The flights cancelled by Ryanair over the next few months, using poor management of pilots’ holidays as its justification, are mainly unprofitable flights, La Libre Belgique quotes the Aviation Analytics Bureau as saying. The move was aimed at improving the airline’s financial performance, the Bureau argued.
The study’s author, Heidi Stancliffe, said that, in 2016, the low-cost carrier lost eight euros on average for each seat on the cancelled flights, whereas it earned an average of three euros per seat throughout its network.
She added that the flights were rumoured to have been cancelled because of a shortage of pilots, but the question could be asked whether those destinations were not bound to be scrapped anyway, and whether the crisis had not given Ryanair an opportunity to lop off some weak links on its network. According to Stancliffe, those lines have little chance of being reinstated in future.
Two of the destinations cancelled between November 2017 and March 2018 were profitable, two broke even, while the others posted deficits last year, according to the bureau, which compared 23 of the 34 lines scrapped since the others were only introduced for this winter.
The Brussels Times
