Intro

Not a favourite of mine, Ryanair. Good stock to own, no doubt, at least as a long term play in the ridiculously cyclical airline sector, but the experience of travelling on a scheduled Ryanair flight is, at least to my thankfully limited exposure, akin to the DART from Pearse St at evening rush hour on a hot (ha) summer's day.

My trip home from London yesterday was probably the most unpleasant 45 airborne minutes of my life. Ignoring the unsavoury co-passengers - in this case including a group of 30 or so members of a "family" (I include quotation marks as they were no normal family, at least not in the modern, nuclear sense) whose volume level was matched only by the number of different relationships they had to one another - there were many other factors to impede my relaxation. In no particular order, the others were: the bead-inducing humidity for the first 15 minutes of the flight (before the stewards noticed it, probably), the size of the gentlemen sitting either side of me coupled with Ryanair's legendary leg room, the frankly alarming smell emanating from the bathroom........all nicely topped off with a good demonstration of the "Ryanair Slam" - a deft landing manoeuvre in which the pilot reduces his altitude to about 20 feet over the runway, then seemingly cuts power and drops the planenon the Tarmac. The only reason I can see for landing in this manner is purely for the laugh, and I can imagine it's quite unsettling for nervous fliers. Anyway, never again. I'd sooner ferry and drive.