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Ruinair Flight FR206 – Tuesday @ 8.30am – DUB-STN

Is that Mick? I stare ahead at the check-in queue for London Stansted. Others spot him too and peer over. It looks like Mick. He wears faded denim jeans and a creased check shirt, with buttons undone and sleeves rolled up. He is active and agitated. So it must be Mick. I have never stood so close to a man worth six hundred million euro who doesn’t possess a tie, nor apparently an iron. Mick is the closest thing we have to a real cult in Ireland.

I wonder why he bothers to stand in a queue, five or six people ahead of me, taking another flight to his Mecca. He could have jumped the line; instead he joins the Great Unwashed. I’m vaguely impressed. I wonder if he really purchased a ticket like I did, how long ago he booked it and if it’s as cheap as my flight.

There’s no sign of Mick when I reach the departure gate so he must be in the VIP area. But suddenly he stands up like a Messiah in our midst and assists his staff to take our boarding cards. I purposefully join his personal queue and he rips my boarding card in two with a practised ease. Mick doesn’t look at me. We don’t bond.

I have an aisle seat in the centre of the B-737. Mick sits a few rows ahead, reads an Irish Times at speed, then grazes some business papers. He chats to a colleague who sits opposite. The crew are on their very best behaviour today. So is their boss. He hasn’t sworn at anyone yet, us passengers included. I wonder where it all went wrong. We both attended private schools in Ireland favoured by the cream of the country: rich and thick. We were at university in Dublin at the same time. We joined large accounting firms in Dublin. He almost qualified as an accountant, but I did. He left the profession to buy a few corner shops in Dublin, but I took a proper day job. One of us is now a multi-millionaire and one of us writes books.

How does he do it? There isn’t a spare seat on the flight. I paid a teeny ten euro return fare for the trip. It’s cheaper than parking a car at the airport, cheaper than the books on sale in the terminal, cheaper than the sandwich and coffee available on board, cheaper than the train to civilisation at the other end. The taxes, fees and charges are still a mystery to me. I paid forty penal euros. Mick had the gall to charge me a €6 credit card handling fee, yet I did it all online. I mean, who ever handled my credit card but myself?

Today we fly to a place to the north-east of London called Stansted, which is Connexted by rail to Liverpool Street. This modern accessible airport is an essential component of this airline’s strategy. Experience shows that passengers will fly from somewhere to nowhere, but will not fly from nowhere to nowhere. I stalk Mick along the corridors on our communal route march towards Arrivals. I spy a row of five middle-aged men in grey suits wearing shiny British Airport Authority ID badges. They are on bended knee as they shake his hand. Mick delivers 60 per cent of all passengers arriving at their airport. It’s like a visit from the Pope.

The new world order is in the concourse. Ruinair have half the floor space. EzJet have the rest. Herr Berlin is the latest upstart. Buzz were badly stung. DebonAir went out of fashion. Go are long gone. The walls of the terminal are adorned with Ruinair’s smiley bulbous aircraft, their route map cobweb and must-see website address. The latter is the most searched travel website in Europe and the world’s most searched airline brand according to Google. Ruinair is the world’s largest international scheduled airline by passenger numbers, ahead of Lufthansa, Air France and British Airways, and is the third most valuable airline in the world, surpassed only by Southwest Airlines and Singapore Airlines. Even with its millions of passengers, Ruinair only enjoys an 8 per cent market share of the 600 million people who fly annually within Europe.

We are the Ruinair generation who take flights abroad in the same way our parents took bus trips into town. Ruinair takes us from A to somewhere remotely near B; from Aarhus to Zaragoza (Pyrenees). They fly to every hamlet in Europe: Altenburg, Billund, Brno, Lamezia, Pau, Vaxjo (which sounds like a toilet cleaner), Weeze, Zadar; places that I doubt even exist. RuinWhere? They fly to the vague destination of Karlsruhe Baden-Baden (Stuttgart), so Bad they named it twice. They fly to Balaton in Hungary, which is not a city, but a lake. Fifty million passengers travel annually on 550 routes between 26 countries on our own Eireflot.

This is no longer a little Irish airline. It’s an epidemic of biblical proportions. As I study the Ruinair route map, I am reminded of their Spanish routes. I decide I will book another flight, this time to Malaga. I am confident the fare will be as low, and the experience as painless, as today. Surely Mick and his very cheap airline couldn’t ruin my precious summer holiday.