Ryanair blown off target by delays at Boeing

Ryanair will be forced to fly fewer passengers than planned next year due to likely delays in Boeing delivering new aircraft.
Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, Boeing’s largest customer in Europe, said the low-cost airline was due to receive 30 Boeing 737 aircraft between March and June next year to help it meet growth targets, but is now questioning how many would arrive on time.
A strike by Boeing’s largest union has halted production at its main factories in Washington state, deepening a crisis caused by a major safety issue with one of its planes in January. Boeing has responded by targeting 17,000 job cuts and on Tuesday announced a $35 billion strategy to bolster its finances.
Ryanair aims to increase its passenger numbers from about 200 million this year to 300 million by 2034, underpinned by new deliveries of Boeing’s 737 aircraft.
The delays at Boeing as well as at its rival, Airbus, which is struggling with its own supply chain issues, are increasingly frustrating carriers.
“We were supposed to get 20 deliveries before the end of December. They’ll probably come now in January and February, and that’s fine. We’ll have them in time for next summer. The big issue for Ryanair is we’re due 30 aircraft in March, April, May and June of next year, and how many of those will we get?” O’Leary said.
“I think we’re clearly going to walk back our traffic growth for next year, because I don’t think we’re going to get all those 30 aircraft.”
He added: “We want to avoid next year what we had this year. We had geared up, we crewed up the 50 aircraft, and then we only got 30 … we were overcrowded, over-staffed. We took a significant cost penalty this year,” he added.
O’Leary is due to meet Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s chief executive, to discuss the problems.
Sir Tim Clark, the boss of Emirates, the Middle Eastern carrier, has previously said he would have “a serious conversation” with Boeing about delivery delays.
O’Leary was among a number of industry leaders to complain about the capacity constraints at an industry conference in Brussels on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, at a separate event in Dublin, Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), and the former boss of IAG, owner of British Airways, told the Institute of International and European Affairs think tank that it was “massively frustrating for airline chief executives and it’s having a big impact”.
He added: “It’s going to be a problem I think for a number of years to come. The message I get from airline chief executives is the situation doesn’t look like it’s getting any worse, so it seems to have bottomed out or plateaued, but it’s not yet getting better.”
European airlines are also urging Brussels to do more to level the playing field with Chinese carriers which are able to fly over Russia, saving costs. A number of carriers, including BA and Lufthansa, have recently cancelled their routes to Beijing.
“Our view, from IATA point of view, is Russian airspace should be open to everybody. This is a political issue. It’s not a security or safety issue … I can understand why the airlines are calling for it, but I can’t see any particular instrument available to address that,” Walsh said.