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Ruinair Flight FR44 – Tuesday @ 11.50am – DUB-CRL-DUB

Fare €1 plus taxes, fees and charges €33

I must drive rather than take public transport because Dublin is the only large European capital without a rail link to its airport. I pass the Port Tunnel into which the government has poured €750 million of taxpayers’ money yet the builders want €350 million more to finish it and the tunnel roof leaks water on occasion, making it the most expensive car wash in Dublin. It’s a black hole. I stay out of the bus lanes since these are exclusively reserved for Polish motor cars. On the way to the airport there are Irish roadworks. A sign confirms the M1 is closed and there is a diversion along Griffith Avenue. However, in the best traditions of Irish motoring, all the cars ahead of me carry on along the M1. I follow. As expected, the M1 is open to traffic all the way to the short-term car park opposite the terminal. Sure we only put these sort of alarmist road signs up to present a challenge to our overseas visitors when travelling to the airport.

In a move reminiscent of Al Capone’s hey-day, the Dublin Airport Authority has increased the cost of short-term car parking by 50 per cent, so I drive the fifty miles to the barren wasteland of long-term. To park in short-term, one must now deposit several close family members in a bank vault as a security deposit. The Beautiful People of Dublin used to frequent Brown Thomas, the Ice Bar and Lillie’s Bordello but now they can ostentatiously display their personal wealth in the Lower Level of short-term car park A. In long-term the DAA has kindly provided visual reminder signage of the parking zones to aid those who return from two weeks in Majorca only to utter ‘Jaysus, where did I leave me feckin’ wheels?’ So there’s a Zone G for Guitar, Zone H for Helicopter and more recently Zone c for Criminal, Zone M for Monopoly and Zone R for Rip-off. There’s also a Zone Y as in Y is this car park so fecking far away from the terminal building? It’s only called long-term because of the average time it takes to get from your car by bus to the Departures terminal. I park in Zone F, so-called because today there’s no F’in spaces left anywhere. My parents have given up parking in the long-term because they find it’s too complicated and too difficult to find their car on their return. They claim to have lost several rather desirable and sensible Peugeot 406s here in the past.

It’s freezing in Dublin so on the apron they are de-icing our aircraft. I don’t know why they bother with the expense of de-icing. Why not get Mick to stand near the wings and tail and speak for ten minutes? There is much chaos at the gates, almost a bloodbath. ‘Flights FR206 and FR112 to London are cancelled due to the weather conditions. Would passengers make their way to the baggage carousel to collect their luggage and go to the Ruinair ticket desk in the Departures hall.’ A day ruined. We are the lucky ones. The ramp guy who boards us is professionally attired in a woolly Manchester United bobble hat. ‘Will yez all stop pushing. If yez don’t stop pushing, then none of yez will be gettin’ on de plane.’ They don’t hang about even in freezing weather so some of the passengers who board by the rear steps receive a fine coating of deicer from the man on the gantry who knows there is always a 25-minute turnaround, hail rain or shine.

A University of Miami professor addressing the Airline Pilots Association claimed that in the future the crew in an aircraft will consist of a pilot and a dog. The pilot is in the aircraft to feed and take care of the dog. The dog is in the aircraft to bite the pilot if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons or switches. The primary requirement to becoming a pilot continues to be the ability to speak with a posh accent, and being a pilot means starting your career with a bag full of luck and a bag devoid of experience, the trick being to fill the latter before the former empties. As BBC’s Frank Spencer once said, ‘There are old pilots, there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.’ I wonder do Ruinair pilots place wagers on whether they will be able to find these remote airfields? Our pilot locates Charleroi amongst arable fields. We land. It’s Brussels but not as we know it, Captain. It’s quiet, and I wonder: are they expecting us? The airport is deserted. There have been no air traffic control delays here since Sopwith Camels took part in the Allied offensives in the Great War. Immigration hardly requires a passport; it’s more like a nod and a wink.

There is a tourist desk in the airport and I’m suddenly hopeful that there may be a tourist industry in Charleroi. Five years ago 200,000 passengers passed through here annually. Now it’s two million plus of us annually. Back in the nineteenth century a place on Europe’s rail network could make a city’s fortune. Now it’s a listing in the schedules of a growing list of low fares, low cost, budget, low frills, no frills, etc airlines. Charleroi’s tourist office is in town on Quai des Martyrs de 8 Aout and so I am sure something very grisly happened on that date. But I remain pessimistic. A colleague told me that some years ago when he worked in Brussels, he and some friends went to visit Charleroi one day. They entered the tourist office and asked the charming girl behind the counter what they should go and see. She replied rather sheepishly, ‘Well, there isn’t anything to see.’

Mick has never been a fan of Brussels. ‘Consumers have been ripped off for the past fifty years because governments got together with the airlines after 1945. British Airways got the monopoly in the UK, Air France the monopoly in France and Lufthansa the monopoly in Germany.’ The airline industry is the only industry where the producers are allowed by the idiots in Brussels to get together once or twice a year to fix the fares and route capacities and they get anti-trust immunity to do it. It’s a joke.’ Today’s nearby destination is in the newspapers. The European Commission rules that four million euros of financial incentives received by Ruinair from the Walloon government amounts to illegal state aid.

Mick’s reaction is choice. ‘It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Ruinair to get a fair hearing in Brussels. It’s a complete fuck-up which is going to overturn twenty years of competition in air travel, but it wouldn’t be the first time the EU has made a balls of an investigation. Any time politicians get involved in an industry or regulating an industry, they fuck it up. It’s what they do best. I think we should blow the place up and shoot all the regulators and the airline business might actually prosper. Bureaucrats in Brussels have been blathering on about European unity for ages but the low cost airlines are at the forefront of delivering it. We are the means by which hundreds of thousands can now travel back and forth; they are almost commuting. It looks like the EU are trying to come up with some communist rules. The judgment is just blindingly wrong. There will be a repayment over my dead body. We have written back to say fuck off.’

The chief executive of the almost-Brussels airport replies: ‘A letter is going to be sent shortly to ask the airline to repay the amount.’ Mick retorts: ‘We haven’t received a letter, but if we do I think it would get a pretty short reply. I think it would consist of two words: Foxtrot Oscar. We have spent much more than we have ever received from the Walloon region. We spent over a hundred million euros building the bloody base. We created their airport from nothing. So our reply will say we’re paying nothing, love Mick.’

Mick was not best pleased either when the EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes blocked his bid to take over Aer Lingus when she had previously permitted an Alitalia and Air One merger: ‘She’ll be rolling over like a poodle having her tummy tickled and rubber stamping the thing. We think the EU Commission is biased against us, but then we would say that, wouldn’t we.’ Mick is appealing. Now that doesn’t happen too often. ‘Given our outstanding record with legal actions we’re very confident we’ll be successful. So far the tally’s running at 99 losses and 2 wins.’

Mick is left holding a 29 per cent stake in Aer Lingus which some investors want him to sell: ‘It has been mentioned by our shareholders; the response was two words, and the second word was “off”. It is in the national interest for us to help out our national airline. The €300 million invested by Ruinair in Aer Lingus is just a drop in the ocean, this isn’t a lot of money. I sit in front of our shareholders and say, “I own more shares in the company than you do”.’

At the time of writing Mick is down sixty million euros on the stake in Aer Lingus. ‘I’m celebrating the fall in value in our investment in Aer Lingus. It’s an accurate response to the management’s current performance. Aer Lingus is likely to be taken over and the most likely candidate to take over Aer Lingus is Ruinair, because frankly nobody else has any interest in taking over Aer Lingus. It’s too small and too high-cost to survive as an independent airline.’

Charleroi is not the same as Brussels, and even the Advertising Standards Authority spotted this when it banned Ruinair from claiming its London to Brussels flights were faster and cheaper than the Eurostar train service. The airline’s advertisement compared its one-hour, 10-minute flight to the two-hour, 11-minute train trip. The ASA found that because London’s Stansted airport is around 25 miles (40 km) out of London and Charleroi is around 28 miles (46 km) out of Brussels, travelling from London and Brussels city centres to the two airports adds 1 hour and 45 minutes to the total journey time. A Ruinair spokesman retorted by saying: ‘Only in the parallel universe of the ASA can a one-hour, 10-minute flight be declared to be longer than a two-hour, 11-minute train journey. Even a four-year-old with basic maths could tell you the flight is shorter. Ruinair has today sent a Dummies Guide to Mathematics to the ASA who clearly can’t add and they can’t subtract either. This false ruling should be reversed.’ Not so fast, Ruinair.

But Ruinair did not let the matter lie and shortly after ran the following job search on their website: