The European Commission, which we often criticize in those calls were maybe not being quick enough in terms of sorting out ATC in Europe or air traffic control strikes and so on. It was actually incredibly helpful in the context of this Italian situation. They stepped in and put a lot of pressure on the Italian government to reverse that decree when it comes to attempted control prices between mainland Italy and the Italian Island. And I think this is a very good lesson for all the other governments that might have ideas of similar sorts feeding populous agendas, don’t go there because you will end up before the EU court and not prosecuted by airlines by the European Commission.
Sathish Sivakumar: That’s helpful. Thank you.
Michael O’Leary: Thanks, Satish. Next question please Maxi.
Operator: The next question comes from Duane Pfennigwerth from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead, Duane, your line is now open.
Duane Pfennigwerth: Good morning. It’s been a very comprehensive call. Just one from me. So air traffic control constraints are really not new in Europe. It’s something you’ve been dealing with for several years even pre-COVID. We’re hearing much more about these issues in the US. And so just curious, how do you design your network to achieve high utilization, low unit costs despite the constraints that you live with. I mean if there was a moment maybe five, 10 years ago where you said, look we have to operate differently because of this, what are the changes you made from a network design, network planning perspective?
Michael O’Leary: I mean I think Duane, to answer that question, ATC has been a much greater problem challenge for the industry in Europe than it is in the US. Europe’s ATCs are fundamentally mismanaged, underproductive and ridiculously expensive compared to North America. The biggest challenge continues to be not just the cost of that, but the environmental impact of flight delays, long flight plan. We’ve been campaigning aggressively for now two or three years at least the simple issue is during ATC strikes, which you tend not to have in North America [indiscernible]. But in Europe, we’ll be dealing with particularly the French 64 days of ATC strike this year so far. We’re calling for the protection of overflight because of the geographic location of France, if they — France uses minimum service legislation to protect its domestic flights and cancels all the overflights.
And we think it should be reversed the other way. Europe should be protecting the overflights and cancel French domestic flights. That one initiative would probably remove some 70%, 80% of the impact of ATC strike and not just [EC] (ph) strike and would have a very significant impact on the environmental impact or the environmental damage done by European ATC today. I think we’re seeing some movements on that. Europe itself has spent billions over the last 30 years on a single European skies project. They have made not 1 millimetre of progress on it. It’s a complete waste of time. I personally believe Europe could deregulate air to air traffic control each individual like they did with the airlines. They should allow the air traffic control providers to compete against each other to provide service.
That will be a much more efficient way, force them to compete against each other. But as long as very small ATC unions have a disproportionate power and you have weak European governments who are willing to stand up to these with the way Reagan did with the American aircraft [indiscernible] day back in 1980, I think we will continue to be bedevilled by ATC delays, inefficiency and screwups in Europe. I don’t know, Eddie, you want to add anything further on that or Neil, maybe on finance?
Edward Wilson: Go ahead, Neil.
Neil Sorahan: Sorry, Eddie, just in terms of design, so there’s been no fundamental change in design, but it has resulted in, we’ve had to increase resilience, so crew and resilient because we have to now factor in, there’s going to be more ATC delays than there would have been five, 10 years ago. And if we just use the example of the UK, the NASS collapsed on the 28th of August, which resulted in the closure of UK airspace and widespread cancellations because of the increased resilience we had by — that was on the Monday. And by lunchtime on Tuesday, our operation was fully back to normal despite having 20 aircraft in the wrong position the night before. So I think that’s where we’re seeing, there’s an increased resilience, higher accruing ratios to factor in rather than an aerospace redesign or a network redesign.
Duane Pfennigwerth: Thank you.
Michael O’Leary: Okay. Thanks, Ed. Next question Maxine, please.
Operator: The next question comes from Alex Patterson from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead, Alex. Your line is now open.
Alex Patterson: Good morning, everyone. And, two quick questions, please. Firstly, just on your October traffic, your load factor was slightly lower than the prior year. That’s the first down year for a long time, were there any anomalies in that month anything to cause that? And secondly, just on the 737 MAX-10, obviously there’s been delays to the back, say there’s been problems with various engines and so on. What if that isn’t certified bill delivered on time what would you do run existing fleet for longer? Are there any other levers you can pull? Thank you.
Michael O’Leary: Okay. Thanks, Alex. October 5, it was off 1% is a rounding issue. There’s nothing material in there. We could have engaged in seat sales that would have artificially driven it back up just to the sake of it. I think that’s the wrong thing to do. We’re happy to let the load factor go up 1%, fall 1%. We hit our target for the month. The only thing I would point to do is that there was a very steep falloff in loads on the flights to Jordan and also obviously the Israel, the situation, the Israeli Hamas conflict. At the start of the month, we were operated by [Stewart] (ph) from Israel. There was a dramatic increase in no shows and a collapse in bookings. Much the same way we had in into Central and Eastern Europe when Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.
I know there’s anything untoward in that. There’s nothing we would call out that we expect to we’re running slightly ahead we are year-to-date on load factor and expect to hit the full year load factor targets. On 737, MAX-10, remember, our first delivery are until January 2027. It’s Boeing expect the MAX-7 to be certified either this side of Christmas our early first quarter of 2024. We think that then rolls on. They expect that will roll on, but the FAA will certify, I think, the MAX-10 sometime towards second half of 2024. It might slip into early ‘25 but we are a long way behind the lead customers on that. So, I don’t think there’s any particular risk to our first deliveries of MAX-10 aircraft in January ‘27 given that it’ll be three or four years behind the original transportation aircraft.
If what would happen yes, we would simply I mean, again, it would further constrain capacity if there’s any delays to our MAX-10 deliveries in 2027. It would further constrain capacity across Europe where, again, Airbus and Boeing to be challenged on their delivery positions. But I would be reasonably confident that we get those deliveries on-time in the first half of 2027. Neil, anything do you want to add on the Boeing side?
