By Julia Payne and Joanna Plucinska
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Ryanair will have to revise down its passenger traffic estimates for next year because of expected aircraft delivery delays from Boeing (NYSE:), the budget airline’s group CEO Michael O’Leary told Reuters on Wednesday.
“We were supposed to get 20 deliveries before the end of December. They’ll probably come now in January and February, and that’s fine. We’ll have them in time for next summer. The big issue for Ryanair is we’re due 30 aircraft in March, April, May and June of next year, and how many of those will we get?” O’Leary said in an interview.
“I think we’re clearly going to walk back our traffic growth for next year, because I don’t think we’re going to get all those 30 aircraft,” he added.
The comments from Europe’s biggest budget airline are among the strongest yet on the capacity constraints in the sector as Boeing and Airbus struggle to meet delivery goals amid supply chain challenges and, in Boeing’s case, labour unrest.
O’Leary said that in his 30 years in the industry he had never seen capacity constraints to the current extent.
“We want to avoid next year what we had this year. We had geared up, we crewed up the 50 aircraft, and then we only got 30 …. we were overcrowded, over-staffed. We took a significant cost penalty this year,” he added.
On the conflict in the Middle East, O’Leary said Ryanair would take its cues from Europe’s aviation regulator EASA.
“Safety is a black and white issue. If EASA says it’s safe, we’re not interested in what some pilots and unions say,” he said. Ryanair has stopped flying to Tel Aviv in Israel as well as Jordan’s Amman and Aqaba airports.
