete and they serve the London area. They’re all designated as London Airport.
Shannon isn’t designated as a Dublin Airport. So you’ve got Luton, Stanstedt, Gatwick, London City and Heathrow, they’re all London airports. And they all have their own unique ways.
If you want to go, if you’re doing business in the city of London and you want to pay sky high fares, you can fly into London City and you can be in Canary Wharf in a couple of minutes. If you want to get in to ride in the Bishop’s Gate or whatever it is, Stanstedt is most convenient rather than Heathrow, because you can go right across. So there’s different ways, but it’s demand driven.
It’s what people want. I’m sure there are people who start their holiday or their trip in Shannon and then make their way up to Dublin. But this idea that you’re going to force people to fly to another airport because you can’t get the government to pass the cap.
Here’s the thing, we have the runways in Dublin. We’ve got the capacity in Dublin for 60 million. There’s an artificial cap of 32 million.
The Minister for Transport here just needs to pass the legislation. They have a 20 seat majority. Just get on with it.
They put an incentive scheme in there that rewards the most fuel efficient aircraft. And we responded to that straight away by putting all the new 8200 aircraft into Dublin because the charges are lower to do that and it’s better for the environment because they burn less fuel, they carry more passengers per flight, and they make less noise. So that is substantially less noise, 50% less noise.
So, you know, there are the type of things that you need to do to attract capacity. The only access costs need to go down, and they have temporarily in Dublin, and I hope they continue to do that. And you look at places like Cork has done a long term deal with Shannon has done a long term deal.
These are vibrant airport systems competing for capacity, because we have to get out of this nationalistic way of looking at it. Like Cork and Shannon are not competing necessarily with Dublin. They’re competing with Chirin or Grenoble or Copenhagen, because it’s the airline decides where to put the capacity into your airport or not.
And we will make those decisions on a pan-European basis, where you get this idea, oh, we’ve got an airport, will somebody come fill it? I mean, like an airport is an interruption in the fence around an airport. It’s the airlines that decide to bring passengers, and they will bring it solely on the basis of access costs.
And the airport system here in Ireland at least is coming around to that to saying, look, we need capacity and we need to be competitive. We’ve got the largest, lowest cost airline in Europe, and we know exactly how they take, and we will continue to play. In Ireland, we take this for granted.
If we put a plane there, it’ll end up getting filled. Like we do that completely different than any other airline.
And then when you’re in there, and you’ve got a sustainable, low cost base, you will then look at, can we build frequencies on this route? Because we generally create markets that previously didn’t exist. And the only variable cost in our business is airports and taxes.
Staff are pretty much the same, no matter where you go throughout Europe, because pilots, cabin crew and engineers, international, there’s generally an international rate of pay. The price of the aircraft is exactly the same, buy them centrally. Fuel, pretty much the same, because we had fuel.
All those costs within our business are the same. The only difference are taxes and costs at airports. And people have this idea, oh, well, it’s only four quid, and it’s less than the price of a pint, and I’d pay it.
You wouldn’t pay it, right? Because it’s not up to you as an individual whether you’re going to pay it. The airline will have to absorb that in the 1999 fare, because we don’t get a chance to charge 23.99, because if we could do that, we would have done it.”
And then what happens is that we decide where the capacity goes based on the lowest cost. So when you get the Treasury officials in the UK or the Department of Finance here, it’s only three or four quid or whatever it is. You don’t get the chance to pay it.
But just so I’m clear then, and then the final, the end result of that is that when you make the decision, you are not saying we have done market research that causes us to believe that there’s a bucket of French people who want to come to Dublin. You’re looking at it saying, if we can get that 737 into Dublin at this price, we’ll fill it regardless of current demand.
You know the first thing we look at? What are the costs at the other end? So if the costs at the other end of that route are lower, we’re going to fly that first.
Even in places like Spain, whereby we call out the uncompetitive airport charges and people will say it’s the wrong way about going about it. Look, it has served us well over the last 30 to 40 years. We generally end up getting our way because it’s hard to argue against that if you’re competitive, you’ll be rewarded with additional capacity passengers, which brings extra taxes, extra jobs, extra tours, extra connectivity that transforms people’s lives.
But is there anything in the individual politicians looking at you and saying, when it comes to Ryanair, sup with a long spoon, you don’t want to end up being like Mary O’Rourke, you don’t want to end up being like Eamon Ryan, keep your distance, let the process work on.
I think it’s self-evident to say they’re all gone and we’re still here.”
