I have lost more through a hole in my pocket or put more into the collection plate at Sunday mass. These low fares are advertised in the media but often garner free publicity, such as the time Ruinair was criticised by the UK’S Advertising Standards Authority for using offensive language in an advertisement. Published before Bonfire Night, the advertisement had depicted fireworks with the headline ‘Fawking great offers’. Even worse was the reaction to their advertisement showing the soles of a pair of feet on top of another pair of feet, with a ‘fare for 2’ of £69, and the slogan above ‘Blow me, these fares are hard to swallow!’ How low.
It’s good to fly to France for lunch. I could have taken the 46A bus into Dublin city centre for a bite instead but the bus fare into town is €1.90 each way, so it’s much cheaper to travel to France for one euro each way. Mick likes these low prices: ‘Our strategy is like Wal-Mart and Dell. We pile it high and sell it cheap. If anyone beats us on price, we will lower ours. We are the Tesco of the airline industry.’ This is cheaper than staying at home for two days. Forget the fact that the taxes, fees and charges are 1,650 per cent of the fare. The only things cheaper are the ‘free’ Christmas cards I receive annually from the Disabled Artists Association.
I am certain that it’s costing this airline more than one euro in aviation fuel to move my butt six hundred miles eastwards towards France. I agree with Sir Bob Geldof’s opinion on low air fares to unknown destinations: ‘If I can get a £7 flight to somewhere within two hundred miles of Venice, you know, destination unknown, magical mystery tour, well, I’ll take it. Seven quid, I don’t care where I fucking go.’
Flying is now all about queuing. We queue at the check-in to receive a boarding card, we queue at security to show the boarding card and we queue at the gate while they take back a piece of the boarding card they gave us earlier. After twenty years of flying from Dublin, Ruinair’s boarding cards still show a space for Seat Number, albeit unused. With fifty minutes to go to the scheduled departure time, some passengers are already standing around at the gate. These are the passengers classified by this airline at an Investors’ Day presentation as ‘well-trained passengers’. More specifically, airline pilots officially refer to us passengers as ‘SLF’ (self-loading freight). There are signs and lines to queue but Irish people as a rule don’t queue. The same guy who put the chocks under the nose-wheel asks us to form two orderly queues. ‘Jaysuswha’didhesay?’ I hear.
This airline has inadvertently created two classes of travel: early class and late class, much like business class and economy class in the old days. If you are late for check-in, you are doomed, and Mick agrees. ‘We don’t care if you don’t show up.’ Many of my fellow passengers have evidently passed the Advanced Masters Degree in Queue-Jumping. This airline formerly used the same policy as on the Titanic when they used to invite passengers with children to go first. It was almost worth borrowing a child for the day. Now, like everything else on this airline, they charge passengers to stand in a queue. If you are a parent and you wish to be sure of a seat alongside your child, then that will be three euros each. I don’t know what the mad rush is for anyway. I mean, we’re all going to get seats. It’s not like some of us will be left sitting on the cabin crew’s knees or on the toilet seats if we are the last to clamber on board.
Or maybe we will. A few years ago Ruinair flew from Girona in Spain to Stansted with people seated in the aircraft’s toilets. The airline, which was reported to the regulator following the incident, acknowledged that the flight was overcrowded and that it should not have happened. ‘Ruinair does not overbook its flights,’ a spokesman said. ‘We are taking it very seriously and it is the subject of an internal investigation.’ The passengers seated on the toilets for the duration of the flight were Ruinair staff. Other staff not on duty on the particular flight sat in jump-seats in the passenger cabin. Ruinair said the incident occurred because too many off-duty staff were allowed on board. This is what’s known as a Loo Fares Airline.
Today the arriving passengers are still deplaning as we begin to get ready to board. Someday soon we will rush them at the two doors, like on the Tube. In fact this airline reminds me of the London Underground in many respects, but without the sense of personal space I enjoy on the Tube. Boarding is monitored in a simple manner. None of this new-fangled computer or electronic rubbish, as used by other airlines, is required. A staff member sits at a desk with an A4 page of numbers 1 to 189 and uses a highlighter marker to cross off our sequence number as we board. When a few of us have passed him by I expect him to leap up with joy, show us his completed fluorescent grid of work and shout Full House.
Getting onto the plane is by the scrum method. Two packs of burly passengers line up in opposite directions, wait for the signal and charge. ‘Crouch…touch…hold…engage.’ Like the Six Nations. We don’t depart the terminal, rather we escape in a circuitous double-pronged pincer movement. Obstacles such as passing freight traffic, abandoned electrical machinery and lethal rotating jet engines don’t matter because we want to get the best fucking seat. It’s such a race that it seems other passengers genuinely do not believe there will be seats for all. I’m on the inside and past the departure gate, but a girl cuts through the walkway and comes up fast on my rear, so without indicating left or right, I move ahead and speed to the rear steps, until the girl breaks into a fast stride last seen in that ludicrous Olympic walking race and makes towards the same rear steps, so I edge her off at the steps with a shoulder charge and we board the aircraft with myself in pole position to find…there are lots of vacant seats so we’re both gutted. I wonder if we boarded only by the rear steps, could the arriving passengers exit by the front steps simultaneously and save time?
My preference is to use the rear steps to board. There’s no point using the front steps unless you’re the pilot. It’s also proven to be safer to sit at the rear because you never hear of aircraft reversing into mountains. Also the ‘Black Box’ flight recorder is located in the tail and even when jets plunge into the Florida Everglades or the Amazonian rainforest, they always find the ‘Black Box’ intact, so that’s encouraging. It’s great to choose your own seat on board to avoid sitting beside large, loud or drunk people, teary babies or beardy loonies. I rarely sit in the emergency row with the extra leg room. Firstly you will spend the next two hours sitting ten feet away from the noisiest mother of all jet engines. And if that over-wing door blows out, you’re hoovered.
The tray tables of the seats in a few of the back rows of the aircraft are down and have tatty photo-copied multi-lingual notices advising we cannot sit there. I don’t know why. Maybe the crew dine there? I try to sit in one of these blocked seats but the cabin crew are having none of it and propel me along the aisle. This certainly undermines their treasured principle that we can sit anywhere we like when we board. ‘I think we certainly have democratised flight, in that there’s no curtains anymore, there’s no business class anymore, you’re not made to feel, you know, two inches tall, like, “Here you go, down with the poor people at the back.” Everybody is the same on Ruinair,’ says Mick.
I take a row of seats only to find others before me had a food fight here and I’m sitting on their bread and crisps. The new B737-800 aircraft sports a nausea-inducing puce-yellow interior. This is the only airline in the world who employ an interior designer suffering from colour blindness. It’s the same colour they use in McDonalds restaurants. Yellow is inviting and instantly warming but once you’re sitting for ten minutes you want to vacate your seat and leave. This is not so easily done at 500 mph and at 32,000 feet.
A fellow passenger holds her boarding card towards me. ‘Where is the seat number, please?’
‘You can sit anywhere,’ I advise helpfully. She is a veritable virgin. So rare these days.
Getting the optimal seat is a priority and it’s not easy because there is some excellent top-notch competition out there these days, so practice and discipline are essential. It’s important because the average elbow is wider than the seat’s armrest and the middle seats create a war
