RYANAIR BOEING DELIVERY
UPDATE
NOW EXPECT ONLY 40 OF 57 B737
DELIVERIES FOR PEAK S24
Ryanair, Europe's No.1 airline,
today (Fri 1 Mar) confirmed that Boeing now expect to deliver just
40 of the 57 planned B737-MAX8200 aircraft that were due to be
delivered to Ryanair before the end of June 2024. Ryanair's current
S24 schedule was based on receiving a minimum of 50 B737 aircraft,
and Ryanair will now have to reduce approx. 10 aircraft lines of
flying for the peak summer months of Jul, Aug and Sept. This will
cause some minor schedule changes in the context of Ryanair's 600
aircraft fleet and will reduce frequencies on existing routes
rather than cutting new routes.
Ryanair has already implemented
these schedule cuts at some of its higher cost airports, most
notably Dublin, Milan Malpensa, Warsaw Modlin and 4 Portuguese
airports where costs are rising faster than inflation in 2024. All
affected passengers have already received schedule change
notifications offering them alternative flight times or full
refunds if they prefer.
Ryanair regrets these further 10
Boeing delivery delays and expects that these further S24 schedule
changes will reduce FY March 2025 traffic to just under 200m
passengers compared to an original target of 205m. Ryanair will now
work with Boeing to accept aircraft deliveries during the peak
months of Jul, Aug and Sept 2024, but given these delivery
uncertainties, it will be unable to put these aircraft on sale for
peak S24.
Ryanair's Group CEO Michael O'Leary said:
"We are very disappointed at these latest Boeing delivery
delays, but we continue to work with Boeing to maximise the number
of new B737 aircraft we receive by the end of June, which we can
confidently release for sale to customers during the S24 peak. We
will now work with Boeing to take delayed aircraft deliveries
during Aug and Sept 2024 to help Boeing reduce their delivery
backlog.
We
regret any inconvenience caused to some customers and our airport
partners by these enforced S24 schedule changes, which will reduce
our full year traffic growth from 184m in FY24 to between 198m to
200m in FY25. We are working with our airport partners to deliver
some growth to them, albeit later in Sept and Oct (rather than Jul
and Aug). This traffic growth can only be delivered at lower fares
during these shoulder months.
Boeing continues to have Ryanair's wholehearted support as
they work through these temporary challenges, and we are confident
that their senior management team, led by Dave Calhoun (CEO) and
Brian West (CFO), will resolve these production delays and quality
control issues in both Wichita and Seattle.
We
expect these latest Boeing delivery delays, which regrettably are
beyond Ryanair's control, combined with the grounding of up to 20%
of our Airbus competitors' A320 fleets in Europe, will lead to more
constrained capacity and slightly higher air fares for consumers in
Europe in Summer 2024. We therefore urge all Ryanair customers to
book early in order to secure the lowest available air fares for
Summer 2024."
ENDS
For
further information
please
contact:
Ryanair Press
Office
Tel:
+353-1-9451799
press@ryanair.com