Never engage Ruinair check-in staff in voluntary conversation for fear they find an obscure reason to deny boarding. ‘Sorry sir, that couldn’t possibly be you in that awful passport photograph.’ Today is not the day to naively ask for a good window seat near the front and see their reaction. Be conscious of the small print they put on page 173 of their standard email confirmation. This states the following. ‘Look mate, no matter what happens at any stage in this flight, it’s your own fault not ours, so don’t ever try to mess with us.’ I worry they will get me soon at check-in. They get us all eventually. I will be late. I will have no ID. I will forget the email confirmation. The check-in queue will be too long. I will not have shaved. They won’t like my jumper. Some braver folk dice with death and bring a Post-it note with their confirmation reference. But I always bring along my emailed itinerary so I can show the check-in girl that I only paid one euro.
Ruinair weigh passenger checked luggage as carefully as the us Department of the Treasury weigh gold bars leaving the Fort Knox Bullion Depository in Kentucky. I watch other passengers on their knees on the floor, opening suitcases and dividing their life’s possessions into heavy items and not-so-heavy items, all being somewhat reminiscent of that U2 song ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’. Someone spots an unused check-in desk with a weighing scales so others check the weight of their baggage with fingers crossed, but the cashiers who double as check-in agents are not happy that the rabble are using the scales. A reading of 15 kg on the red display is joy; 16 kg is despair. ‘She wants to charge me for one feckin’ kilo over.’ The guy ahead with a huge suitcase is about to be badly screwed until the cashier asks him to weigh his backpack which is a tiny 2 kg. He moves about 5 kg of dirty laundry from suitcase to backpack and so avoids excess baggage charges but holds us up for ages and all his baggage is still going in the aircraft, whether it’s in the hold or the overhead bin, and all their petty baggage rules suddenly seem so pointless.
I heard a rumour that Ruinair may introduce charges for customers who travel with emotional baggage, in an attempt to avoid delays caused by family arguments at check-in and at boarding. They will have a strict rule of ‘maximum of one divorce case per passenger’ with no pooling of cases allowed. So if a mother turns up at the airport with her children from a first marriage, and she is still not talking to her second husband, the check-in girl will ask her a series of questions about the divorce and all the suppressed anger and guilt felt by the family, and Ruinair will charge her an extra ten euros. If the mother complains that this money-grabbing reminds her of the absent father who just took, took, took and left her nothing in his will, Ruinair will add another five euros.
What do you think Mick? ‘People are overly obsessed with charges. They complain we are charging for check-in, but people who use web check-in and only have carry-on luggage are getting even cheaper fares. We are absolutely upfront about charges and the baggage charges and the check-in charges will rise. We will keep raising them until we can persuade the 40% to 50% of passengers who travel with us for one or two days to bring just one carry-on bag. I can go away for two weeks with just my overnight bag. Instead of packing a hairdryer, why not buy one when you get there?’
I have long since tired of playing their checked baggage game. It’s easier to pay the checked baggage fee of when booking a trip of any longer than a few days. So on the day of travel I can put the baggage in the hold or else carry it on and I have found that once you pay the fee they never bother to look at your carry-on baggage and I can take as much as I can carry with me on board so they don’t lose my baggage. This arrangement suits both parties since they have their blood money and I can do what I want with my luggage. A few euros to transport a suitcase to Europe is a steal in every sense. I mean, FedEx or DHL would charge me a hundred euros or more and they would not be as quick.
Check-in is fairly ugly with many long queues snaking around the Departures area but no clue as to which desks they lead to. Lost Ruinair staff with less than perfect English stand and look at us. There’s a queue beside me for a flight to Bournemouth and I’m not sure why. Maybe Bournemouth is close to somewhere more exciting. Near the check-in queue are a gang of teenage Nike Hoodie boys, apparently wearing legitimate tracksuits emblazoned with the names of various Dublin boxing clubs. A gent asks where they are going. One of the freckled shaven-head terriers clenches up a fist. ‘We’re off to kill the feckin’ English.’
This airline, like any multi-million Boeing, is a well-oiled machine. Their operating system is simple. Each aircraft departs from its base on the first wave of flights early in the day (much like when the Japanese set off en masse early one morning for Pearl Harbour), and by the end of the operating day at midnight all crew and aircraft are back home. There is no scheduled over-nighting away from base, so there are no nasty hotel bills to pay. Each aircraft usually makes eight flights per day, from 6am to midnight. I saw a programme on RTE where their pilots said the ‘earlies’ are getting earlier, they don’t get a break for nine hours and cannot even get off the plane to buy a sandwich because they must supervise the refuelling. Landing and taking off many times per day is a more stressful job than flying intercontinental long haul. But on the upside Ruinair pilots do not have to fly to congested hubs like Heathrow and Schiphol.
One cabin crew team works the first four flights, or sectors, then another cabin crew takes the last four flights. Sometimes the pilots can fly a six-sector day which involves three return flights from Ireland to the UK. This airline rosters pilots on a pattern of five early-start days and two days off, followed by five late-start days and two days off, known as 5/2/5/2, which some crews like because of the predictability. But many of their pilots fly so much that they reach the 900-hour annual maximum limit specified by Europe’s aviation regulations before the year is over, and as the airline runs the same rostering year for everyone from 1 April to 31 March, this can lead to a crew crisis and lack of pilots at the end of every March when the pilots can sit around for weeks with their feet up since it would be illegal for them to take to the air.
Some of the pilots feel overworked so they set up a covert website for the Ruinair European Pilots Association called www.repaweb.org in order to communicate privately with each other. Ruinair do not approve but the Irish High Court dismissed an application by Ruinair seeking disclosure of the identities of pilots using the website. Ruinair contended that some of their pilots had been intimidated by postings by anonymous individuals using code names including ‘I hate Ruinair’ and ‘Can’t fly, Won’t fly’. However, the Justice refused to allow their identities to be revealed. He said that there was no evidence of bullying by the defendants to the action and the only evidence of bullying in the case was by the plaintiff, Ruinair. Mick doesn’t agree that his pilots are under pressure. ‘I don’t even know how I would put a pilot under pressure. What do you do? Call him up as he’s coming in to land? They are paid €100,000 a year for flying eighteen hours a week. How could you be fatigued working nine days in every two weeks? They can afford to buy yachts. If this is such a Siberian salt mine and I am such an ogre then why are they still working for the airline?’
All aircraft are left at their home base overnight so fault fixing is easier. There is no slack in the operating system. Turnarounds are scheduled to take only 25 minutes, and any delays are subject to immediate scrutiny. Timing is so tight that the only chance the pilots get to have a break is when they are safely up in the air. If the cabin is absolutely full, 25 minutes is simply impossible, so pilots rely on arriving early at the gate to achieve an on-time departure. If any aircraft become unserviceable, Ruinair has four standby aircraft at the ready: at the time of writing one is based at Dublin, one at Rome Ciampino and two at Stansted. Daily at 8am after the first wave of departures, all the base operations chiefs in Europe join a conference phone call. Each centre sends an email to the Dublin headquarters detailing performance. If there is a reason even for a one-minute delay it is discussed to see if a recurrence can be prevented. At 8.30am every Monday