Flightblogging.com

Last month, Flightmapping caught up with Easyjet CEO Andrew Harrison, who was talking about the benefits of Easyjet’s new Ecojet proposals.

A lot of commentators have suggested that India or China might be able to offer this kind of emerging technology, even though they don’t really have any manufacturers capable of doing this just yet.  Have you considered talking to the Brazilian company Embraer, who have already made major efficiency gains through aircraft like the E195 used by Flybe?

Andy Harrison: No, they are still only building smaller planes. We are looking for a replacement in the 150+ seat market, so that we can offer a replacement for our current fleet of Airbus A319s and Boeing 737-700s.

In terms of cabin noise, is there any advantage in having rear mounted engines?

AH: Yes, they should be quieter.

Do the kind of outbursts we have heard from Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, who refers to environmental campaigners as “nutbags”, help or hinder your cause?

AH: We never take what our Irish rivals say too seriously.

How much do you think that carbon offsetting is likely to cost the consumer?

AH: We are talking about a typical £1 to £2 on an average Easyjet flight.  This compares reasonably against our current average fare of around £40. This is also a fraction of the recent increase in air passenger duty.

If you continue to encourage emissions trading, and keep talking about the aviation industry’s need to meet its environmental obligations, do you risk shooting yourself in the foot, and putting people off from flying?

AH: No, we are just keen to see an informed debate, in which the externalities of flying are properly addressed.  We expect consumers to use this information to make intelligent discretionary decisions about their flying habits.

Do you think it is reasonable for airlines like yourselves to complain about increases in air passenger duty on the one hand, and then to take handouts from regional governments with the other?

AH: I think there are two separate arguments here - one is that aviation should cover its environmental externalities, and the other is that new flight routes do bring in tremendous economic benefits to the regions they serve. I think that both of these arguments are equally valid - so it is not really a sense of giving and taking.  However, air passenger duty is currently significantly higher than the carbon cost of flights.

Will the Easyjet eco-jet proposals result in shorter flying distances?

AH: This design is aimed at flights with a sector length of up to 2000 nautical miles – 98% of all flights operated by aircraft with 120-240 seats are below this. We would expect an extended range version for the longer routes, but this would need additional fuel tanks and fewer seats.

Airlines such as Easyjet very well funded, so this kind of new technology will be affordable to them. Isn’t this all a bit irrelevant though, if your older aircraft are just passed on to other airlines?

AH: We made it very clear that we believe that there are 700 older aircraft in Europe which need to be taken out of the skies and dismantled. There is no point in shipping them out to Africa, as that just relocates the problem. What we are calling for is a win-win situation - airlines get to invest in new, cleaner aircraft with a minimum of noise and CO2 emissions, consumers get to fly much more modern equipment, and the environmental benefits are clear to see.

Doesn’t this create a huge problem, because there are already shortages of new aircraft, and now you are effectively saying to African countries that their airlines cannot expand, because these older aircraft must be phased out?

AH: We are only saying that the very oldest aircraft need to be taken out of service.

What will happen to Easyjet’s current fleet that is due for replacement from 2015 onwards?

AH: The reason why we are asking aircraft manufacturers to take the Easyjet eco-jet proposals seriously is that we are looking ahead now to our first major fleet replacement, which is due to start in 2015. We depreciate our aircraft over 23 years, so it would not be a problem for us to scrap than after this time.

Considering that Easyjet is so desperate to display its green credentials, why did you kick up so much fuss about Virgin Trains’ recent adverts, which were trying to encourage people to swap domestic flights for the train instead?

AH: At Easyjet, we’re not against trains at all, we are just looking for a balanced and sensible debate. Many proponents of rail travel seem to assume that trains are 100% full all the time, and they’re not taking real accounts of actual occupancy levels, or of the infrastructure costs of the track and maintenance. 

Easyjet has always recognised that train travel offers significant convenience on journeys of up to three hours, and that this range is extending - perhaps now to four hours. If the train journey takes less than this time, we simply don’t fly.

Further links:

• Easyjet Ecojet press release
• Initial blog about Easyjet’s green offensive
• Flightmapping news about Easyjet

It looks like Ryanair have stopped offering cheap flights from Liverpool to Inverness for the upcoming winter season.

Ryanair are quite often very happy to say which routes don’t perform well, but this seems to be one they have let go of quietly. Unfortunately, when it comes to confirming these details, Ryanair’s website is one of the most cumbersome out there. There is no quick way of checking timetable details, so users have to scroll back and forth through the dates they are interested in finding flights for.

This is, I’m afraid, yet another example of Ryanair’s needless unhelpfulness. So in the time it takes me to write this blog, I have got as far as confirming that there are no flights between Wednesdays and Saturdays in November. OK - can now confirm this route doesn’t operate on any days in November. Checking back through Ryanair’s booking form confirms that these flights do indeed end on 26th October.

So, we can expect the usual questions about why a route which appears to have been popular, both with point to point travellers, and people making their own onward connections from Liverpool, has been axed.

Our understanding is that these flights were indeed relatively full. There is certainly room for competition on this route, as passengers who have got used to Ryanair’s cheap flights to Inverness will now have to make do with Eastern’s services from an alternative airport like Manchester or Birmingham.

The clue lies in the probable reason for Ryanair offering cheap Inverness flights in the first place. Budget airlines like Ryanair do everything they can to get the best usage out of their aircraft, and this process involves carefully matching up city combinations, so that each plane can perform a maximum number of “rotations” (out and back trips) in one day. Sometimes, the schedule results in a time slot of, let’s say, 2 1/2 hours, into which they need to fit a return trip.

We have always suspected that destinations like Inverness and Aberdeen suit Ryanair’s purposes in this respect very well. In the case of Ryanair’s Aberdeen flights, the “yields” (i.e. the revenue the airline earns for each passenger) seem notably above those for Inverness, so the route seems likely to stay - for the time being at least. In the case of Inverness, it looks like even if Ryanair were making money, they can now make more money by moving their aircraft around to serve other routes.

Flightmapping’s MD James Avery will be on BBC Radio CWR, in Annie Othen’s travel slot, from around 11:40pm tomorrow (Tuesday 19th June).

Topics set for discussion include:

• Summer 2007 travel opportunities from the Midlands - where the best bargains are.
• New flight routes for 2007.
• The impact of the recent government decision on Coventry Airport’s future.
• How the aviation industry is responding to its environmental critics.

As always, James promised to be on fighting form, so tune in for some interesting discussion.

My email is still downloading as I type this - all 57MB worth. Of course, there’s the usual varieties of Monday spam, but the real offender is 11MB worth of image attachments, courtesy of Easyjet, who now need to be dubbed as the web’s most un-email savvy PR office.

I’m not sure if there is a universal guideline for email attachments - I’ve previously worked on about 1MB, but there’s certainly no need to send me images this size - especially when (a) I already have them on a zip disk they gave me at the press conference, and (b) if I do use them, they will only end up as a tiny jpeg image on a news story - no more than 400 pixels wide. If I want more, I know where to find them.

Apart from this minor breach of netiquette, I think the Easyjet Ecojet is a very interesting concept, and will be back for more comment on it later. I just hope the Easyjet PR team think before sending out large attachments next time. This kind of initiative is always going to get a very welcome reception here at Flightmapping.com, but other media outlets, especially the doomsday-predicting Independent, and officially biased BBC are a lot less tolerant!

A couple of years back, I devoted a huge amount of time to defending Coventry Airport’s plans to launch more flights, and to cater for upto 2 million passengers per year.

Despite attempts by some of the anti-airport campaigners to suggest that I was doing this because I had commercial interests to protect, my reasons for getting involved boiled down to a simple belief that the airport’s plans were reasonable and moderate, and that they should be given full support.

It just happens to be that Flightmapping.com is based in Coventry, and that much of the opposition to the airport’s expansion plans was eminating from within the chattering classes of Warwick District, within which I had lived for many years. I have to give it to Warwick District Council, they are a tough bunch - much as though I completely disagree with the stance they have taken, their viewpoint has been vindicated - at least for now.

How different it might have been if the airport was in the boundaries of Coventry? I also can’t help wondering if the decision would have been the same, had TUI still maintained ownershop of the lease on the Coventry Airport site.

At some stage in the not to distant future, I will need to thoroughly digest the report, but I am still sensing that the grounds for refusal ultimately boil down to the presence of Birmingham Airport, rather than the inherent strength of local opposition. I expect that this is a combination of the pre-existence of Birmingham (for mainstream passenger purposes), the public transport provision that Birmingham offers, and its inherent political clout, rather than any individual reason - or grand conspiracy, as some commentators might suggest. I’ll leave the conspiracy theories to the government’s White Paper proposals to build a new airport near Rugby - an obvious political hoax if ever there was one!

Despite the obvious blow that the airport operators have just been dealt, this is far from over - there are appeals, and possible alternative submissions to think about. Meanwhile, the current terminal continues to operate, and to do so with planning permission.

I hope that the key political voices in Coventry will make their opinions known in the right places - shame on Jim Cunningham for caving in to the nimby arguments.

If a local shop of 70 years’ standing was refused planning permission to open a second checkout desk, on the grounds that there was a large supermarket with 12 desks, and plans to expand to 36 desks, just 120 yards away, there would be total outrage, and cries of bullying on the part of said supermarket. Yet shops also cause disturbances, albeit on a different scale. And don’t get me started on the nuisance going on outside a certain local pub last night!

I hope that people will sense a similar outrage over what has happened here, and that they will see through the political points scoring which is so easy to do these days in the name of the environment, when it is perfectly clear that there are other, far greater, vested interests at play.

Easyjet are set to launch a massive environmental campaign later this morning, with the airline claiming that carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by 50% as early as 2015. 

The implication is that Easyjet’s proposals will apply to the industry as a whole, rather than to its own emissions, which are already substantially below the European average. 

Although we are assuming that they are talking about emissions per passenger carried, rather than total emissions of the industry, this is still a very significant ambition.

Flighmapping will be in attendance to find out how Easyjet plan to achieve this, but we expect that some of the following will be high on the agenda:

1. Phasing out older, less efficient aircraft — this is a very easy call for Easyjet to make, especially as many of these are run by their behemoth old school European state carrier counterparts.
2. Improvements in air traffic control paths, and more efficient runway management — again, and easy demand to make, but one which could have significant impacts, even though very few of these will be visible to the consumer.
3. Continuing investment in modern fleets, and new engine technology — again, an easy call for cash rich and fast growing budget airlines to make.
4. Maintaining high occupancy levels, and sticking to point to point route networks — again, this has always been the staple business of the low-cost carriers.

Most of the above strategies are well known within the industry, even if they might go right over the heads of your typical whingeing environmental protester. 

Last week, Flybe gave us further details of their environmental labelling scheme, a strategy that they have been working on for at least three years now.  Will Easyjet be announcing something similar, and to what extent will they embrace the concept of carbon offsetting? 

Again, this is still a minefield for the typical consumer, with Flybe having opted to contribute towards energy saving projects in schools.  I wonder if Easyjet will go for something more visible, possibly involving forestry projects, along the lines are the ones which have already been backed by the Peel airport group, who operate Liverpool, Doncaster Sheffield and Durham Tees Valley airports.

Either way, I hope that the initiative they undertake is substantial, and properly thought through.  However serious concerns over the environmental impact of aviation might be, the hysteria-fuelled media have given the green lobby total carte blanche to criticise the industry, with numerous so-called facts being doled out with scant scientific justification. 

The only substantial challenges to the status quo so far to have gained any major press attention have emanated in typical foulmouthed style from Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary.  These might well have grabbed the headlines, but they have done little to move the debate forward.

No one should pretend that the airline industry can plant its green credentials overnight, and come up smelling of roses the next morning, but the big Orange can still make a substantial contribution to the debate, without having to turn the air into Ryanair’s shade of blue.

I have just got one of those consumer survey stories through, which claims that online consumers will turn immediately to a competitor if they read a bad review.  Of course, there is a great deal of truth in this, but any kind of press release on these issues needs to be backed by a bit of credibility.  The survey was done by the digital marketing agency Tamar, who are well known on the search engine industry circuit.  The problem is that a company like this has a clear agenda to sell “online reputation management solutions” to its clients, many of whom will bite at this kind of story.

The survey claims that if consumers really bad review when they are searching for a travel company by name, then 58% of them would book with an alternative provider, whereas 42% of them would stop their search session.  This seems to make the assumption that 100% of consumers who read a bad review will end up turning away from the travel company in question.  The survey then goes on to claim that:

 ”one of the most high-profile travel companies to suffer as a result of natural search results, reducing a plethora of negative reviews is budget airline Ryanair.”

If this claim were true, then surely, Ryanair would have already lost 100% of their business? For all the obvious reasons, Ryanair are still the black sheep amongst large swathes of the travel industry, be it online or offline — just as they are amongst numerous consumer groups, politicians and environmentalists. But just because the airline generates large quantities of negative publicity, does that mean that they should be worried?  Clearly, Ryanair’s incessant rise in passenger numbers suggests otherwise.

This does not mean that consumer reviews don’t have their place, but it does mean that expectations have to be managed.  People seem to love telling stories about Ryanair, whether they have flown with them or not.  Ryanair are the one airline to thrive on the age-old adage that no publicity is bad publicity.  The statistics however speak for themselves — Ryanair carry more passengers on more on-time flights than any other airline, and they also lose a few of their passengers’ bags in the process. 

So does this tell the whole story?  Not entirely — Ryanair tend to use airports which are much less congested, and therefore less prone to delays. Meanwhile, charging passengers to check their luggage in, and only operating point-to-point schedules, also ensures that they have far fewer opportunities to lose bags, compared to network carriers like British Airways.

Would I recommend flying with Ryanair, given a like-for-like comparison on the same route?  Such direct comparisons are very difficult to make, as there are very few examples of Ryanair operating flights directly against a competitor — i.e. from the same departure airport to the same arrival airport.  I can reach the check-in desks of either Birmingham or Coventry airport within 15 minutes of leaving my house, and as neither these are Ryanair strongholds, their rivals tend to start with a significant advantage.  If I’m trying to get to somewhere a little bit more adventurous (both Coventry and Birmingham still offer a pretty conservative choice of destinations, although Birmingham is looking a lot more interesting this summer), then I would look briefly at flights from East Midlands airport, before considering flying from London. 

The last time I flew with Ryanair was just over a year ago, when I went with a friend to Palermo in Sicily.  On that particular occasion, Ryanair were the only airline flying there, and as the friend in question not only lives within 30 minutes’ drive of Stansted, but also gets free parking there, the choice of departure airport wasn’t really an issue either.

Ultimately, I’ll always pay a bit extra to use more convenient airport, and to know that I can reserve a window seat at check-in.  Much as though I think reliability is important, Ryanair’s punctuality can also be counterbalanced by the fact that they generally operate a much lower frequency of flights, and provide very little assistance when things do go wrong.

So should Michael O’Leary be quaking in his boots because Flightmapping says that Ryanair are a long way from being our favourite airline? We very much doubt it — our whole point in existence is to provide route information about which airlines offer flights to which destinations. Any commentary that we provide is always going to lean towards the most direct option, whereas Ryanair are more likely to take you to a field in the middle of nowhere. 

One mantra that Ryanair repeatedly spew out is that lowest cost always wins.  This might well be true for the vast majority of passengers, but this site has always been much more focused on providing information for people who know where they want to go, and who will value finding the most direct way of getting there above the price they have to pay. 

This doesn’t mean that we don’t think the price is important, it is just that we like to look at the whole picture, instead of just the baseline cost, which can often be so misleading anyway.  Fortunately for Ryanair, most people don’t think that way, so even if I had decided to go on a massive tirade against them, they would have still filled another load of flights in the time you read this article!

When I saw Newquay Airport’s press release about its defence of BA’s new Newquay flights, there was a mention of flights also operating to Zurich. in Switzerland.

I didn’t think this sounded likely, but it turns out that weekly charters will be operating in the summer season. I’m not sure if they will also be bringing people back in the other direction, but this is certainly one of the more obscure routes we’ve seen in recent times.

Monarch Scheduled’s flights to Malaga were dropped very quickly, but they were trying to fill a much larger aircraft (an Airbus A320) on a much higher frequency (3x per week). For now, this is the only destination Newquay Airport offers outside the British Isles. It would be interesting to see which European cities the airport’s management think might be able to sustain regular scheduled services, and whether any airlines have been interested. Flybe would certainly make a good candidate for a route to either Paris or Amsterdam, either of which would provide numerous onward connections, but we’re not sure how ambitious a route like this would be for an airport of this size?