Ruinair. Paul Kilduff
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f****** late?’
So it’s not surprising that our aircraft is on time. I watch the disembarking passengers trudge past us. There’s also an incoming flight from Liverpool so every second passenger who alights wears full Liverpool FC replica kit. Mick likes Liverpool. ‘Liverpool is the low fares regional airport for the north-west of England. Liverpool doesn’t have all the glass, bells and whistles that Manchester has, but passengers don’t want glass, bells and whistles. It’s always good to see Liverpool give Manchester a good kicking.’ All of the passengers are bleary-eyed and fatigued. I woke up at 6am to catch my flight. I dread to think at what time these fellow travellers awoke. It was hardly worth even going to bed. Often low fares comes at a high price. Having aircraft lying around doing nothing at night-time must ruin this airline. Soon there’ll be 3am flights.
On the plane I read Ruinair, the first edition of their in-flight magazine, which I keep because it will surely be worth a lot of money in years to come. There is an advertisement from the printers of the magazine based in Warsaw. I bet they’re low-cost printers. The magazine includes a model Boeing to buy; a push-fit plastic model requiring no glue or paint, with realistic take-off sounds and flashing lights, like what we fly in today. I read Mick’s message on the first page. I can’t believe he writes this piece himself because of the absence of swear words. He describes the amazing in-flight Movie-Star system. There’s a sample on-screen picture, showing Mick getting on board an aircraft, hands on hips, open-neck shirt and jeans. I think that’s the same shirt. I hope we don’t have to pay €7 to listen to him. Six months of trials later they can the movie system because no one wants to pay to use it. There is an editorial with a quote from Saint Augustine who is the patron saint of low fares air travel. ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel, read only a page’ I keep my copy of the magazine for research purposes but the crew come through the cabin to retrieve all copies. So I sit on my magazine. They pass by. I triumph but there will be a downside. They print 70,000 copies of every issue, and 50 per cent of passengers spend thirty minutes reading it. Tonight the employee who counts the magazines in the warehouse in Dublin airport will shout over to his foreman: ‘Hey, Seamus, it’s happened again. We’re down to 69,999 copies. Some fecker has nicked a copy.’
The magazine has a tacky insert called Buy As You Fly, which features mail order products that no one would ever need or use or want as a gift. There’s a wooden rocking chair. I mean who ever uses a rocking chair except Val Doonican or the elderly gentleman in the TV advertisements for Werthers Original sweets? There’s a Hercules Winch which will uproot an unwanted tree, pull a vehicle out of a ditch or winch in a boat but I don’t have any unwanted trees, I don’t often drive my car into ditches (of which there are few where I live and in any event I would be calling the AA) and, like most of the population, I don’t own a boat. There’s a Snail and Slug Trap which is filled with beer to entice the slimy rascals inside where they drown but go with a big smile on their faces. What a waste of good beer. There’s the Garden Kneeler Bench, a real life-saver for the avid but badly crippled gardener. There’s the dog bark control collar, the sonic mole repeller and the ultrasonic cat repeller; all repelling. There’s the appropriately named Sudoku for Dummies. There are Exclusive Football Stadium Framed Prints. How exclusive can they be if I can buy one by mail order? There’s an anti-frost mat to prevent icy build-up in my freezer. What a load of rubbish.
In 1942 the us Air Force established an airfield at Stansted for its Marauder bomber squadron. In the early days of this low fares Mecca everyone flew from here for free courtesy of the us government, but mostly it was on daytime bombing runs to Berlin. Later the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command abandoned the airfield, leaving a civil airport with one of the longest runways in Europe, but with zero passengers. The airport was designated as London’s third and re-opened in 1991 as the greatest white elephant of its time. There was no train link from London to the airport. Air UK flew there and Cubana Airlines operated a weekly flight to Havana via Gander on a Russian-made Ilyushin jet. The BAA, with noted starchitect Norman Foster on board, spent £300 million on a terminal building with a floating roof supported by a frame of inverted-pyramid roof trusses, a glass and steel masterpiece in the middle of nowhere. Ideal for Ruinair.
Why do we need architects to design airports? Let’s build a building and have glass walls so it’s bright inside. Let’s put a flat roof on it. Let’s have a train station underneath and how about some bus stops outside? And then let’s build a Toytown train to take people to the piers—we’ll have two of those. Let’s call them A & B. And hey, how about we make one half for Departures and the other for Arrivals? But Stansted is revolutionary for one genuine reason. Before Stansted, airports used to have roofs full of cabling, air conditioning and insulation. Foster put them all under the floor and opened the roof to the sky, safe in the knowledge that sunlight is considerably cheaper than paying a monthly London Electricity bill. This is the airport of choice for the authorities when a hijacked aircraft wants to land in the South-East. I rest my case. When a Sudanese airliner was hijacked and landed here, Ruinair responded with an advertisement headlined: ‘It’s amazing what lengths people will go to to fly cheaper than Ruinair.’ As Mick says, ‘Usually someone gets offended by our ads, which is fantastic. You get a whole lot more bang for your buck if somebody is upset.’
The BAA plan to build a new runway at Stansted. The analysis of the £4 billion spend includes £90 million for a runway, £1 billion plus for a terminal building and an amazing £350 million for earthmoving and landscaping, the latter representing a gardening event of truly Alan Titchmarsh proportions. Mick as usual offers his modest opinion. ‘The BAA are on a cocaine-induced spending spree. They are an overcharging, gold-plating monopoly which should be broken up. BAA have no particular skills in building airports and are the worst airport builders in the western world. A break-up of BAA would be the greatest thing that has happened to British aviation since the founding of Ruinair. Then airline customers would not be forced to endure the black hole of Calcutta that is Heathrow, or the unnecessary, overpriced palace being planned at Stansted. The BAA want to spend £4 billion on an airport which should cost £100 million. £3.9 billion is for tree planting, new roadways and Norman Foster’s Noddy railway so they can mortgage away the future of low-cost airlines. This plan is for the birds. People can drive up the M11, they will walk barefoot over the fields for a cheap fare. What they are not going to do is pay for some bloody marble Taj Mahal.’
Mick is even considering ways to avoid incurring the charges at the check-in desks at BAA’S Stansted airport: ‘I could check in people in the car park, which would be cheaper than BAA. If they don’t let me use their car parks we might let them check in at the truckers’ car park on the M11.’ Equally the BAA CEO enjoys a public spat with his biggest customer at Stansted and rebuts Mick. ‘You could probably build the runway for £100 million if you had a flat piece of ground, were not worried about where you parked the aircraft and were not worried about how to get the passengers on and off the planes. The runway would only cost £100m if all we had to do was fly some Irish labourers over to lay some tarmac down the drive.’
It’s a rough landing at Stansted in gale force winds but it’s not a bad landing. A good landing is one where the pilot plants the wheels onto the asphalt and comes to a stop. A bad landing is any other sort of landing. I don’t know how much these aircraft can take, but if it had been my motor car, it would now be scrap. I turn to a guy in the aisle seat. ‘Not a great landing?’ I suggest. All he can do is mumble and then show me the open palm of his hand, slam it down hard on his thigh and utter the single word ‘Splat.’ I am reminded of the note written by a girl to the captain on a Qantas flight. ‘Dear captain. My name is Nicola. I am 8 years old. This is my first flight but I’m not scared. I like to watch the clouds go by. My mum says the crew is nice. I think your plane is good. Thanks for a nice flight. Don’t fuck up the landing. Luv Nicola.’
Shortly after we land, a loud trumpet fanfare is broadcast through the cabin, followed by ‘Congratulations, you’ve arrived at your destination ahead of schedule.’ I look at the crew members in disbelief and they are evidently mortified at having to play such a tacky announcement but it’s company policy. It’s also odd because they are congratulating us for an early arrival but we didn’t make the aircraft go faster. As soon