Michael O’Leary: Sorry, is that NG pricing? Is it?
Neil Sorahan: Yes, I can take that, Michael.
Michael O’Leary: Okay, Neil. Sorry, I didn’t hear it again. If you heard her say, will you answer please, and the first half as well, December, 2024.
Neil Sorahan: Okay. Well, just on resilience, Savi, I don’t think air traffic control are going to be more to improve, but I’ll ask Eddie to deal with that. I’ll talk about NGs first. I mean, the market for NG is very hot at the moment. The phone is ringing off the hook of people trying to buy NG of us, the leasing companies, lease rate factors have increased quite significantly. So it wouldn’t be minded to go out and try and lease anything from them. So I think we’re very happy just to operate what we have and to continue to work with Boeing to accelerate and speed up the pace that we’re getting the MAXs into the fleet. But yes, NG is holding values very well. I think Eddie is going to answer the question on resilience.
Edward Wilson: Yes. Just I think what, [indiscernible] on operational resilience is coming out post-COVID where we were just better prepared than all of our competitors by keeping everybody employed and keeping everyone current our crews and our aircraft current. And we’ve tried to work really, really hard to sustain that advantage. And you can see that, I think in a lot of the recovery or lack of recovery from our competitors who appear reluctant to get back to full recovery. Some of that, I suspect is driven by sort of meltdown days where ATC dropped everybody in it. And what we’ve tried to do is have additional crews built into the system and that gives us — I mean, we’re able to lean into that because we’re still a growing airline as ATC hopefully will recover in terms of its capacity over the next number of years, we’ll be able to pair back crewing levels to what you would need in a normal busy season.
But those of you who are at the Capital Markets Day will have seen what John’s team, along with Neil’s team and Darryl as well in terms of building IT solutions to make best use of those crews so that we can get through those parts of the like on meltdown days, that are happening more frequently. But it’s something that we’re not crowing about. There’s a lot of hard paddling under the surface here to keep that operation going. And we’ve invested heavily in technology, heavily in manning not just in terms of crews per aircraft, but also in our ops control center. But we have to continue to invest. We’re not being complacent in any way about that.
Savanthi Syth: Eddie, just to clarify, so just the incremental investment won’t be that much greater than what you’re seeing today, right? I mean it’s not going to be another big headwind into the next year.
Edward Wilson: No. I think what you’re — like we have to look at all of these things on a sort of a micro level, don’t forget we’re spread over 93 separate basis, and there’s always room for improvement as to how you grow that. And given the data that we have now, that will inform our decision. But I don’t see a step up. But my instincts would be to have — to increase that slightly, but I don’t think it’s anything material just because we’re going to get into — we’re on a long-term growth trajectory here and that means then that you’re going to — we sort of fine-tune your accruing ratios as you take delivery of aircraft as well. So I’d rather have slightly more than slightly less but not material.
Savanthi Syth: Okay. Thank you.
Michael O’Leary: Thanks, Eddie. Savi, I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear the question probably. Next question please Maxi?
Operator: Next question comes from Ruairi Cullinane from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead your line is now open.
Ruairi Cullinane: Good morning. It looks like relative to Q1, your hedging position on fuel is advanced, but not so much on FX. So I was just wondering if hedging was paused or what drove that? And then secondly, a longer-term question. And you’ve got two years of slower fleet growth around 2025, 2026. Do you think that could be a more difficult period to restrain unit costs? And as a result, is there silver lining to Boeing delivery delays? Thank you.
Michael O’Leary: Neil, you want to take the question on hedging. I mean you or Thomas can do the hedging, and I’ll do the two years of slower fleet growth.
Neil Sorahan: Yes. On hedging, we’re very pleased with the level of hedging that we have in place just under 89% for the second half of this year at about $890 a metric ton and well hedged into next year, over 50%, and in fact, close to about 56% in the first half of the year at savings of $790 a metric ton. What’s changed in our hedging policy, not a huge loss. We’re possibly not going out with a higher percentage as we would have done in the past, but that’s a factor of our competitors’ balance sheets not being as strong, and they’ve not been able to get access to hedging line. So that’s why we had a number of options this year where we effectively capped out the worst case scenario and then had downside participation. So you may, over time, see us doing a little bit more on auctions.
But we continue to have a kind of 12 to 18 month rolling policy. We’re well hedged out to now at the end of March 2025, and we’ll continue just to build up on that over the next number of months. Similarly, on the currency side, we continue to run a very active OpEx book, we were hedged at $108, the current year in euro dollar, we’re hedged at about $111, $112 into next year. And again, we’ll continue to build that over time. So no, we’re continuing to execute on us. We continue to have huge hedge lines with our counterparties and the treasury team have never been busier. So we’re pushing on.
Michael O’Leary: Okay. And two years of slower fleet growth. I mean if anything we’re facing almost three years of slower fleet growth, we will take — if Boeing can meet their delivery commitment, we get 57 aircraft for summer 2024. We get another 30 aircraft for summer 2025. I think they’ll miss some of the summer 2024 and therefore, it will even itself out. We’ll pick those up for summer 2025. We will have nothing new for summer 2026, very little for summer of 2027. I think we take 17 aircraft from January to May of summer 2027. So it’s not by choice, but I think the two or three years of slower fleet growth don’t have — it gives us a bit of a pause in the organization before we start a decade of aggressive growth. It does take some of the pressure off recruitment and training over that period of time.
It may create some challenges, but I think we’re facing challenges, I think, on the labor front anyway in the next year or a couple of years, I think we’ve reflected that in what has been the pay restoration and generous pay — already generous pay agreements in place with [indiscernible] across Europe. But that inevitably, the upside of the silver lining of that is, it further constrains capacity. I mean the only airline delivery material capacity growth across Europe is December of 2022, December 2023, December 2024 is Ryanair. And we ourselves will be capacity constrained through the summer of 2025, 2026 and 2027. Now I think we’ll continue to see significant churn of our operations during that period. We will continue to do aggressive growth deals with ambitious airports.
And therefore, we will churn more aircraft out of expensive airport at Dublin, for example, where again they’re planning to build EUR250 million on a total to going nowhere is just, again regulatory game playing. They just want to desperately weight CapEx on some of the airlines there. Neil is right. None of us want a stupid that only goes across to where the cargo aircraft are parked. And even this, their government is spending EUR230 million out of time when they admit themselves, that Dublin Airport has a planning restriction of traffic cap of 32 million passengers. So the [indiscernible] Dublin Airport have done nothing about this planning cap for the last decade, while traffic is rising to 32 million passengers. And so Dublin is now capacity constrained.
