continues to be the ability to speak with a posh accent, and being a pilot means starting your career with a bag full of luck and a bag devoid of experience, the trick being to fill the latter before the former empties. As BBC’s Frank Spencer once said, ‘There are old pilots, there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.’ I wonder do Ruinair pilots place wagers on whether they will be able to find these remote airfields? Our pilot locates Charleroi amongst arable fields. We land. It’s Brussels but not as we know it, Captain. It’s quiet, and I wonder: are they expecting us? The airport is deserted. There have been no air traffic control delays here since Sopwith Camels took part in the Allied offensives in the Great War. Immigration hardly requires a passport; it’s more like a nod and a wink.
There is a tourist desk in the airport and I’m suddenly hopeful that there may be a tourist industry in Charleroi. Five years ago 200,000 passengers passed through here annually. Now it’s two million plus of us annually. Back in the nineteenth century a place on Europe’s rail network could make a city’s fortune. Now it’s a listing in the schedules of a growing list of low fares, low cost, budget, low frills, no frills, etc airlines. Charleroi’s tourist office is in town on Quai des Martyrs de 8 Aout and so I am sure something very grisly happened on that date. But I remain pessimistic. A colleague told me that some years ago when he worked in Brussels, he and some friends went to visit Charleroi one day. They entered the tourist office and asked the charming girl behind the counter what they should go and see. She replied rather sheepishly, ‘Well, there isn’t anything to see.’
Mick has never been a fan of Brussels. ‘Consumers have been ripped off for the past fifty years because governments got together with the airlines after 1945. British Airways got the monopoly in the UK, Air France the monopoly in France and Lufthansa the monopoly in Germany.’ The airline industry is the only industry where the producers are allowed by the idiots in Brussels to get together once or twice a year to fix the fares and route capacities and they get anti-trust immunity to do it. It’s a joke.’ Today’s nearby destination is in the newspapers. The European Commission rules that four million euros of financial incentives received by Ruinair from the Walloon government amounts to illegal state aid.
Mick’s reaction is choice. ‘It would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Ruinair to get a fair hearing in Brussels. It’s a complete fuck-up which is going to overturn twenty years of competition in air travel, but it wouldn’t be the first time the EU has made a balls of an investigation. Any time politicians get involved in an industry or regulating an industry, they fuck it up. It’s what they do best. I think we should blow the place up and shoot all the regulators and the airline business might actually prosper. Bureaucrats in Brussels have been blathering on about European unity for ages but the low cost airlines are at the forefront of delivering it. We are the means by which hundreds of thousands can now travel back and forth; they are almost commuting. It looks like the EU are trying to come up with some communist rules. The judgment is just blindingly wrong. There will be a repayment over my dead body. We have written back to say fuck off.’
The chief executive of the almost-Brussels airport replies: ‘A letter is going to be sent shortly to ask the airline to repay the amount.’ Mick retorts: ‘We haven’t received a letter, but if we do I think it would get a pretty short reply. I think it would consist of two words: Foxtrot Oscar. We have spent much more than we have ever received from the Walloon region. We spent over a hundred million euros building the bloody base. We created their airport from nothing. So our reply will say we’re paying nothing, love Mick.’
Mick was not best pleased either when the EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes blocked his bid to take over Aer Lingus when she had previously permitted an Alitalia and Air One merger: ‘She’ll be rolling over like a poodle having her tummy tickled and rubber stamping the thing. We think the EU Commission is biased against us, but then we would say that, wouldn’t we.’ Mick is appealing. Now that doesn’t happen too often. ‘Given our outstanding record with legal actions we’re very confident we’ll be successful. So far the tally’s running at 99 losses and 2 wins.’
Mick is left holding a 29 per cent stake in Aer Lingus which some investors want him to sell: ‘It has been mentioned by our shareholders; the response was two words, and the second word was “off”. It is in the national interest for us to help out our national airline. The €300 million invested by Ruinair in Aer Lingus is just a drop in the ocean, this isn’t a lot of money. I sit in front of our shareholders and say, “I own more shares in the company than you do”.’
At the time of writing Mick is down sixty million euros on the stake in Aer Lingus. ‘I’m celebrating the fall in value in our investment in Aer Lingus. It’s an accurate response to the management’s current performance. Aer Lingus is likely to be taken over and the most likely candidate to take over Aer Lingus is Ruinair, because frankly nobody else has any interest in taking over Aer Lingus. It’s too small and too high-cost to survive as an independent airline.’
Charleroi is not the same as Brussels, and even the Advertising Standards Authority spotted this when it banned Ruinair from claiming its London to Brussels flights were faster and cheaper than the Eurostar train service. The airline’s advertisement compared its one-hour, 10-minute flight to the two-hour, 11-minute train trip. The ASA found that because London’s Stansted airport is around 25 miles (40 km) out of London and Charleroi is around 28 miles (46 km) out of Brussels, travelling from London and Brussels city centres to the two airports adds 1 hour and 45 minutes to the total journey time. A Ruinair spokesman retorted by saying: ‘Only in the parallel universe of the ASA can a one-hour, 10-minute flight be declared to be longer than a two-hour, 11-minute train journey. Even a four-year-old with basic maths could tell you the flight is shorter. Ruinair has today sent a Dummies Guide to Mathematics to the ASA who clearly can’t add and they can’t subtract either. This false ruling should be reversed.’ Not so fast, Ruinair.
But Ruinair did not let the matter lie and shortly after ran the following job search on their website:
Maths Test for Morons: Are you slow enough to work for the UK Advertising Standards Authority?
The UK Advertising Standards Authority is looking for an ‘investigations executive’ but if you want to work for them you’ll have to show that you’re a dummy. Take our test to find out if you are a big enough moron to join the ASA’s crack team.
A Ruinair flight from London to Brussels lasts 1 hour and 10 minutes. The Eurostar train takes 2 hours 11 minutes.
Which is shorter?
A) Ruinair
B) Eurostar
A Ruinair flight from London to Brussels costs £15. A Eurostar train from London to Brussels costs £27.
Which is cheaper?
A) Ruinair
B) Eurostar
If you answered B you’re just the kind of mathematically challenged ‘Investigations Executive’ the ASA is looking for.
I look around the airport and try to decide where to spend the night. I could follow the herd and board the bus north to Brussels; the 46 kilometre trip. But I’ve been to Brussels before. On the first occasion I went to the Grand Place and the famous Manneken Pis, a pitifully small urinating national icon. I didn’t fondle its well-rubbed private parts. It’s the sort of tiny national statue you could stick in your backpack and
