Ryanair is in no hurry to recommence negotiations and clinch a quick deal with Boeing for the MAX 10. For now, the Irish low-cost airline has no immediate need for the aircraft, so Ryanair is waiting when the timing is right to get a good price, Group CEO Michael O’Leary told AirInsight in an interview at the Airlines 4 Europe (A4E) Aviation Summit on March 31. Ryanair is in no hurry to get MAX 10 deal. Attending the event was also Boeing’s Ihssane Mounir, Senior Vice President of Commercial Sales and Marketing and the ‘sales chief’ of the US airframer. Asked if he had been talking with him about the MAX 10, O’Leary said: “Not really. Boeing knows where we are. We are working very closely with them, taking aircraft deliveries: 65 this winter for the coming summer, 55 next winter. No, discussions on the MAX 10 haven’t restarted.” Ryanair terminated negotiations last September, saying it was disappointing that Boeing had “a more over-optimistic outlook on aircraft pricing than we do.” Earlier, O’Leary had said on numerous occasions that the MAX 10 would be a great addition to the fleet, offering more extra seats to the 197 in its MAX 8200s of which Ryanair has 210 on order. O’Leary noted that the situation of the MAX 10 has changed recently: “The certification of the MAX 10 has been delayed again.” The schedule is already late and could be in conflict with a December deadline of the Aircraft Safety and Certification Reform Act of the US Congress. The act stipulates that all aircraft that are certified after December 31, 2022, need to have the Engine Indicating and Crew Alerting System (EICAS), which has never been incorporated in the 737 and the MAX. No worries about potential certification delay “I am not worried about it, because it is so far away”, says O’Leary of his need for the type, with or without EICAS. “We don’t need a MAX 10 delivery soon. Deliveries of the MAX 8200 have us covered until the summer of 2025/2026. We don’t need the first MAX 10s until 2026 or 2027, so the delay in certification isn’t an issue for us at the moment. We have more than enough growth for the next four or five years to get us to 225 million passengers a year, but we would like to deal with Boeing when the timing is right. But the timing will only be right when the pricing is right.” O’Leary said earlier that the high pricing of the MAX might have shied away loyal Boeing customers like Jet2 to get cheaper deals with Airbus on the A320neo-family. This could also include US leisure carrier Allegiant. “We have no idea what they are paying. US carriers seem to get a particularly good price at the moment. We certainly wouldn’t buy aircraft for the prices Boeing is posing at the moment. You know, Boeing is losing customers to Airbus: they lost Jet 2, Qantas, the IAG short-haul order (for 200 MAX) looks like switching from Boeing to Airbus. Boeing needs to fight back and win market share. At the moment, they are not doing much of a job of it.” In an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest at the same Aviation Summit, O’Leary said he had teased Airbus to make him an offer for A320neo-family aircraft at a ten percent discount, but the OEM was having none of it as it probably thinks that Ryanair isn’t serious about doing a deal. However, the airline boss has said in 2019 that he isn’t ruling out investing in a mixed Boeing-Airbus fleet if that helps him spread the risks of supplier issues (like that of the MAX) or brings extra efficiencies. Michael O'Leary (far right) having a chat with easyjet's Johan Lundgren. Next to them from right to left: Luis Gallego (IAG), Carsten Spohr (Lufthansa), Thomas Reynaert. (Airines 4 Europe). (Richard Schuurman) Ukraine AirInsight also discussed the current situation in Ukraine and the effect it has on Ryanair. According to a recent webcast by IBA Consultancy, the Irish low-cost has a 12.3 percent share of all flights to Ukraine in February. O’Leary says the number isn’t correct but confirms that Ukraine was to be a key market in its schedule this year: “The plan was that we would carry two million passengers of our 150 million this year, so it is about 1.2 percent of our capacity. We had to cancel all those flights for the remainder of February and March. All those aircraft were based in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. We pivoted all those capacity for the summer schedule now to other destinations in Europe. So we lost about 300.000 passengers at the end of February and in March but we will pick up all that traffic by reallocating the aircraft to other European routes from April onwards.” Ryanair had “very exciting” plans for Ukraine, says O’Leary: “We expected to grow last year, we did 1.2 million passengers this FY22, we expected to double that to two million this year and to four million in FY24. We were to open up two or three new bases in Ukraine. Now all of that growth has disappeared.” “Though, we remain optimistic. Hopefully, the Ukrainians will be successful in defeating the Russians, and the invasion will be repelled. Then there would be a huge need to rebuild the Ukrainian economy and Ryanair will be one of the first investors wanting to go back into Ukraine. We need to put flights back in there and we will look forward to the day we can put Ryanair aircraft back into Ukraine, rehire Ukraine pilots in the capital. In the meantime, we have set up a specific employment website for Ukrainian pilots, cabin crew, and engineers who are fleeing the situation. One started in our head office in Dublin on Wednesday and one lady on cabin crew in Poland on Friday.” SAF Last week, Ryanair presented its updated sustainability agenda Pathway to Net Zero, in which it outlines its plans to be net zero on carbon emissions in 2050. It thinks it can get 34 percent of the job done by investing in sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), but it seems only to do this through its partnership with Trinity College in Dublin to expand the research on SAFs. Shouldn’t do Ryanair more and get deals done with SAF suppliers? “We are working with all the main fuel companies like Shell, AirBP, and Total of SAF. The challenge for us is that none of them have any significant availability of SAFs. Everybody is talking about producing SAFs, but if we use the entire world supply of SAF, it would operate Ryanair’s flights for less than 1.5 days! It isn’t there”, says O’Leary. “So we are working with Trinity to research how we can accelerate the production and supply of SAF, the storage of SAFs adjacent to airports. Because without that research, we are never going to get to the ambitious targets we set for 2050.”
