‘Software ate my homework’ FULL transcript of Michael O’Leary press conference in London

Just an opportunity to give you an update on the marketplace as we launch our winter schedule. We have a record Winter ’26 schedule, including new routes. We expect to grow traffic by another 3pc in Britain this year, and deal with a couple of other issues that are occurring as we move along.

As you’ve seen before, we are the lowest-fare, lowest-cost airline not just in Britain but also in Europe. We’re number two in the world in terms of traffic. We’ve overtaken two of the American airlines this year, carrying 214m passengers, that’s up 43pc since COVID. Number one for coverage and choice, number one for on-time performance. We’re about to get the first 15 of our MAX 10 aircraft. We expect those to be certified by Boeing in the next couple of weeks, sometime in the second or third week of October, and the first 15 aircraft in the spring of next year, which will give us some more growth. That puts us on a 10-year trajectory to grow our traffic from 200m to 300m passengers. In essence, we’re the only airline across Europe and Britain who will be offering growth and lower fares for the next six or eight years.

We’re the number two airline in the world. We’ve overtaken Delta and United in the last year. We’re now just running slightly behind American. Other European carriers like IAG, Air France-KLM and easyJet are way down at 9, 10, 11, 12. As we grow from 200m to 300m over the next eight years, we will become the world’s number one airline by passengers carried.

In terms of European spread and coverage: 95 bases this summer, 222 airports, 35 countries, 650 aircraft, carrying 214m passengers, which is slightly down. Originally this year we expected to carry 216m. We have cut the capacity this winter. We are better hedged than any other airline in Europe: 80pc hedged at $67 a barrel, so we are buying fuel cheaper than almost any other airline in Europe. But we have 20pc that is unhedged, and at the moment that’s pricing up at about $149–$150 a barrel. So we want to reduce our exposure to that this winter, which is why we’re cutting back our growth very fractionally to 214m passengers.

The key strength of Ryanair is we have much lower costs than any other airline in Europe, regardless of fuel. This is the ex-fuel unit costs. Since COVID our unit costs have risen from €31 to just €36 per passenger. Over the same period easyJet have gone from €39 to €65, and all of the other European carriers are four and five times more expensive than us.

In terms of growth this winter: in Britain we’re the number one airline. We’re operating this winter at 22 airports and 13 bases. We have allocated 126 aircraft to Britain, that’s an investment of about $13bn in Britain. We are one of the largest overseas investors in Britain economy. We’ll be operating 650 routes, of which this winter 25 will be new. We expect to carry 63m passengers, growth of some 13pc over last year, and we’re supporting over 50,000 jobs.

At Stansted this winter: 49 based aircraft. We have done a new growth deal with Stansted that takes us out to 2031–2032. With that, we’re going to base two new aircraft at Stansted, a £5bn investment, 124 routes, three new routes this winter (domestic to Glasgow, to Parma, and to Malmö), with more frequencies on 50 through-routes. We expect to deliver 8pc traffic growth at Stansted this winter and carry just over 25–26m passengers in the full year.

At Gatwick we’re not increasing: four routes this winter, 1.

5m passengers, traffic growth of about 8pc. At Luton, who are very exercised by two of their main customers, both easyJet (currently the subject of M&A activity) and Wizz (teetering on the brink), they’re very keen that we continue to grow. So we’re basing seven aircraft there, opening one new route this winter to Venice, with more frequencies on five other routes, and growing our traffic in Luton by 12pc to 2.

7m passengers.

Current developments: very strong post-COVID recovery. This year we’ll carry 214m passengers, up from 148m pre-COVID. No other airline has grown as fast post-COVID as Ryanair. We have 300 new aircraft on order. These aircraft come to us with 20pc more seats and burn 20pc less fuel.

The Draghi report, which we welcomed in 2024, called for more competitiveness in Europe. Of course, as usual, Europe has done nothing about competitiveness. Nor has Britain. Those great Brexiteers who have all now disappeared to television stations across Britain have done absolutely nothing about competitiveness.

Andy Burnham, whose grasp of history is somewhat flimsy, believes that the last 40 years have been a tragic mistake. He clearly doesn’t remember, or wasn’t around for, the 70s and 80s when Britain economy was the sick man of Europe and the IMF were running your economy. If he thinks going back to the 60s and 70s is the way forward to deliver growth in every postcode, he is sadly mistaken.

We call on Mr Burnham: if he’s really serious about delivering growth in every postcode, the only way to do that is to boost aviation and tourism, which can be turned on or turned off instantaneously and can deliver growth in every region and every airport. That’s why today we’re calling on him. We don’t have any great fundamental philosophical difference with his regional tax where you allow the regional mayors to add a tax on hotel nights. But that is a double tax on tourism. Abolish APD. You can’t tax tourists on the way into Britain and then double-tax them for the hotel night. But that is the Labour plan, which is always the plan with Labour: more tax and even more spending and less economic growth.

We are actively switching capacity away from those countries who are raising taxes and airports who are raising fees, towards countries who are abolishing taxes (of which there are many) and airports who are cutting their fees (of which there are many, including in the UK). We believe Britain needs to compete with those countries. So we’re calling on the Labour government in the upcoming budget: scrap APD. It would cost you about £2.

5bn and would be repaid within 12 months given the very dramatic traffic, new route and regional growth that would be delivered not just by Ryanair but by all airlines in response to abolition of English APD. At least get your visitors into the country first before you tax them on their hotel nights, rather than trying to tax them on the way in, which is sending more and more people to other European destinations. So scrap APD. The Burnham visitor tax is just a double tax on visitors.

It is up to Britain to deliver on competitiveness. Rachel Reeves spent two years talking about it and doing nothing about it. She promised growth and of course all she managed to do was increase APD and increase employer taxes, which delivered exactly the opposite of growth, it delivered decline. The Burnham tax will double-tax visitors. English APD has already risen this year to £15 per ticket at a time when Sweden, Slovakia, four of the bigger regions in Italy, Albania and Hungary have all abolished their environmental taxes on air travel. The trend across Europe is abolishing taxes. Meanwhile here in sunny English you’re raising APD taxes. Labour now propose a double tax with the regional visitor tax. It is stupid and doomed to fail. We believe you should tax visitors once you get them into the country. So if you want to have a hotel tax, by all means, but use it as the vehicle for abolishing APD.

Low-cost access is vital for regional tourism, regional jobs and growth. If you want growth in Britain, abolish APD. Regional English and Scottish airports have excess capacity. There’s lots of room available to grow in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, etc. We can turn that on straight away. So scrap APD on all flights.

In return, we sent this growth proposal into Rachel Reeves when we were carrying 50m passengers a year. Of course we didn’t even get a reply from her. We promised to grow to 80m passengers. That would still be 27pc growth over the next four years. We would base 30 new aircraft here in Britain, a £3bn inward investment at English airports, 200 new routes and 10,000 new jobs. If you really want to deliver growth at every postcode, scrap APD and let’s stand back and let us do it.

We are calling again today for urgent reform of failing English NATS. What do we mean by urgent reform? Sack Martin Rolfe. How many more screw-ups do we have to endure for our passengers and our airlines? How many more times does he have to come up with his own internal reports marking his own homework where there’s nothing to see here, “oh, it was another software ate my homework”? This guy’s been sitting there for 15 years getting paid £1.5m a year, of which £800,000 is an annual bonus, despite delivering spectacular ATC collapses every year for the last four years. The point we make repeatedly with Heidi Alexander and all the other visionary leaders you have here in Britain is: no other European ATC system has collapsed over that period of time. Yes, the French don’t show up to work. Yes, the Belgians will go on strike. But the actual computer systems don’t fail. And here you’ve had four large failures in the last four years: August 2023 (the flight plan collapse, a software glitch because there was a flight plan filed that the system didn’t recognise); Martin Rolfe assured the House of Parliament it won’t happen again, “this is a once-in-a-lifetime, highly unlikely to ever happen again.

Two years later in July 2025 Britain radar system collapsed. This year on the 8th of September there was another collapse. “Oh, but it wasn’t a third party, it wasn’t the Russians, it wasn’t a duplicate flight plan.

We’ve asked Martin Rolfe to investigate what caused it and he took seven days to come up with “oh, it was another software glitch, the software ate my homework.

We need different management there. We have a complacent, incompetent management in NATS. The board of NATS won’t do anything because they’re too busy rewarding him with £800,000 per annum bonuses for screwing up, for running the worst ATC system in Europe that keeps failing. And on Monday of this week we had another tech failure. It was the NATS Prestwick system. It wasn’t the same software system that collapsed the Swanwick system two weeks earlier. It was a different software. But that’s all right, Martin, that’s fine. You just keep screwing up the software. The software keeps failing. Only in Britain, not in any other ATC system in Europe. But here’s another £800,000 bonus for the remarkable job you’re doing running the second most expensive ATC system in Europe.

He also told the House of Parliament back in 2023 that this wouldn’t happen again and there would be an effective backup system in place. Clearly nothing he says can be taken at face value or relied upon. And what does Heidi Alexander do this time around? She asked Martin Rolfe to come up with a report, mark your own homework. And then when that’s finished, we’re going to ask the CAA, that independent constabulary, to take six months to investigate Martin Rolfe’s homework. Why are we waiting six months? He’s already told us there’s another software glitch in the system. The CAA is not independent, in the shape of Harry Bush, nice but dim Harry, who’s been sitting on the board of the CAA for the last eight years. The CAA and all the other insiders sitting on the board of NATS cannot be relied upon.

Sack Martin Rolfe. Replace him with somebody, a 15-year-old would be more competent or would deliver more effective service, and you’d probably be able to save the £800,000 bonus as well. It is time for action. We’re fed up listening to Heidi Alexander or I don’t know who the aviation minister is (I’ve forgotten his name): “You know, we need to investigate this. This is very serious. We have to investigate this. They can’t be allowed to happen again,” and then it happens again two weeks later.

On today’s visionary press release we also gave you an excerpt from the Independent newspaper from two weeks ago where the air traffic boss takes full responsibility. The boss of air traffic control, Martin Rolfe, says he always accepts full responsibility every time the ATC system here collapses. We want to know what full responsibility means. Is it just another £800,000 bonus? We don’t think that’s actually full responsibility. We think if you’re taking full responsibility for repeatedly and uniquely collapsing the ATC system, you should resign. If you won’t do that, you should at least abandon your £800,000 bonus, but he won’t do that either.

Meanwhile Heidi Alexander is telling us we must learn from these mistakes, we must investigate this, this cannot be allowed to happen again. In fact she recently told the CAA to strengthen passenger rights so that when the ATC system collapses again, the airlines will pay more compensation, more right-to-care, to pick up the tab for Martin Rolfe’s £1.5m pay package when he can’t run an ATC system.

Here, by the way, and I think we should share with you, who’s actually sitting on the independent board of English NATS: the chairman is Warren East, ex-Rolls-Royce. It would be unfair of me to point out that when he became chairman of Rolls-Royce in 2015 the share price was £4; when he stepped down as CEO of Rolls-Royce in 2022 the share price was less than £1. What he got rewarded by was making him the chairman of NATS. You also have Martin (overpaid) and an overpaid Alistair the CFO sitting on the board. And then we have the great and the good of English aviation: the RAF, Heathrow, the CAA (dim, nice-but-dim Harry Bush, the failed CAA regulator who was presiding over the Heathrow shambles for many years), easyJet, two ex-easyJet people, and then there’s chief operating officer David Smith (another Rolls-Royce headbanger), Louise Street (she’s the BA head of airports), and some guy called Richard Churches (apparently he’s ex-easyJet as well).

They ask the question: well, why are the other airlines not calling for the head of Martin Rolfe? I said: because they’re all sitting on the board of NATS writing the bonus cheques at £800,000 a year. Don’t expect any effective reform from this lot. They’re all sitting there eating the biscuits, having coffee and dunking their doughnuts in the tea and coffee while they reward Martin, who takes full responsibility for the repeated failures of NATS, by giving another £800,000 of bonus.

So it is time for change. Heidi Alexander: stop waffling about new reports. “We must learn the lessons going forward.

We’ve already learned the lesson. The fundamental lesson to learn about NATS is it has an incompetent, overpaid CEO who needs to be dismissed. Four system collapses in the last four years at a time when no other EU ATC computer system has collapsed even once is unacceptable. Sack him and put somebody efficient or somebody effective and efficient in there to run it. Let’s put it this way: anybody, my 15-year-old, my 16-year-old child, could do a better job than Martin Rolfe and at a fraction of his £1.5m pay packet.

In summary: Ryanair is the world’s number two airline. We are still growing in Britain this year. But if the government increases or doubles visitor taxes with a visitor tax, I suspect we will be switching scarce capacity out of Britain for the summer of 2027. We don’t want to do that. We want to continue to grow in Britain. All we need is the Burnham government to abolish APD. Go ahead with your visitor tax, at least you’ll have the visitors in Britain before you tax them. Sweden, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Italy have all scrapped access taxes and are growing rapidly while Britain isn’t. We call on the Burnham government to scrap APD, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Our plan: if you scrap APD, we will grow dramatically in the next two or three years to 80m passengers, 30 new aircraft, and create 10,000 new jobs. And that growth will take place in all of the regions and all of the postcodes of Britain.

And please Heidi Alexander: don’t “learn the lessons of the past.

Don’t do any more six-month reports from the CAA who are not independent of NATS. Sack Martin Rolfe and replace him with somebody semi-competent who would run, if they can’t run the computer system, at least have an effective backup every time the computer system in English NATS fails.

And we have a winter seat sale: £19.99, 1m seats, buy now before Burnham comes in with the double tax on visitors.

Simon Calder: Is it going to improve if you get rid of Martin? Isn’t it overstretched because you’ve got so many flights and it’s going to keep falling over? That’s what the report last week said.

Michael O’Leary: No. The report last week was written by Martin Rolfe, so it was “not my fault, we need to spend more money on resilience, which is let’s increase Britain ATC charges even higher.

The problem with English NATS is they have an in-house system that they have been kind of adding and subtracting to for the last 30 years, whereas most of the other EU ATCs have an off-the-shelf system that they’re able to grow. The problem here is not volume. The problem here is the system is unreliable and keeps collapsing. A duplicate flight plan in 2023 collapsed the system. This week it was a software problem. What was the software problem? “Oh, it’s very complex, you wouldn’t know, but it’s software.

Why has no other ATC computer system across Europe failed? There has to be something unusual in Britain, and we think there is incompetent management. And by the way, he’s also the most highly paid ATC CEO in Europe by a distance. There is one repeated thing here: get rid of him. Put somebody new in there to run this place.

Lawrence: You’re very welcome. I know you said the CAA, you don’t believe the CAA is independent. Do you have confidence they will get to the bottom of this? And do you also have any idea how much the last two outages cost?

Michael O’Leary: The CAA did a report in 2023 as well. What changed? The system fell over in 2025. The system has now fallen over twice in 2026. What’s the CAA going to do? According to Martin Rolfe it’s a software issue. The CAA are going to take six months and say “oh, it was a software issue. Oh great, thanks very much. Now what do we do?” Change the management. One mistake you could allow, two mistakes, three mistakes, we’re into four. And these are not mistakes. These are system collapses. And the CAA don’t, Martin Rolfe comes out: “I take full responsibility, please.

And we actually sent an open letter to Martin Rolfe this week: please tell us what full responsibility means. Is it that you’ll resign? Is it you’ll forgo your £800,000 bonus this year? Or is it no, you’ll just get bonused again for repeatedly failing?In addition to that: what is it that we need to learn? I’m happy to take his internal report that it’s a software problem. Right, that’s the fourth failure, fourth collapse you’ve had in the last four years when no other ATC system has collapsed anywhere else in Europe. Something is rotten in the heart of English NATS. It is complacent. You look at the board, it’s all the dim failures of English aviation, BA, the CAA, sitting there eating the tea and biscuits. I wouldn’t depend on any of that lot to run an efficient operation. But at least change the management and start off again.

The other thing I want to say: Martin Rolfe comes out with two spin points every time these systems collapse. One: “Safety is our number one priority so we’ll ground everything.

Well great, okay, that’s fine. Safety is our number one priority for every airline, but we can’t be safe by grounding everything. They have to fly. And the other point he makes… the legislation doesn’t allow us to pay compensation. The legislation doesn’t stop you paying compensation. Sir Warren East of Rolls-Royce and the rest of your board can agree to reimburse the right-to-care costs. By the way, it would just be built up and packaged by the regulator and passed on to us in fees next year again. But there’s no legislation that stops NATS from reimbursing the airlines the right-to-care. So it’s all PR spin: “I take full responsibility but oh the legislation doesn’t allow us to pay.

The legislation doesn’t stop you reimbursing the airlines. So it’s spin, spin, spin, spin. We think the 8th of September cost us something of the order of between €4 and €5m. It’s very interesting. We have a case where we’ve been suing NATS for recovery. We have about €7.5m of costs from the July/August 2023 shambles (the last big collapse). That’s coming up to court, we have a court hearing in the High Court in London where we’re challenging NATS for recovery of our costs. NATS last week, we have witness statements from four people in NATS. Guess who’s the only person in NATS who we don’t have a witness statement from? Mr £1.

5m. He doesn’t want to be, because he was the one dealing with it all. He takes full responsibility but he now can’t be cross-examined in court because he’s not a witness. So there are four other lemmings in NATS who are sent out to provide witness statements, while Martin, Mr £1.5m, “No, no, I take full responsibility, but I’m not answering any questions on that in court. Like, it’s a joke. Meanwhile Heidi Alexander is: “Oh, we must learn the lessons. We must do something about it. Let’s get the CAA to do a report on this. It takes six months to do it so you’ve all forgotten about it by the time it gets here.

This is just a political cover-up. I don’t understand what he has over either the government or the Department for Transport, but it’s all the same: “He’s one of ours. Let’s circle the wagons and protect this overpaid failure.

We want him sacked. Why won’t the other airlines call for him to be sacked? Well, Wizz does, but why won’t the others? Because BA are sitting on the board giving him these annual bonuses.

Question: I’m still slightly confused. If it was you in charge, or your 15-year-old, what would you expect them to do? What would be the first step?

Michael O’Leary: First, they have a backup system. Software, we have backup systems. Our operating system is based out of some computer system here in the UK; we have a backup system based in Frankfurt. Our whole operations centre runs out of our head office in Dublin. If, God forbid, a drone attack by the Russians takes out our head office, we have a standalone centre we can get up and running. Why is it when Swanwick goes down that you can’t switch the system to get Prestwick to run it? Why is it “but it was only a millisecond, oh, that’s all right then”? Every flight was cancelled for six hours, but it was just a millisecond. Well fine, “but we protected safety.

What? By grounding every airline and every aircraft to and from the UK? We protected safety by trapping you on aircraft for three or four hours. Like, what else can you do? How many times has this guy got to fail? How many times has Britain system got to collapse before you say this is fundamentally a management problem? Why is there nobody on the board of NATS who works for an IT company, an AI company, who has any software expertise? Go back to it, it’s all the great and the good, the RAF, the CAA. What do these guys know about running a computer system? Harry Bush is a nice guy and all that, but it was a software problem. Which of these is going to go? You’ve got the easyJet COO, why haven’t you got the easyJet chief technology officer sitting on the board there? Meanwhile Martin will be in there pontificating away: “Oh, this is terrible, but I take full responsibility. What’s that mean, Martin? “Give me my bonus.

If this game keeps happening and we keep doing investigations and the CAA keep doing reports, why don’t you start at the top and sack the man who’s presided over four collapses in four years?

Question: Are those capacity cuts coming from frequencies or generally?

Michael O’Leary: We’re taking out kind of… while we’re 80pc hedged at $67 a barrel, this is jet fuel. Jet fuel today is trading at about $140 a barrel. We’re 20pc unhedged. So we’re trying to reduce the amount of unhedged oil we buy this winter. It’s almost all capacity. We’re taking out a lot of flights on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturday afternoons, Sunday mornings before lunchtime; capacity in late November, early December; and capacity in the middle of January. So it’s all that selective. We’re not closing any significant bases unless there’s a route with an airport or a tax with the government. We’re not closing any bases. We’re not taking away capacity out of markets where we’re competing with people. It’s basically just trying to trim the schedule as much as we possibly can so that we can reduce our exposure to unhedged oil. And most of the variants that we see, like airBaltic have now gone into Chapter 11. Wizz we think won’t be far behind them. TAP are cutting capacity. easyJet are cutting. Everybody’s going to cut capacity this winter because we are all much more exposed to oil this winter and into the summer of ’27 than we were into December ’26.

Question: Are you worried about jet fuel prices rising significantly again next year?

Michael O’Leary: No. I very much hope that jet prices will rise faster into next year because that will accelerate the extent to which other airlines will fail. Airlines who are currently loss-making will fail. It will accelerate the consolidation of Europe into four large airlines: BA, Lufthansa, Air France and Ryanair. It will also mean fuel surcharges coming on, particularly with the legacy carriers in short-haul Europe next year. And I think there will be a meaningful rise in airfares into the summer. We’re already seeing airfares, when the Middle East war kicked off in February we saw fares beginning to soften from February right through to the end of July. Interestingly, from the start of August fares are beginning to rise again into the winter, which is almost unprecedented. That’s just everybody taking out winter capacity, pricing up because of higher oil prices. And if that continues through the winter, I think you’re going to see meaningfully less capacity next summer and meaningfully higher airfares. So if I were you planning your holidays for next year, next summer, I’d be booking them today. The sooner you book and lock away those prices, I think there’s only one way airfares are going in Europe next year, and that is dramatically upwards.

Question: Fewer routes as a result?

Michael O’Leary: Well, it’s inevitable that costs are going to get passed on. But a NATS failure, the NATS failure we think in September cost us something like €4 or €5m. That’s not significant spread across 214m passengers or across a 12-month period. The problem is much more the lack of resilience of English NATS. And the question that Heidi Alexander won’t answer, apart from one: when Martin Rolfe says he takes full responsibility, what does he mean? And two: why is it only Britain system that has failed/collapsed four times in the last four years? But she’ll be too busy doffing her hat towards “we’ll investigate” and “I’ll have her report in six months’ time.

So let’s just kick the can down the road instead of taking real action and sacking Martin Rolfe and putting somebody competent in to run it.

But no, fares for Ryanair passengers and every other passenger into the summer of 2027 are going to rise materially, I believe, because of significantly higher oil prices. Most of the airlines were well hedged into the summer of 2026 and therefore we absorbed the shock of the much higher oil prices this summer. None of us will be able to absorb those much higher oil prices next year into summer 2027, and it will get passed on in the form of fuel surcharges or higher airfares. Ryanair will not levy a fuel surcharge, but the legacy guys certainly will next summer.

Chris: Just a quick one on two other things. Obviously you meet with your fellow CEOs quite often through A4E and so on. Have you lobbied them to actually take a stance on this, or do you think the fact that, for example they benefit from the dividends, the pretty hefty dividend paid out, or are they telling you that it’s the government and its golden share that’s standing in the way?

Michael O’Leary: No, they say “oh something must be done,” but you know, we’re not calling… I’ve spoken to them. They don’t want to call for his head. We don’t want to personalise this problem. I should say by the way, as you know the shareholders of NATS: the government is 49pc, Airlines English (which is BA, easyJet and the others) have I think 42pc. Last year NATS recorded a profit of £140m and the dividend was £137m. So when Mr Rolfe talks about resilience and “we need to invest more in resilience,” they’re too busy ripping the money out, enriching their shareholders, who are the airlines and Britain government. So they don’t really care. They’re not worried about resilience. He just wants his £1.

5m or his £800,000 bonus every year to continue, and he keeps paying out ridiculous dividends to these guys.

Chris: In terms of demand, you’re trimming your capacity, cutting the fuel bill that way, some consolidating. But two said that revenue was down 9pc. Britain was the most pronounced decline, 4pc across Europe for the winter schedule. Are you seeing a real-terms decline in demand or bookings then?

Michael O’Leary: No. We never see a real-terms decline in bookings because we keep growing traffic. Pricing is where we see growth or decline. From February through to the end of August this year, prices, our underlying fares, were falling year-over-year. So prices were down on summer ’26 over summer ’25. From August onwards that has turned. Prices are now rising over what we were charging this time last year. In our June quarter our average fares were down 6pc. In the September quarter we expect fares to be down 2–3pc on the prior year. But it’s beginning to look more and more like into the third quarter (December) and the fourth quarter (March) fares will be up year-on-year. Is that as a function of passing on…? No. I think it’s a function of the industry beginning to pass on higher airfares because they have to, because they’re paying much higher oil prices, and meaningful capacity coming out this winter. Everybody, if we lead, and we generally set the trend, if we lead by going from capacity up 6pc and we’re flat capacity this winter, everybody else will follow us.

Question: You spoke about fuel. There’s a huge hubbub about fuel shortages immediately after the start of the Iran war and everyone said “no problem.

As the US begins to pull up the drawbridge and we don’t have huge refining capacity certainly in Britain, does that become a proper problem?

Michael O’Leary: No. At the moment all of the signs are in the US that they’re actually pumping more. Trump is coming up to the midterms in November. He’s desperately trying to get oil prices back down below $7 a gallon in the US. It looks like between Venezuela, West Africa, the US and Russia they’re pumping more and making out like bandits. We do believe, however, there is clearly refinery capacity that has been attacked in Russia and in the Middle East. One of the big trends: Brent this week has come back down below $100 a barrel. The refining margin, the crack spreads, are still up. Jet fuel is still up around $145 a barrel. Typically jet was between 10 and 20pc more expensive than Brent. That has widened currently towards close to 40 or 50pc more expensive. And that is because of pressure on refinery capacity. We think that wider crack spread or refining margin will remain into next year. I personally believe oil prices, once you get past into the first quarter into early 2027, assuming there’s some significant change in the midterms and some sort of movement towards peace or a resolution in the Middle East and/or Ukraine, Brent crude will fall into the spring of next year. But jet prices will remain high because of the widening refining/jet crack spreads. Historically I thought we would be looking into 2027 with jet fuel coming back down below $100 a barrel. Now I’m not so sure. Certainly into the first half of 2027 jet could well remain up at around $110–$120 a barrel even if Brent crude comes down to $80 or $90 a barrel. But what the hell do I know about oil prices except we just try to hedge so that we have cost certainty over a rolling 12-month period.

Question: I wanted to ask about bankruptcies, potential bankruptcies. When it comes to where would you want to take over, which area would be most valuable to you? Where do you want to grow when someone is coming off?

Michael O’Leary: We never… our capacity is deployed to whichever airports are giving us the biggest growth incentives. So we don’t wait for people to go bankrupt. We already have airport suppliers to existing airlines who are in Chapter 11 or who are teetering on the edge actively talking to us about whether we will commit to more. Most of the airports in Europe know that capacity growth in the next couple of years is going to be very scarce. We have airports who are currently dependent on the likes of airBaltic, TAP, Wizz, even easyJet, who are worried about what’s likely to happen. Take easyJet, which is a very fine airline, profitable, but subject to M&A. There’s going to be a lot of financial engineering around easyJet for the next couple of years if the Apollo bid succeeds, and certain airports want insurance against easyJet capacity being switched out of those airports. Clearly it’s not Gatwick or Paris or Switzerland. But the airports are getting much more concerned about the likely shifts in capacity. If you are at the moment a significant customer of Wizz, airBaltic, Norwegian, SAS, you’ll be worried. So we’re not waiting for somebody’s bankruptcy. We are doing growth deals with a lot of those airports because they want us, or they want to get Ryanair, to expand capacity in their airports before somebody else switches capacity or goes into Chapter 11 or goes bankrupt. Airlines are notoriously bad at going bankrupt; they generally go into some kind of Chapter 11 and then some Egyptian wants to rescue them or believes they can refloat the Titanic. So we would never hang around waiting. We are always in negotiations with airports, but the airports are increasingly exercised and worried about some of their incumbent airlines.

Question: How much are you hedged into…?

Michael O’Leary: Officially we are 15pc hedged into FY28, which includes summer ’27, 15pc hedged at $85 a barrel. In terms of… 15pc hedging is very little. We have very little hedging in place for summer 2027. We will continue to look for opportunities to raise that hedging profile, particularly as we run into the half-year results in November. But there is no doubt, even if we hedge today, you can buy forward into next year today at just over $100 a barrel. We would want to get our hedging up towards maybe 30 or 40pc by the time we get to the half-year results in November. We may not get there because we would be greedy and wait for pricing under $100 a barrel. Pricing may not fall under $100 a barrel this side of Trump in the midterms. But does that mean you would look to, for example if prices stay high, then look to trim summer? No, summer schedule we will fly the ass off our summer schedule. Our capacity next year with 15 MAX 10 deliveries will go up about 2–3pc next summer. This year we will do 214m passengers. I expect in FY28 (which is the summer of ’27) that we will grow that to about 220m passengers. Ultimately you can pass on higher oil prices during the summer; where you struggle to pass on higher oil prices is during the winter period, which is why we’re trimming this winter.

I have no doubt fares are rising next year. The question is by how much?

Question: At the AGM… what’s your response to that pushback from any of the unhappy shareholders?

Michael O’Leary: Nothing. If we get less than 75pc approval we have to go back and consult with shareholders over the next 12 months. We have to understand the reasons why they voted against it. They seem to split into two. Half of them have voted against it for ESG reasons. They think that while Holland should be paid £25m a year for scoring a few goals, I should not be paid appropriately for the job that I do. And then there are others who believe that the targets, by the way this is not a bonus plan. I keep emphasising this is a share option scheme. I do not qualify for any of it unless the share price (which today is about €23.

50) has to go to €42 a share. And some of them believe that target should have been higher. So we will consult with shareholders to understand. But it’s a say-on-pay that has still been approved by a two-thirds majority, and then we have to publish in next year’s annual report the results of our consultation with shareholders.

Question: Just take on that, so you might tweak it or you wouldn’t tweak it?

Michael O’Leary: No, it’s approved. It goes ahead. It’s a say-on-pay. Even if it was lost, it’s a say-on-pay. It is approved by a two-thirds majority. But because we fell below 75pc, we have to consult shareholders and understand why they voted against it. Welcome to the world of ESG and a lot of shareholder meetings. You need to go to a few more AGMs. They’re largely not a particularly useful use of time.

Question: I’m interested in the contact… where’s those letters?

Michael O’Leary: They’re there to be distributed. Have you got them? Actually we’re going to share with you… Martin doesn’t speak to me, won’t write to me. He’s taken to writing to Eddie, who’s the Ryanair CEO. This week he has written to us recently, sharing his report which identified that collision… he doesn’t explain why they keep having software digresses… undeserved apologies. He takes full responsibility and he is working on a dramatic plan to improve the resilience of English [NATS], which is almost exactly the same as in July 2023.

This is the letter we sent back yesterday or on Monday after the second collapse of the system. By the way, he has invited all the airlines to an open forum consultation with the DfT, the CAA and himself. He probably won’t show up to it, he’ll send somebody else along. And we’ve asked four questions. So: you confirmed you take full responsibility, what do you actually mean? Two: can you explain why only, and this is to me the compelling point, whether you agree with Martin Rolfe or not, why is it only Britain system that has collapsed four times in four years? No other EU ATC system. By the way we are very critical of French ATC, Italian ATC when they go on strike, when they don’t show up to work, but the systems don’t collapse, and they are bigger. The Italian ATC system is bigger in handling more flights than Britain system. Given the latest excuse that “the software ate your homework,” how can we have any confidence that there won’t be more software defects? We don’t have any confidence. And we note your misleading excuse that legislation does not provide the mechanism for direct compensation by NATS. No, but the board and management of NATS can provide that compensation anyway. You’re not prevented by legislation. So it’s all spin and puff and “full responsibility, legislation prevents us from providing you with right-to-care compensation.

We will invite you all to the High Court in London at the end of October when our case against NATS for recovery of our €7.

5m in costs for the July 2023 comes up. But unfortunately Martin Rolfe, who takes full responsibility, is the only senior NATS executive not to file a witness statement. So we can’t put him in the box because he hasn’t filed a witness statement. So it’s all mealy-mouthed political backsliding while he collects this year’s £800,000 bonus.

Question: Paying more for resilience?

Michael O’Leary: I would be prepared to pay more starting tomorrow if the existing shareholders of NATS stop ripping 140m of dividends out of this place. This thing has fallen under us. And yet the existing shareholders, which may be Heidi Alexander, BA, easyJet and the others, are taking almost 100pc of the annual profits out in dividends while they deliver a system that keeps collapsing. Martin Rolfe promised to invest in resilience. We would pay more, even despite that, English ATC is the second most expensive ATC system in Europe. We would pay more, but only on condition that there is a 10-year moratorium on dividends. Heidi Alexander will be there pontificating away about the need to prioritise safety and we need to prioritise resilience while I keep taking £70m in dividends out every year. Like, what do you expect was going to happen here if you take all the profits out in dividends every year? And remarkably, neither BA nor Heathrow nor easyJet nor Rolls-Royce have called for Martin Rolfe’s head as a result of all of this, because I think they’re very happy with the current framework which results in them getting £70m in dividends every year, and Heidi is getting £70m in dividends while she calls on the CAA to independently investigate, but take six months, let’s not be in any rush here. Six months should be enough time to investigate the software system. It’s a scam run by and presided over by Britain government, where they pontificate about safety, talk about resilience, and yet all they do is keep ripping dividends out. Almost 100pc of the profits last year were taken out in dividends. No business can survive with that kind of shareholder enriching. The only real example I’ve seen of this where a regulated monopoly does this is Heathrow, where they just keep taking the money out, load it up with debt, take all the money out in dividends, and then “oh we need the regulator to allow us to charge £49bn for a third runway which you could build for £15bn, I mean concrete.

So no, we don’t have any faith in Martin Rolfe. It’s time for management changes in NATS, and it’s also time for Warren East to step down and put somebody in there who knows something about software systems and running resilient software systems.

ITV: How much would a new resilient system cost?

Michael O’Leary: Honestly, I have no idea. But detail, it’s an important detail. FlightRadar is a very resilient and effective system. You could have FlightRadar for free and it would run a better job than this lot do, and you wouldn’t need 12 of the great and the good or the dim-witted failures of English aviation to sit on the board. We run most of our flight ops, our flight ops is probably the biggest system in the world. We got Labs to write that. We’ve invested, it cost us about €80m over about a four-year period, but we have a flight ops control system that has the capacity to handle over a thousand aircraft. But that’s not something you could instantaneously put in there. Actually the software is not expensive. But the starting point here is you have a software system that they’ve been patching and fixing. Remember when it failed in 2023 and failed on a bank holiday Monday? All their engineers were sitting at home in their jim-jams, and the reason it was down for six hours was the engineers couldn’t get to work because they were sitting at home watching Sky News. But now we have the engineers will be on site. Now we have the engineers on site but they don’t know why the software failed. If the software fails at Swanwick, why are you not switching that? Why can’t Prestwick not got the capacity to take it over then? When Prestwick failed this Monday, why hasn’t Swanwick got the capacity to take this over? As I said, we run a big operations centre in Dublin, biggest airline operations in Europe. We also have a duplicate operations system in Warsaw. So we can flick from Dublin to Warsaw at very short notice to keep the system running. Why doesn’t NATS have something similar there? I don’t know.

NATS income last year, by the way, was £1.

3bn. Basically all their costs are software and people. So they spent about £1.

15bn on people and software and the other £150m got paid out in dividends to the shareholders. It’s not like they’re short of money. But there is just no management there. Rolfe has been running NATS for about 15 years, getting enriched on an annual basis with an £800,000 bonus to deliver collapse after collapse after collapse. Now Heidi Alexander doesn’t have any better idea as to what to do. Warren certainly doesn’t have any idea. He couldn’t run Rolls-Royce and he sure as hell can’t run NATS either. Maybe we start with Martin Rolfe, take him out, and let’s… why don’t we run an advert? Let’s see, get some of the other Europeans who run an efficient software system in to run that. It couldn’t be any worse than the existing incumbents.

Simon: How worried are you about easyJet being taken over by a company with lots of money and expansion, and that’s going to run, isn’t it?

Michael O’Leary: No. Look, all I’ve seen, if you look at what Apollo have promised in the plan for easyJet, but it’s more detailed in the core, they say they’re going to increase airfares, they’re going to go upmarket, they’re going to be connecting easyJet flights into long-haul flights, probably a little less capacity around the edges. And the last is that they’re going to load about £3bn of debt into the easyJet balance sheet. So easyJet, which today I think sits on… easyJet is a well-run airline. And I have a lot of respect for Kenton Jarvis. It runs a good operation on holidays. The airline doesn’t make much money, but Holidays makes money. Kenton Jarvis runs a reasonably tight ship. But it’s all going to be M&A for the next three or four years. If they load £3bn of debt onto the easyJet balance sheet, easyJet isn’t going to be growing. It’s going to be getting smaller and raising fares even faster. Fundamentally, that is all part of the European consolidation process that we’ve been predicting for the last 10–15 years. And eventually we’ll be right, the consolidation will play itself out.

Question: What does that look like [on fares]?

Michael O’Leary: Honestly I don’t know. But if you look at our costs this year, we’re essentially hedged this year at about $80 a barrel. If we hedge next year at $100 a barrel, our oil bill goes up by 25pc. Our oil bill this year is €6bn. If it goes up by 25pc that’s €7.

5bn next year, oil price is going up €1.

5bn. We need airfares to go up across 220m passengers by about €7 a passenger. Our average airfare this year is about €50. If it goes up by that, that’s about a 12 to 14pc increase in airfare just to cover higher fuel, and our fuel increase is less than almost any other airline in Europe. So I think you are looking at… again I have no idea what this… if oil prices remain at these high levels through into the summer of 2027 I think you’re looking at airfares rising 10, 15, 20pc. And it has happened before during 9/11, Gulf War I, Gulf War II, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil prices spike up materially, airfares rise, lag about 12 months. And I think airfares are heading for meaningfully higher prices into the summer of 2027. But is it up 10pc, up 15pc? I have no idea. I don’t know. All I know is that there will not be any meaningful capacity growth next year. There will be significant capacity reductions because there will be more airline failures in Europe this year other than airBaltic if jet fuel remains up at $140 a barrel through this winter. I do not personally believe Wizz will survive this winter if oil prices remain up at $140–$150 a barrel, but that is a personal opinion and I’ve been wrong before.

Question: Just check, you said your backup centre is in Frankfurt/Warsaw. What are the other centres you mentioned?

Michael O’Leary: We have a separate centre in Dublin. If Dublin falls down, we can move all of our people into a separate ops centre in Dublin, but we have a duplicate ops centre in Warsaw. So if anything goes down in Dublin, we can move everything straight away to Warsaw. And to be fair, NATS has two ops centres: you have Swanwick and you have Prestwick. Now if one goes down as a software [failure], why don’t you move to the second one, Martin Rolfe with £1.

5m a year? What have you been doing for the last 15 years? Collapse after collapse after collapse. But it’s okay, it’s a software problem, it’s a duplicate flight plan problem, it’s a radar failure problem. Nothing to see here, let’s move on. But I take full responsibility. What does that mean? Nobody’s really sure.

Question: Do you think [Warren East] got the job… obviously he had some experience of technology and all that?

Michael O’Leary: Well he was a kind of non-exec… he was the CEO of Rolls-Royce from 2015 to 2022. Yeah. But before that… well before that you mean… he went into Rolls-Royce from 2015 to 2022. The share price fell by 75pc during his tenure. But if you were dealing with tech in 2015, the world has changed in 2026. Frankly I don’t know the man, but nothing he’s done in NATS has inspired any particular confidence here. If you were setting up a board, what does NATS do? It runs very large software systems. Why do you not have somebody there from the AI industry or Microsoft? Why is nobody from Microsoft or Oracle or Google sitting on the board? It’s all the great and the good of English aviation enriching themselves with excessive dividends. I think they’re all there so they make sure the dividend payout doesn’t fall. But that’s not a board that inspires any confidence in anything.

Anything else? No. Okay folks, thank you very much. Buy, if you’re looking to travel now, either this winter or at Christmas or in summer ’27, get on the Ryanair website and book today. Our full summer schedule is already on sale next year. Buy now because the prices are only going one way and that is significantly upwards. Thank you very much, and let’s hope that Heidi Alexander seizes the moment and sacks Martin Rolfe, because clearly he has no intention of resigning himself. Thank you very much everybody.