On 1 January 1994 Michael O’Leary finally stepped out of the shadows. For the previous five years he had been at the heart of the airline’s transformation, but he had operated below the radar. He was known within Ryanair but barely registered outside it. Now he was to assume official leadership of a company that he had helped drag from near bankruptcy to profitability, a role that he had combined with the sometimes all-consuming pressures of dealing with the sporadic crises in Tony Ryan’s business affairs.
His rise was greeted with some internal trepidation. ‘Some were delighted to hear it, some weren’t,’ recalls Charlie Clifton. ‘They were scared he’d be cutting costs and cutting us. That it would be bread and water.’ Ryanair’s employees were right to be wary; the new chief executive was messianic about cost control. He was also convinced he could transform Ryanair from a successful niche airline into a serious European contender.
O’Leary first needed to develop a new relationship with Ryan. The collapse of GPA had destroyed Ryan’s aura of invincibility and threatened to eliminate his wealth. The great man of Irish business was on his way down while O’Leary, his protégé bagman, was on an upward curve. He had chosen to stay in the background at Ryanair for years, first as Ryan’s eyes and ears, later as finance director and deputy chief executive. He had, as he reminds anyone who interviews him, wanted to shut the airline down but Ryan’s stubbornness had kept it flying. He had walked away from it for a time, only for his hopes of striking gold with Ryan’s millions to be dashed when GPA collapsed. He had returned to the airline, knowing that it was his only remaining opportunity of making serious money. He had in his pocket his previous deal with Ryan which promised him a 25 per cent share of any future profits above £2 million – a deal struck when the prospect of the airline being closed seemed more likely than recovery. Under Conor Hayes, however, Ryanair had stabilized and edged its way to profit, and O’Leary was prepared to sweat blood to take it to the next level. His routine was relentless: he arrived early in the office, left late, smoked heavily and drank coffee incessantly. He lived in his apartment in the Dublin suburb of Sandymount during the week, escaping some weekends to Gigginstown, but his real life was at Dublin airport, guiding the fortunes of the company he now directed.
From 1988 to the end of 1993 the battle at Ryanair had been for control of the company, but not in the sense of boardroom struggles and jockeying for power; it had been a more basic battle. Hayes, who hadjust left, O’Leary and their management team had been fighting for control of the airline’s finances, slowly instilling order where there had been chaos. Loss-making routes had been closed, financial controls had been imposed, costs had been reduced, but the strategy that was to mark out Ryanair from the rest of the competition over the next decade had yet to emerge. Under first McGoldrick and then Hayes elements of that strategy had fallen into place, but it had not been pulled together into a coherent business model that could be the template for the future
Slowly, the policy of low costs and fares had become the dominant if still bare approach. Hayes had experimented successfully with low fares and high frequency, and it had stuck. What had evolved at the airline, through trial and error, was a way of doing business profitably – a gigantic breakthrough, but it had not yet been fleshed out into a business model that O’Leary could call his own.
His Ryanair was now lean, understood how to reduce its costs, had a clear idea of what it wanted to become – an airline that could expand profitably – and what it needed to do to get there, but its corporate clear-headedness was not the result of a eureka moment. O’Leary had visited Herb Kelleher, Southwest’s charismatic founder, two years earlier and had left with an understanding of the dynamics of the low-fare industry, but he had not yet converted his knowledge into a strategy.
O’Leary’s impact on the company was incremental: he was determined to make each day better than the day that went before it. ‘Looking back it looks like we were some kind of genius turnaround artists whereas in fact the company was in such a sorry state that all we did was try to keep improving it day by day, week by week. And it has kept improving,’ he says.
By the time O’Leary decided to take the chief executive’s chair he had started to put flesh on the survivalist strategy that had secured the airline’s future by pointing it down the road of sustainable profitability. ‘He started to develop a plan based loosely on Southwest,’ says Clifton. ‘The dynamic guy on top, single fleet-type, good culture and cheaper than everybody else.’
Within days of his appointment at the start of 1994 the new Ryanair began to emerge into public view, though few in Europe would have recognized the significance of what O’Leary was attempting. Throughout that year he rolled out a series of initiatives that, taken together, created the modern Ryanair. The business model that was to become the envy of low-cost airlines across the world has been refined since, but the fundamentals were laid down in 1994, and the first signs of O’Leary’s emerging vision for the airline and what it could achieve in Europe had become apparent by the end of the year.
Ryanair was metamorphosing from a small, if profitable, Irish airline into O’Leary’s creature: an airline that could challenge, create a market and defeat Europe’s dominant national airlines.
For O’Leary there would be no honeymoon period in his new role. Ryanair had just survived a bruising battle with Aer Lingus, a battle that had plunged Aer Lingus into heavy losses, but Ryanair’s success tempted yet more competition to join the market. On 4 January British Midland launched a price war on the Dublin–London route by introducing a return fare of £69, a 50 per cent cut on its existing price and a serious challenge to Ryanair. Six days later Richard Branson’s Virgin group joined the fray when it teamed up with Cityjet, a struggling Irish start-up which serviced London’s City airport from Dublin. The Virgin deal was effectively a franchise: Cityjet would continue to operate the routes but would use Virgin livery, uniforms, catering, maintenance and other support services.
Branson’s arrival and British Midland’s low fare meant that Ryanair would have to fight even harder for customers, and would have to find new ways of reducing its costs so that it could offer still lower fares than its competitors. The years of attrition with Aer Lingus had hardened the airline and its management team; they knew they could fight, and they knew they could survive. The early reliance on Ryan’s then bottomless pockets had been replaced by the bare bones of a business model which could see off challengers with a straightforward proposition: Ryanair’s lower costs allowed it to make money from fares that caused the larger airlines to bleed. Ryanair’s sticking power now came from its competence, not from its benefactor.
By 1994 Aer Lingus was on the verge of ruin. Under pressure on its core Ireland to Britain routes, where its market share had declined sharply to less than 50 per cent in 1993, Aer Lingus was also being pummelled on its profitable transatlantic routes, as more and more passengers availed themselves of lower fares from London to the United States and shunned its service. Time too was against Aer Lingus. Europe’s steady deregulation of its skies meant not only greater freedom for new independent airlines like Ryanair, but also a looming curb on the amount of money governments could pour into their ailing national airlines. Aer Lingus had had one last chance of getting its hands on a sizeable state subsidy and no time to waste.
The European Commission, after intensive lobbying from the Irish government, had approved the £175 million rescue package. Bernie Cahill promised that costs would be slashed by shedding workers and boosting productivity, and Aer Lingus committed itself to maintain capacity at 1993 levels. Its objective, so it said, was to reinvent itself as a lean, modern airline rather than to use the state’s money to blow its competitors out of the skies, and it would raise money by getting rid of much of its non-airline business, like its hotel chain and human resources company.
But O’Leary suspected that the state aid would be used to subsidize a fresh round of predatory strikes against its competitors, and he was determined to stop that happening. With that determination, another key element of the modern Ryanair model was about to fall into place: the aggressive and noisy pursuit of competitors and anyone who stood in the airline’s way. At the beginning of 1994 O’Leary complained to the European Commission that Aer Lingus was already using state aid to distort competition by ‘fare dumping’ – charging ludicrously low fares – on certain routes. His argument was that Aer Lingus could only charge those fares because it was using taxpayers’ money to subsidize them.
The commission listened and acted. On 4 February officials from its competition office raided Aer Lingus headquarters in Dublin airport. In a statement Ryanair said it had ‘supported Aer Lingus in its application for state aid, primarily in the hope that it would lead to fair play in Irish aviation, and on the grounds that Aer Lingus would, as a condition of receiving state aid, be obliged to cease its practice of “below-cost selling” on those routes where it faces competition from Ryanair’. The statement continued:
It is a matter of great regret to Ryanair that this has not happened. Indeed, in the four weeks since it received this state aid, Aer Lingus has, as it has done in the past, engaged in widespread ‘below-cost selling’ and seat dumping practices on those routes where it faces competition from Ryanair.
Is it reasonable that Aer Lingus, which has received vast amounts of state aid, should be allowed to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize temporarily reduced fares until Ryanair is driven out of business, and then, as it has done in the past, raise the fares to levels which are profitable for them, but will put air travel to the UK once more out of the reach of the vast majority of Irish people? This type of ‘dirty tricks’ must stop.
Brian Cowen, the Irish minister for transport in charge of winning Europe’s support for his government’s rescue of Aer Lingus, said that it was ‘regrettable that it was deemed necessary [to raid the headquarters]. I don’t dispute the competency of the commission to act in that way, but it could have been done otherwise.’ O’Leary, though, had made his point. Aer Lingus, if it wanted to survive, would have to learn to compete on a level if vicious playing field, and he would stop at nothing to prevent it regaining its old dominance of the skies between Ireland and Britain.
On 13 January 1994, less than two weeks after O’Leary started work as Ryanair’s chief executive, it was reported in the aviation trade publication Airclaims that the airline was planning to replace its existing fleet of aircraft and switch to the Boeing 737. This was the plane that Southwest had used to develop its low-fare empire in America. Ryanair chose the 737 because, apart from its reputation for needing little maintenance and an enviable safety record, it could be configured to carry the ideal number of passengers for the company’s market. Just as importantly, operating a single type of aircraft delivered savings across the airline, from maintenance to training and simple flexibility: all crew members, pilot or stewardess, could be moved seamlessly to any aircraft in the fleet.
Two weeks later the airline made its decision public. It was acquiring six second-hand Boeing 737–200s, each with a capacity of 130 passengers (26 more than the existing 104-seat One-Elevens). Ray MacSharry, the former European Union commissioner who was now Ryanair’s chairman, said that Ryanair was ‘now a major Irish airline, with significant expansion plans for the next three years. This 737 fleet will provide us with a unique platform upon which to develop and expand our existing markets.’
For Ryanair it was a major step: not only would the Boeings deliver savings, they would also bring credibility to a still young airline. Boeing was the most respected brand name in the aircraft business and O’Leary believed it would resonate with customers if, when they booked a Ryanair flight, they knew that they would always be flying in a relatively new, high-quality aircraft, rather than the mixed bag used by most young airlines. The decision to embrace the 737 set O’Leary on a course from which he would not deviate. The move would reduce a range of costs within the company by streamlining the training of pilots and staff, by reducing maintenance costs, by simplifying reservations with a standard layout, and by increasing capacity on every route they flew by almost 30 per cent.
By the time the 737s were delivered ‘it was penny pinching to the extreme’ says Charlie Clifton, as O’Leary worked the airline to the bone to pay for his new machines.
I remember when the first 737–200 came in I was head of in flight operations and we discovered that we didn’t have any safety cards for the new aircraft. They’re specific to the type of aircraft – some 737–200s have 130 seats, some have 121, and they sent over lots of cards with 121 seats on it instead of 130 seats.
Unbeknownst to anyone, the night before myself and the cabin services manager found a stick-on that you could put on these cards that would cover out the old bit and put on the new bit. So we were in the office writing away and sticking the new bit on to each of these cards to put on the aircraft. Michael popped his head around the door and was really pleased: ‘Good, good, good lads.’ You were so conscious of doing this sort of stuff – instead of saying we’d go out and order 150 brand spanking new cards, you just tape over the old bit.
By October 1994 Ryanair had taken delivery of five more 737s, bringing its fleet to eleven, and it had phased out all its other planes by not renewing lease agreements. The single fleet-type had arrived and O’Leary’s Ryanair was taking shape.
Declan Ryan says that the decision to acquire the first six Boeings was ‘the real turning point for the company. If you had to identify one decision, that was it.’
O’Leary agrees. ‘That was the big one,’ he says.
Ryanair was now positioned to mount an inexorable challenge on the Ireland–Britain routes, which still accounted for the bulk of its business, but it was also, far more significantly, ready to test the continental European market.
On Valentine’s Day 1994, ten days after the raid on Aer Lingus headquarters, O’Leary turned up the heat once again, announcing Ryanair’s simplified fare structure. Advance purchase requirements would be reduced to a single day – on most airlines the cheapest tickets had to be purchased at least fourteen days in advance – and Ryanair was abolishing the rule that travellers had to spend a Saturday night at their destination to get the cheapest fare.
The changes were seismic. Fare restrictions were used by the national airlines to create the impression that ticket prices were generally cheap, while in reality the cheapest fares were hard to come by. O’Leary’s decision to strip away the rules gave Ryanair a critical edge in a market where it could now claim a 30 per cent market share and where it now carried more than 1.2 million passengers each year. Its route network was still small – in March 1994 it offered services from Dublin to Liverpool, Luton, London Stansted and Munich; from Luton to Cork, Galway, Kerry, Knock and Waterford; from Stansted to Galway, Kerry, Knock and Waterford; from Liverpool to Knock and from London Stansted to Munich and to Shannon – but it was no longer a bit player struggling for survival. It was a profitable airline gearing up for expansion, and the greater capacity of its Boeing 737s would increase the pressure on O’Leary and his team to sell seats.
If the new planes were to be worked productively Ryanair had to develop new routes, and O’Leary was pushing ahead with his expansion plans because he needed to keep the planes flying for as long as possible, with as many passengers on board as he could sell tickets to. He had set his sights on new routes to Manchester and Glasgow’s Prestwick airport. First, however, O’Leary wanted to reduce the costs of that expansion by negotiating exceptional deals at the airports he wanted to serve.
Three years earlier he had played a role in the negotiations with Stansted airport that had paved the way for Ryanair’s survival. It was a deal that had benefited both sides, because Stansted was a new airport with a need for customers. Now O’Leary had to persuade established airports that discounts were the way forward, arguing that passenger growth would compensate them for lower charges.
His negotiations with Prestwick airport, situated outside Ayr, about thirty-five miles from the centre of Glasgow, were to prove a template for the deals that followed. When the details of the deal became public in April 1994, industry experts accused PIK, the owners of Prestwick, of ‘economic suicide’. The airport, which had not had a scheduled service for the previous five years, had agreed to waive all landing, passenger and air-traffic control charges in order to win O’Leary’s business. The Sunday Times estimated that the deal would cost PIK about £600,000 in its first year and £850,000 in subsequent years, but PIK Managing Director Paddy Healy was unrepentant.
We are incurring the costs to get us into the scheduled passenger game again. Prestwick will again start to appear in international airline timetables on travel agents’ computer screens. The new service will bring a flow of scheduled passengers we do not have at present. We will make money from our duty-free, catering and car parking facilities which we operate ourselves. At the end of the first year we will have more money in the till than if we had not done it.
We have done our sums carefully. What we are doing is cutting costs to the bone to promote low-cost air services. We are taking a long-term view.
The industry was not convinced. ‘The extra income to be generated from duty-free, catering and car parking will at best be marginal compared to the costs incurred by PIK in providing the services to the airline,’ said one commentator quoted in the Sunday Times.
O’Leary, though, had got what he wanted: a deal that took his cost base lower still, which allowed him to offer cheaper fares and which gave him the routes that his new fleet needed if it were to be productive. He also believed that the deal would work for Prestwick – there was little point, he argued, in carving out a deal for Ryanair which would force airports into bankruptcy. He was simply shifting the airports’ thinking from a low-volume, high-cost model to one predicated on high volume and low cost. His part of the bargain was to deliver the volume by persuading passengers to take to the skies. Better still, the welter of publicity that had surrounded Prestwick’s decision to grant Ryanair cheap access to its facilities meant that the Scottish public knew that a low-fare airline had moved into their country without O’Leary having to spend a pound on marketing the new service. The Ryanair name was known and its message was clear: cheap flights.
Much to Aer Lingus’s horror, O’Leary trumped his Prestwick coup by extracting dramatic discounts from Manchester airport as well. According to Tim Jeans, then head of marketing at Manchester airport and later Ryanair head of marketing, Manchester had been trying to attract Ryanair ever since it realized how much traffic the airline was putting through its neighbour, and rival, Liverpool airport. Jeans began talking to Ryanair towards the end of 1993, and in January 1994 he flew out to Dublin to meet the airline’s new chief executive.
‘The meeting itself was quite bizarre,’ Jeans says. ‘Apart from anything else, my attempts to go across to Dublin incognito, by going through Liverpool and booking on Ryanair, were thwarted because I chose the one day in Liverpool when it was snowing.’ His flight cancelled, Jeans had to switch to an Aer Lingus flight out of Manchester. ‘Who should I run into but a group of fairly senior managers from Aer Lingus, all of whom I knew well. They said, “Why are you going to Dublin if you’re not meeting us?” So I was rumbled before I even took off.’ When Jeans arrived at Dublin airport he met Ryanair’s head of route development, Bernard Berger, finance chief Howard Millar and finally Michael O’Leary.
‘They just spent three hours telling me how much they didn’t want to fly to Manchester,’ Jeans says. ‘And I almost said, well if you don’t want to fly that much then, okay, I’ll go back…I was never going to accept the first proposal they put to me. And I said, look, I’m not in a position to commit to that sort of level of pricing, but I said I’m not going to close the door on you either, so I’ll go back, talk to my colleagues, and we’ll talk again.’
A deal was eventually agreed, and three weeks later Ryanair announced it was flying to Manchester. The price Ryanair negotiated was ‘substantially below the deal with Aer Lingus’, Jeans says, but the airport quickly offered the flag carrier the same terms. But Jeans was soon to learn that getting Ryanair to sign on the dotted line was only half the battle. The airline had, he says, a lengthy list of demands involving ticket desks, slots and services, and argued about every aspect of the deal. ‘There was a point where I almost said, just don’t bother,’ Jeans says, such was his level of exasperation. But he held his temper and Ryanair added Manchester to its route network.
Slowly but inexorably O’Leary was changing the nature of the airline business: low fares demonstrably stimulated air traffic, and airports benefited from the increased numbers of passengers. If airports wanted volume, then they had to lower their costs and change their way of doing business, because the only way to generate volume was by offering low fares. Prestwick, Manchester, Luton and Stansted had seen the logic, and before long others were queuing up to revitalize their terminals.
O’Leary’s arguments were simple and compelling for those airport operators just outside the mainstream. He offered them what they needed: passengers. The operators, he argued, would make their money on the ground, from shops, restaurants, car parks and transport to and from the airport. It is an argument that he has refined over the years, but the fundamental insight hasn’t changed: low-cost airlines should not have to pay to bring passengers to airports, which are captive retail markets.
For O’Leary cut-price airport deals meant he could fulfil another mission. ‘Some airlines enter a new route and aim to make a profit in three years. We will not enter a route if we cannot break even in three hours and grow the market by at least ioo per cent,’ he said.
Tony Ryan had still not repaid Merrill Lynch the $35 million he had borrowed from them to acquire shares in GPA, and he could not afford to pay. He refused to contemplate personal bankruptcy, but he also could not afford the embarrassment and ruinous expense of a foreclosure by the American bank. Needing desperately to negotiate a settlement, he turned to his personal assistant of five years, Michael O’Leary.
‘Those Merrill boys were bastards,’ says O’Leary, ‘but eventually we ground them down.’ For weeks O’Leary battled for a settlement, flying to New York to hammer out terms. Eventually, in the early autumn of 1994, he reached it. Ryan would repay $4 million to Merrill Lynch, and the bank would write off the remaining $31 million. Critically, it was a clean-break agreement: there would be no clawback against any wealth Ryan might accumulate in the future. It was a remarkable deal, particularly since Ryanair’s transformation from loss maker to profit centre – albeit on a small scale – was clearly complete.
Ryan now needed to raise the $4 million, and O’Leary came up with a neat solution – one that did not become public for another three years. The airline needed five more Boeings to complete its fleet transformation and maintain its growth. O’Leary negotiated a deal whereby Ryan would acquire the jets for $20 million and then immediately trade them on to the airline for $24 million, booking himself a $4 million profit that would pay off his bankers. It was in effect a direct payment by the airline to its founder, but it was never disclosed as anything as straightforward. Ryan had bankrolled Ryanair for its first seven years, spending more than £20 million to keep it afloat, and the time had come for payback. ‘The company paid the debt to Merrill Lynch,’ a financial adviser confirms, ‘but it was more than he was due at the time. Tony had kept the place going when anyone else would have shut it down. He had poured in money, and now he needed some back.’
Ryan, finally, was free from the GPA debacle and also free, thanks to the deal with Merrill Lynch, to take a stake in what was rightfully his. The bank had missed an opportunity to acquire a stake in a company which was soon to be worth billions, and Ryan would waste little time before joining the board and assuming the chairmanship, as well as major shareholding, in the restructuring which would precede its eventual flotation three years later.
By the autumn of 1994 O’Leary had thus secured his bases and his boss’s finances. Ryanair was not yet the dominant player in the Dublin to London market, but it had more than 30 per cent of the traffic, had opened new routes to Glasgow and Manchester and was above all profitable. His mixed-bag fleet of 104-seat jets and turboprops had been replaced by a homogenous fleet of Boeing 737s, which carried 130 passengers each, and he was beginning to fill the planes. Ryanair, which now employed just 500 people – compared to the more than 7,000 employed by Aer Lingus – had a turnover of £75 million, carried almost two million passengers and had the lowest cost base of any airline flying between Ireland and Britain.
‘We make 92p net profit per passenger and claim to be the lowest-cost airline in Europe,’ said O’Leary. ‘Our strategy is about running the airline the way people want. Low fares, high capacity at busy times, flexible tickets. There are only three layers of management. No secrets. No dogma. No unions. I drive buses at the airport, check in passengers, load bags and get a good kicking when I play for the baggage-handlers’ football team. The only thing I will not do is fly aircraft.’
Despite the changes throughout 1994, Ryanair was still pursuing a predictable and relatively traditional route network. It flew from a number of minor airports, but its primary source of passengers and profit was from major cities like Cork and Dublin to other major cities like London, Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool. Some of his destination airports may have been on the fringe – Prestwick, Stansted and Luton were all some distance from the cities they served – but they were not significantly more distant than traditional airports like Gatwick and Heathrow.
O’Leary could sense greater opportunity, and he was hungry to try.
‘Continental Europe is a market with over 300 million people most of whom are now paying outrageously high airfares. I assure you that this is a market which Ryanair will not ignore but I cannot reveal our strategy today,’ he said that autumn. He predicted that after 1997, when many of the remaining restrictions on airlines in Europe were due to be lifted, ‘short-haul, cost-efficient, point-to-point airlines will sprout up throughout Europe. They will, in a short space of time, change the face of European air travel…From 1996 onwards continental Europe will be at the forefront of our plans, but whether the Ryanair assault will come from Dublin or London, we have yet to decide.’
His optimism was not universally shared, however. Air UK’s director of planning and industry affairs, Phil Chapman, told an IATA conference on aviation economics that the chances of a European airline replicating the success of Southwest in America was virtually non-existent. ‘Governments still support many of our national carriers and in some countries the social implications of allowing a major carrier to fail or to dramatically reduce costs is nearly impossible,’ he said.
‘But,’ Chapman added, ‘set against this is the political desire to see low airfares to satisfy voter aspirations. Many of these carriers dominate their home markets, and with the structural advantage it is difficult to see how a real threat can be mounted by a low-cost, no-frills company. The numbers travelling by air in Europe are not sufficient to allow a real high-frequency, low-cost service to take place.’
Chapman underestimated the single-minded determination of O’Leary. He was right to foresee the difficulties which lay ahead and the determination of the flag carriers to retain their stranglehold on the market, but deregulation had already changed the game. The flag carriers would survive, and would continue to subsidize their European operations with the profits they made on intercontinental routes. Chapman also underestimated the European public’s as yet untested appetite for low airfares.
Ryanair, even in its earliest and most chaotic period, had shown that competition would stimulate a market. In its first ten years of existence the number of people flying between Ireland and Britain had more than doubled. Ryanair had grown the market for everyone, but its ability under O’Leary to contain its costs and lower fares had made it impossible for rivals to compete profitably. Existing airlines could not match Ryanair’s costs because they were laden down with the historical costs of serving a different type of aviation market. Overstaffed and heavily unionized, national airlines were imbued with the ethos of public service, not profit. It was far easier for a new airline, without the baggage of the past, to adapt to a changing market and keep its costs at a level that could not be matched by its rivals.
The airline’s success at new or previously underutilized airports like Stansted, Luton and Prestwick demonstrated that travellers would fly to relatively inconvenient locations if the price was right, and marked the beginning of an airport strategy that would turn the air travel market on its head.
Aer Lingus’s experience should have been a salutary warning to the flag carriers that O’Leary would have to face down in the years ahead. It had tried to use its power as a state-owned company to blow the upstart out of the skies, but it had failed to understand the most basic of business lessons. In order to compete, it had to charge less, and unless it was prepared to bring its costs into line with those of Ryanair, it was doomed to lose millions on every head-to-head challenge. In 1994 Aer Lingus did not have the stomach for bloodletting on a serious scale. The airline’s survival plan envisaged job cuts, but not a scale that could guarantee survival.
O’Leary was on his way; nothing, it seemed, could derail the ambition of this man who had helped salvage a company from near-bankruptcy and was now driving it relentlessly to dominance of a new and fast-growing market. The results for O’Leary’s first year as chief executive would show that he had almost trebled the airline’s reported profits to £5.68 million. Its arch domestic rival had been seen off and would not be able to mount a credible challenge for another nine years, while in Europe the slow but sure pace of deregulation meant that further opportunities were just around the corner.