Ryanair Strike implications re Cancellations NO INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS POSTS

Bob24

LiamaDelta wrote: »

Possibly so...but in the unlikely event that people could actually think rationally and not believe everything they read they would conclude that if there was a so-called 'exodus' they certainly wouldn't be able to run 98% of their flights, and up until this week 100%!!

Of course "exodus" is a bit of an overhyped word, as the media always do.

But I would not get stuck with the terminology. If you look at what is happening it is indeed quite exceptional: it is extremely uncommon for an airline to have to cancel dozens of flight per day over several week due to a lack of pilots availability (if you except strikes of course). So there is indeed a serious issue at Ryanair currently which doesn't exist with other airlines and while figures differ there seems to be an agreement to say an large number of pilots have left them for other airlines.

trellheim

meh our lot fly Ryanair all the time ( Mostly IE to UK I have to admit and this is core stuff for them shorthaul many times a day so its fine normally )


its all about the times and prices suiting theres many things wrong with FR but generally they do the job.

devnull

Bob24 wrote: »

But I would not get stuck with the terminology. If you look at what is happening it is indeed quite exceptional: it is extremely uncommon for an airline to have to cancel dozens of flight per day over several week due to a lack of pilots availability (if you except strikes of course). So there is indeed a serious issue at Ryanair currently which doesn't exist with other airlines and while figures differ there seems to be an agreement to say an large number of pilots have left them for other airlines.

There's also exceptional circumstances, the root of this problem is the changing of the calendar year for holidays, everything else is contributing factors at the end of the day such as Ryanair's desire to put short term customer service ahead of long term hour management, a more disrupted summer than normal and a few more pilots than predicted leaving.

It's basically a perfect storm of events coming together., if you removed any of those events they would either not be in the situation or it would not be as bad.

jimmycrackcorm

devnull wrote:

If this was any other airline there'd never be the volume of articles there is right now. People and bodies are exploiting this for their own agenda sadly.

MOL and the Ryanair publicity machine have been dishing it out regularly to their competitors, governments, airports etc.

It's just coming back to bite them in the ass.

Bob24

devnull wrote: »

There's also exceptional circumstances, the root of this problem is the changing of the calendar year for holidays, everything else is contributing factors at the end of the day such as Ryanair's desire to put short term customer service ahead of long term hour management, a more disrupted summer than normal and a few more pilots than predicted leaving.

It's basically a perfect storm of events coming together., if you removed any of those events they would either not be in the situation or it would not be as bad.

All those sound like excuses though (not from you, but from Ryanair).

Regulations around calendars are the same for all airlines so if it is a major factor the issue is purely caused by if Ryanair's own mismanagement of the transition as it doesn't seem to impact other airlines.

And "put short term customer service ahead of long term hour management" sounds like a poor policy if you end up using it as an excuse for mass flights cancellations, again if this is a leading factor it is due to mismanagement as they could have seen it coming (again other airlines have exactly the same constraints and make choices which haven't lead to block cancellations for several weeks). I also suspect one reason behind Ryanair having more standby ressources available is that they know that because their planes/crew are more stretched with more flights per day than a regular airline, the chances of something going wrong (i.e. of needing a backup crew) are higher especially towards the end of a very busy day.

So I see two options:
- either as you say there are just a few more pilots leaving than normal, but in that case Ryanair was totally incompetent with planning their service and how to use their ressources (again their constraints around holidays and hour management are no different from other airlines' which are able to manage)
- or the loss of pilots is much greater

redandwhite

The knock on effects could be massive.

Bye bye budget flights??

Bob24

redandwhite wrote: »

The knock on effects could be massive.

Bye bye budget flights??

Doubt so. Ryanair's reputation will suffer but the company will easily survive this (assuming it doesn't escalate even more for whatever reason).

But budget airlines definitely have some issues which would be worth regulators' attention (for exemple some Easyjet pilots have repetidly said that schedules are too busy: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/15/easyjet-scheduling-flights-french-pilots).

kravmaga

140 pilots lost and mismanagement of the rostering and time off system according to the Irish Indo article by Donal O'Donovan.

Im planning on not using Ryanair ever again going forward and Aer Lingus all the way.

I think O' Leary has lost control and should resign

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/donal-odonovan-michael-olearys-unloved-airline-could-now-lose-reliable-tag-36142926.html

Van.Bosch

kravmaga wrote: »

140 pilots lost and mismanagement of the rostering and time off system according to the Irish Indo article by Donal O'Donovan.

Im planning on not using Ryanair ever again going forward and Aer Lingus all the way.

I think O' Leary has lost control and should resign

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/donal-odonovan-michael-olearys-unloved-airline-could-now-lose-reliable-tag-36142926.html

He took the airline from nothing to 120mln pax per year and you think he should resign over this, while it is a huge f up, entirely their own making, it is not something he should walk over. If the issue persists possibly but if like they say it's just a 8 week thing then no.

grogi

kravmaga wrote: »

I think O' Leary has lost control and should resign

Do the maths 300000 passengers, each costing on average 300 euro. That is cost of 90 000 000 euro. Triple that to account damaged reputation...

So Ryanair will earn 1.2 bln instead of 1.5 bln this year... Disaster, management should be crucified...

The truth said, Ryanair is biggest airline in Europe atm. F__kups will happen and that's part of doing cut throat business.

devnull

Bob24 wrote: »

All those sound like excuses though (not from you, but from Ryanair).

Regulations around calendars are the same for all airlines so if it is a major factor the issue is purely caused by if Ryanair's own mismanagement as it doesn't seem to impact other airlines. And "put short term customer service ahead of long term hour management" sounds like a poor policy if you end up using it as an excuse for mass flights cancellations, again if this is a leading factor it is due to mismanagement as they could have seen it coming (and other airlines have exactly the same constraints and make choices which don't leal to block cancellations for several weeks).

I wouldn't call it excuses - I've had to manage a scenario in the past where I've worked in a company and we operated an annualised hours scheme where workers could only reach a certain number of hours per year and I've had to balance serving clients to the best of our ability whilst also not using up too many hours of our staff too soon.

The problem is that when you have a busy time and/or disruption, you can either throw resources at it to make the problem go away to stop a negative customer reaction or you can do nothing and just put up with all the flack which is going to come your way. The former is vastly the best option for customers but it can create long term headaches for the company later on when people start to run out of hours quicker than you anticipated.

- either as you say there are just a few more pilots leaving that previously, but in that case Ryanair was totally incompetent with planning their service and how to use their ressources (again their constraints around holidays and hour management are no different from other airlines' which are able to manage)

What's unique in this situation is that they are transitioning from an April to March model to a January to December model and that is at the core of the problem. Other airlines also have January to December but the key difference is that they have not had to have the transitional year and it's the transitional year that has caused the problem because the company has essentially not planned it correctly.

From what I have read Ryanair have pretty much confirmed that in this leave transitional period they have allowed and asked pilots to use a full years leave in just nine months of the year. This leads to more pilots being on vacation at once because they're squeezing in the same amount of leave spread over a shorter timeframe.

Example of the issue (dummy figures)
Say a Ryanair pilot has 36 days leave
April 2016 - March 2017 = 36 days = 3 days per month
April 2017 - December 2017 = 36 days = 4 days per month

There are 4,000 pilots in Ryanair. If every one is taking on average 1 day extra leave a month, you are effectively looking at massive shortfall of crew - obviously these figures are dummy and won't illustrate the real thing, but whatever figures you use, the maths are that if you try and squash 12 months leave into a 9 month calendar, you will have a 33% increase in number of days off taken by pilots on a monthly basis.

Of course pilots leaving will not have helped this situation, neither will bad weather or air traffic control strikes, but these things are contributoriy factors, the main factor in this is allowing all staff to take 12 months worth of leave in 9 months in a transitional period whch effectively has caused a large spike in the number of pilots who are on annual leave at one time.

kravmaga

Van.Bosch wrote: »

He took the airline from nothing to 120mln pax per year and you think he should resign over this, while it is a huge f up, entirely their own making, it is not something he should walk over. If the issue persists possibly but if like they say it's just a 8 week thing then no.

haha are you on the board of Ryanair defending the incompetence of your boss.

I disagree with all you have posted , Aer Lingus all the way.

<SNIP>
Ignorant and belligerent rant removed

kravmaga

grogi wrote: »

Do the maths 300000 passengers, each costing on average 300 euro. That is cost of 90 000 000 euro. Triple that to account damaged reputation...

So Ryanair will earn 1.2 bln instead of 1.5 bln this year... Disaster, management should be crucified...

The truth said, Ryanair is biggest airline in Europe atm. F__kups will happen and that's part of doing cut throat business.

Disagree entirely with what you have said, O' Leary looked stressed at the press conference, he should go, senior management incompetence

clareMooney

the working conditions aren't the best...
and the situation is even worse
you could imagine how many people affected...

Bob24

devnull wrote: »

the main factor in this is allowing all staff to take 12 months worth of leave in 9 months in a transitional period whch effectively has caused a large spike in the number of pilots who are on annual leave at one time.

Yes I think most of us get how it can be an issue, but if we all understand it is clear that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to predict that when you ask your staff to compress their leave time in such way it will reduce your ressources availability during the 9 months period. And therefore you need to plan for it accordingly (either by removing flights from your schedule *months* in advance or by planning for more temporary staff during that period).

I doubt Ryanair is stupid enough to have overlooked something like this, so I find it very hard to believe it is the main factor. But if it the case they really desserve what they are getting.

clareMooney

he is a bit stressed out all right
but how many people are stressed out- both staff and travelers...

clareMooney

how you fly with them next time-it's all sorted

my flights is in 3 months, fingers crossed...

clareMooney

the reputation of ryanair wasn't good before, and now it's getting worse...

devnull

kravmaga wrote: »

haha are you on the board of Ryanair defending the incompetence of your boss.

I disagree with all you have posted , Aer Lingus all the way.

AL have had periods where there have been no flights at all for many days because of strikes for example, so lets not say that Aer Lingus have never had any problems, at least with these Ryanair cancellations it's effecting very very few flights out of Dublin and the ones it does tend to be almost fully ones which have multiple daily flights on them.

The thing with Aer Lingus is they take a slightly different approach to Ryanair. If flights run very late they are much less likely to sub in a stand-by crew and plane to recover service which means the chances of delay are higher, which also increases the chances of a last minute cancellation because of staff running out of hours. The benefit of this however is it allows more tight control of pilot hours.

Workforce Management is always about getting a fine balance between allocating enough resources to fulfil your operational requirements in the short term without using too many resources that it causes problem later on in the year.

Mebuntu

clareMooney wrote: »

the reputation of ryanair wasn't good before, and now it's getting worse...

Nonsense, ClareMooney, I'm afraid. Why would 120M+ passengers and growing fly with an airline with a not good reputation. True this development is a fiasco but keep to the facts please and refrain from reading the Daily Mail.

Locker10a

devnull wrote: »

kravmaga wrote: »

haha are you on the board of Ryanair defending the incompetence of your boss.

I disagree with all you have posted , Aer Lingus all the way.

AL have had periods where there have been no flights at all for many days because of strikes for example, so lets not say that Aer Lingus have never had any problems, at least with these Ryanair cancellations it's effecting very very few flights out of Dublin and the ones it does tend to be almost fully ones which have multiple daily flights on them.

The thing with Aer Lingus is they take a slightly different approach to Ryanair. If flights run very late they are much less likely to sub in a stand-by crew and plane to recover service which means the chances of delay are higher, which also increases the chances of a last minute cancellation because of staff running out of hours. The benefit of this however is it allows more tight control of pilot hours.

Workforce Management is always about getting a fine balance between allocating enough resources to fulfil your operational requirements in the short term without using too many resources that it causes problem later on in the year.

Ironically Aer Lingus OTP is above Ryanair's for over a year now. Despite how you interpret their handling of the daily operation. Which is probably accurate but they manage to do it reliably.

Locker10a

Mebuntu wrote: »

clareMooney wrote: »

the reputation of ryanair wasn't good before, and now it's getting worse...

Nonsense, ClareMooney, I'm afraid. Why would 120M+ passengers and growing fly with an airline with a not good reputation. True this development is a fiasco but keep to the facts please and refrain from reading the Daily Mail.

They fly for the price not the reputation...

devnull

Bob24 wrote: »

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to predict that when you ask your staff to compress their leave time in such way it will reduce your ressources availability during the 9 months period - and therefore you need to plan for it accordingly (either by removing flights from your schedule *months* in advance or by planning for more temporary staff during that period).

I don't buy that it is the whole reason either because if it is, they would have to cancel far more than the 9-10 duties a day that they appear to be cancelling now, I suspect that they had enough resilence to operate all flights in their plans when they allowed this 12 months in 9 months leave situation, it's a stupid operational decision to allow it, but looking at numbers they're only really saving 9-10 pilots a day by these cancellations.

What i suspect happened is that their models were based on the attrition rates in previous years with maybe an assumption that it may go slightly higher and also an assumption there would be a certain level of ATC strikes and weather disruptions. I suspect the number of pilots leaving were higher then forecast as was service disruption which leaves them 10 a day short to run a full schedule.

I doubt Ryanair is stupid enough to have overlooked something like this, so I find it very hard to believe it is the main factor. But if it the case they really desserve what they are getting.

They probably didn't overlook it - they probably felt that they had the numbers and forecasts to suggest even with this happening that they could still operate a full schedule without any problems, but the higher attrition and service disruption rate basically resulted in the numbers being outside forecast and leaving them with a daily shortage of 10 pilots or so.

It comes back to what I said - it's a number of factors that have come together to create a perfect storm, take any one of those factors out and there'd probably be no problem, to say it's simply down to pilots leaving is wrong, but you cannot say it didn't play a part either, it's like most aviation accidents in a way, the outcome is the result of a chain of several things coming together to create it.

The catalyst for this issue was the mismanagement of the leave system, that itself didn't result in the final outcome, but it made it much more likely and other events which happened further down the line ultimately sealed RA's fate.

grogi

kravmaga wrote: »

O' Leary looked stressed at the press conference, he should go, senior management incompetence

Of course he is stressed, wouldn't you? He has a crisis on his hands.

However the management made, from business point of view, rational decision to minimise the loses during that crisis. Running all flights, but 30% of them delayed would have much bigger financial consequences.

They are cutting a small number of carefully selected flights and will probably be able to offer rerouting for some of the passengers to even further mimimise the EU261 payouts. The financial impact is not negligible, but it went from a disaster to a something that does not threaten the company.

devnull

Locker10a wrote: »

Ironically Aer Lingus OTP is above Ryanair's for over a year now. Despite how you interpret their handling of the daily operation. Which is probably accurate but they manage to do it reliably.

I fly with both and AL certainly cancel more than RA because of pilots being out of hours whereas RA will more often than not sub crews in to prevent that but that brings complexties into workforce management and possibe issues further down the line as we've seen at the moment even if it does make cancellations less likely.

Thing is with AL as well some people called it passenger unfriendly how they cancel flights when crews are out of hours rather than subbing in standby crews, but I would assume that part of the reason for that is that AL don't have bases all around Europe like RA and don't have as much spare aircraft avaliablity as RA so it's not so simple to put standby crews in anyway.

It's great for RA to prevent short notice cancellations by using subbed in crews, but there's reason to believe here that this has been done at the expense of long term management of pilot hours when they knew they must have been pretty tight on hours, so realistically they should have started using less standby crews to claw some of that over-run back even if it made an odd cancellation more likely, better to have them spread out over the course of several months than the batch cancelling they've had to do even if it's far from ideal for passengers.

Bob24

Locker10a wrote: »

Ironically Aer Lingus OTP is above Ryanair's for over a year now. Despite how you interpret their handling of the daily operation. Which is probably accurate but they manage to do it reliably.

I think a simple explanation for them performing similarly or even better the Ryanair is that while Aer Lingus has less substitution capabilities theiy also happen to need substitutions less often (i.e. they tend to have less cancellations and delays in the first place). This is most likely due to Aer Lingus' daily schedules not being as busy as Ryanair's for a given plane/crew (the more flights a plane or a crew has to do in a day, the higher the chances of delays/issues occurring during the day which will have an knockdown effect on the rest of the schedule and be more difficult to recover).

grogi

Bob24 wrote: »

This is most likely due to Aer Lingus' daily schedules not being as busy as Ryanair's for a given plane/crew

The planes are there to flight. A plane that is parked is loosing money and is a sign of mismanagement.

mikeysmith

Ryanair will learn from this cock-up and bounce back

They just need to be more more careful about the pilots

Bob24

grogi wrote: »

The planes are there to flight. A plane that is parked is loosing money and is a sign of mismanagement.

Delayed and canceled flights also are sign of mismanagement.

At the end of the day there is a balance to find between using the plane as much as you can while not impacting the quality of the service too much.

If your plane is in the air longer but you have more delays and cancellations or need more unproductive standby crews and planes to recover from more frequent passenger delays due to your tighter schedule (all these things costing you money), that plane might not make you more profit than another airline which sees a bit less usage of its plane but has less of these costly issues/requirements.

Locker10a

Bob24 wrote: »

Locker10a wrote: »

Ironically Aer Lingus OTP is above Ryanair's for over a year now. Despite how you interpret their handling of the daily operation. Which is probably accurate but they manage to do it reliably.

I think a simple explanation for them performing similarly or even better the Ryanair is that while Aer Lingus has less substitution capabilities theiy also happen to need substitutions less often (i.e. they tend to have less cancellations and delays in the first place). This is most likely due to Aer Lingus' daily schedules not being as busy as Ryanair's for a given plane/crew (the more flights a plane or a crew has to do in a day, the higher the chances of delays/issues occurring during the day which will have an knockdown effect on the rest of the schedule and be more difficult to recover).

The statistics were mainly referring to flights departing/arriving at Dublin mainly.
Yeah some Aer lingus planes do less flight per day due to long haul etc. But their Europe fleet, when compared with Ryanair's Dublin based fleet operate the same either 4 or 6 sectors per day depending on flights