Ryanair CEO says airline contemplating order for ‘up to 300 aircraft’

By -
Ryanair is contemplating an order of up to 300 aircraft from either Boeing or Airbus, CEO Michael O’Leary told the Financial Times. The LCC late last year walked away from the negotiating table with Boeing after it was unable to agree on a follow-up order for 200 737s for delivery in 2013-16, and decided to use the freed-up cash to award shareholders with €500 million ($637.5 million) in dividends. The dividends, its first since going public in 1997, will be paid out next month.

“All other things being equal, if we’re still generating this amount of cash and we haven’t found any acquisition or aircraft acquisition for it, then we would certainly consider a second dividend by about the end of 2013,” O’Leary said. “But if I was a shareholder I wouldn’t be banking on that yet.”

He added that he saw no airline on the market worth buying, yet there is still the option of purchasing “200 to 300” aircraft from either Boeing or Airbus, he told FT. Ryanair had informed both manufacturers in early summer about the possible order if suitable prices and terms were offered, he noted, though there were no negotiations at present. According to Dow Jones, Airbus has refused to engage in talks with Ryanair concerning the order.

O'Leary also confirmed earlier statements to Bloomberg Businessweek that he is seeking permission from aviation authorities to use only one pilot on the shortest flights. “It would save the entire industry a fortune. In 25 years with [more than] about 10 million flights, we've had one pilot who suffered a heart attack in flight and he landed the plane,” he reasoned. “Really, you only need one pilot. Let's take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it.”

Separately, Ryanair said the Commercial Court of Barcelona confirmed it is entitled under the Spanish Constitution to exclusively distribute its low fares through its own website, and thus will not accept tickets sold through the Spanish screenscraper website Atrapalo. The latter brought the case to court. “This Spanish court victory is yet another milestone win for Ryanair after similar court wins against other screenscrapers in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK,” it commented.

Source : http://atwonline.com/aircraft-engines-components/news/ryanair-ceo-says-airline-contemplating-order-300-aircraft-0908

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?

By -
Image
Researchers are proposing a frequent flyer tax to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the airline industry. A new paper from the International Council on Clean Transportation proposed the tax as a way to fund some of the $121 billion that needs to get invested every year to decarbonize flying. "Varying the levy based on flying frequency focuses the tax burden on wealthier frequent flyers and helps ensure that people with lower incomes are not priced out of air travel because of climate policy," the study's authors, Xinyi Sola Zheng and Dan Rutherford, wrote. A sliding fee for flights beginning at $9 for the second flight and $177 for their twentieth in a given year would raise $121 billion -- versus a flat tax of $25 per ticket for all flights. For the study's authors, the tax is a way to avoid penalizing people in lower income brackets and shifting the load to the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population. Not only would the revenues come from wea
Read more

Autonomous aviation startup Xwing hits $400M valuation after latest funding round

By -
Image
  The safety pilot has his hands off the controls during an Xwing demonstration flight. Image Credits: Xwing Xwing has scored another win two months after it completed its first gate-to-gate autonomous demonstration flight of a commercial cargo aircraft. The company said Thursday it has raised $40 million at a post-money valuation of $400 million. The company is setting its sights on expansion — not only tripling its engineering team, but eventually running regular fully unmanned commercial cargo flights. Xwing has been developing a technology stack to convert aircraft, including a widely used Cessna Grand Caravan 208B, to function autonomously. But it’s had to solve a few problems first: “the perception problem, the planning problem and the control problem,” Xwing founder Marc Piette explained to TechCrunch. The company has come up with a whole suite of solutions to solve for these problems, including integrating lidar, radar and cameras on the plane; retrofitting the servomotors that
Read more