Agreed, terrible. Went to Scotland recently and my seat was designed for Jimmy krankie.
Finally found an airline that is even worse than easy jet.
Yet EasyJet's seat pitch is 29, to Ryanair's 30. Yes there are other nuanced factors, but still it is an important objective measure.
Has anyone here been on BA's new 29 inch pitch product ? How is it in practice ? Is the seat re-design any help in making do with a smaller pitch separation ?
A nice fantasy of mine is to start a new international airline focused on north America and maybe Jordan, Egypt, Malta and perhaps some European like Prague, Florence, Barcelona.
Maybe run a sparse or seasonally adjusted schedule.
I'd use Airbus 350. Whereas economy is typically 9 abreast and capable of 10, I'd want just 7 abreast and 21 or 21.5 inch wide seats like Virgin's exceptional Premium Economy. The whole plane like that. No attempt to do lie flats and compete with other airlines Business or First class products. Seat pitch would be 33-34, with an option for extra legroom rows, say 38-39, otherwise the same wide, deeply padded seat and service.
I might consider sleep pods, stacked, like a Tokyo pod hotel, where you spend the whole flight horizontal or sat-up-in-bed to eat. I don't know. I wonder if that would even get certification.
But yes, fundamentally one class - Awesome Class. Awesome seats, Awesome food, Awesome fun.
Its most probably bollox, commercially speaking. Almost all Business Class only experiments have folded. I guess such a Premium Economy concept as mine would fail too. But its a nice thought !
Apart from the seating, I have some nice ideas to make airplane journeys go better. How about gym steppers and vibro-pad based devices, to get your body and circulation moving ? Just a small number of them, behind thin partitions. Rationed by time and time between usage, by zapping your boarding card. Perhaps also an advanced, powerful massage chair. I am inspired by these ideas, by Virgin's "wonder wall" concept. I would also like to employ mood lighting, as we have seen possible already on latest gen aircraft. Imagination could run riot on the crew uniforms - maybe with a nod to Sylvia Anderson's designs ! Or run different themes across the fleet. EVA do bizarre Hello Kitty themed aircraft, including food and crew uniforms and including the executive cabins ( !!! ) Their sales actually went up.
New York, LA, Las Vegas, New Orleans, San Francisco, Denver, Orlando, Toronto, Vancouver. Malta, Luxor, Amman, Prague, Florence, Barcelona.
Awesome Air !
" Run by cats ! "
I sincerely hope that each and every person so affected takes them for every single penny that they are due in terms of compensation beyond the headline re-book/refund offer (i.e. at least in line with EU rules).
In much the same way that this airline would take its customer for every penny due if they are (for example) 500g over in their baggage weight.
Taking the pee now, are they providing a service or what? Pity they didn't announce this decision to cancel flights before I booked my 3 day trip to Budapest flying out on Friday 29th September. Now I have to wait and hope my fight isn't one of those affected. Never flying with them again if it is, and will never fly with them again if it isn't. Ryanair Roulette.
Ryanair to tell 400,000 passengers of cancelled flights after 'mess-up'
Ryanair is to tell 400,000 passengers that their flight has been cancelled, after it admitted to a “mess-up” on pilot holidays that left 18 million ticket holders wondering if their holiday plans would be ruined.
He said that 75% to 80% of passengers will be re-routed free of charge within a day of their expected departure date, and that compensation of €240 to €400 (£212 to £354) will be paid, depending on the length of the journey. But that will leave as many as 100,000 ticket holders seriously delayed, with possible weekend getaways wrecked.
O’Leary said consequential losses, caused when travellers cancel hire cars or hotels, will not be covered by Ryanair. He added that the airline will not book passengers on to rival airlines to get them to their destination on time.
“We will not pay for flights on other airlines,” he said. “We cannot afford to pay the high costs of our competitors.”
How did thèy let this get so out of hand? Surely they have a plan for staff holidays?
A large number of pilots apparently jumped ship and joined Norwegian Air too.
My flights next week aren't affected luckily.
As I understand it they changed the year from running from April 1st to March 31st to running from January to December. Pilots suddenly had to get leave in before the end of the year.
We messed up pilot holidays, says Ryanair
""We have messed up in the planning of pilot holidays and we're working hard to fix that," he said.
Most of the cancellations are due to a backlog of staff leave which has seen large numbers of the airline's staff book holidays towards the end of the year.
The airline is changing its holiday year, which currently runs from April to March, to run from January to December instead.
Rynanair said the shift meant it had to allocate annual leave to pilots in September and October."
Why change at all? If something works don't try and fix it.
It's a smoke screen. Ryanair is losing a lot of pilots as they obviously feel they can get a better, permanent position with other airlines, so this holiday malarky is probably to offset a full scale industrial action.