Duane Pfennigwerth: Hey. Good morning. I won’t ask you another unit cost question though I was tempted. Maybe just on the guidance update from early January, you noted some softening, I think, in U.K. point of sale — or sorry, on fairs, U.K. point of sale and maybe Ireland. Can you just expand on that a little bit? And have you seen any change or firming since the guidance update?
Michael O’Leary: Yes. Thanks, Duane. We thought — I mean when we came out with the upgrade on the 4th of March, there was certainly something going on in the U.K. We saw weakness in U.K. outbound and Ireland UKP, which is quite a big market for us. We weren’t sure at the time whether there was an awful lot of kind of coverage of — there were strikes and train strikes and head strikes all over the place in the U.K. That didn’t seem to last long. I mean, by the time we got to the middle of January in actual fact, U.K. outbound in Ireland UKP were one of our stronger booking markets. So it seems to have been a kind of a sort of a temporary malaise largely driven by kind of media. Maybe the U.K. hasn’t quite got back to work yet, and the media coverage given to kind of transport strikes and difficulties to get in with border force and trained.
Now we saw no impact on our daily both — on our day-to-day load factors. People if there were train strikes for either driving to the airport into the airport anyway. But I’m pleased to say that, that has certainly disappeared through the remainder of January. We now see no market that we could point to as being weak. All markets are booking strongly into the February midterms, the Easter in the middle of April and through the summer, all markets look strong, booking robustly, booking strongly. I made the point publicly that we had a record — we did our record weekend. We took 2 million bookings in the second weekend in January. And we had a record week 5 million. But first time in a week, we’ve ever take 5 million — we’ve ever taken 5 million bookings.
That won’t happen every week. But bookings are stronger. Forward pricing is stronger. The kind of caution I would have at the moment is this won’t continue. I generally tend to be a bit kind of nervous. When things are going very well, there’s usually a curveball and somewhere to haunt us the nature of this industry. But looking around and absent any adverse development on Ukraine, COVID or some black swan event that we can’t foresee, it all looks worryingly strong, I think, into April and into this summer, as long as French and German ATC don’t it all up in March, April, May, I think all operators in Europe will be positioned for a very strong summer of traffic and bookings and reasonable fair recovery. The difference between them and us, is that we’ll be doing with an enormous unit cost advantage over where we other operate, right?
The other operators who are currently loss making would probably be profitable this year. And we would hope to see into FY ’24 another reasonable bounce in our profitability because of a very strong unit cost position, a very strong balance sheet and considerable growth in our market shares in all markets all markets across Europe.
Duane Pfennigwerth: That’s great, Michael. And maybe just for my follow-up. On the aircraft constraint side and on the kind of delivery pacing side, how much are you being held back into kind of calendar ’23 here? So summer of ’23 , how much larger would you be, how much larger would these passenger targets be if you had no aircraft constraints? Thanks for taking the question.
Michael O’Leary: Yeah. Really not. I mean I think really not a lot. Like if Boeing can get a 45 aircraft yield, they were originally going on to deliver 51 aircraft by the end of April. If we get 45-plus aircraft by the end of June, then there will be no constraint at all. We’ll get to 185 million passengers. We would like to get to 51 aircraft, in which case, we might get to 185.5 million or 186 million. But really, we have it all in there. As long as if Boeing gets forced by aircraft by the end of June, that will be a dramatically better outlook than I think when we were doing the half year numbers in November, I was worried we could be down at around 35 aircraft, and we’d be looking at maybe 178 million, 180 million passengers.
So to be fair to Boeing, we have been writing rightly critical of in recent years, certainly, the delivery and the production side has improved over the Christmas and into the New Year period. But it gets very tight and very fraud, very little would cause us to miss the delivery a couple of — three or four aircraft deliveries missed at the end of June, means we’re either canceling flights in July or we can’t put those prices on sales. And the critical thing is we need to know those aircraft are coming at the end of May, so we can put them on sales through. If we can get them on sale with four or six weeks’ notice, we’ll fill them into July and August. If we can’t get them on sale, we won’t sell them. But it’s really a big FY ’25. Thanks, Duane.
Next question, please?
Operator: Thank you. That’s from Stephen Furlong at Davy. Please go ahead.
Michael O’Leary: Stephen, hi.
Stephen Furlong: Yes. Good morning, everyone. Hi, Michael. Can you just talk about future aircraft deals? I’m just thinking more about size of plane. I mean do you think the optimal is the 197 or it looks like the MAX 10 may get, for example, certified, so 230 or whatever plus? And then kind of related to that, I see that maybe it’s for Neil. 20 F as your average lead age of eight years. Is that kind of the optimal fleet age number to be younger or older? And I’m thinking of things like maintenance CapEx, et cetera. Thanks a lot.
Michael O’Leary: Okay. Thanks. I ask you to the second question. I mean, again, Stephen, my response on the size of playing questions, again, it’s a bit like we wish do you prefer Airbus or Boeing. I prefer whichever cheaper, which has got the cheaper seat. Size of aircraft, I would always take a bigger aircraft as long as I’m getting a cheaper seats per our per seat price. Now we are — we broke off negotiations with Boeing. I think it’s fair to say they have — we’re back talking to Boeing again about new aircraft, but not in any serious way. I don’t expect anything significant coming for the next number of months. Boeing have been distracted up until the end of December where they were going to get the MAX the redesign of the Max 10.
Can Congress are going to approve that or extend that deadline that the guillotine deadline at the end of December? I would be of the view we have been surprised — pleasantly surprised by the performance of the MAX A200. The 197 seat is a perfect aircraft for us in terms of high frequency operation. We get 4% more seats than 18% less or 16% less fuel consumption. I would be very willing to look at going up to the MAX 10, whenever the MAX 10 gets still not certified, whenever it’s certified and they’re able to deliver it, as long as there’s a reasonable discount for the additional 30 seats because the additional 30 seats means we’re going to start taking hits on yield where you allocate that aircraft and also probably going to take a kind of hit on turnaround.
But I’m entirely — would be entirely opportunistic. I put it this way, if we got the extra 30 seats for free, I would — we’ll be ordering all MAX 10s going forward. Boeing will probably come some busted a reason why you’ve got to pay extra for the extra 30 seats and in which case then we would take all we’d be looking at additional A200. So it’s entirely down to pricing. Whichever aircraft gets us the cheaper per seat cost would be the aircraft that I would favor. Neil, do you want to take the second question, please?
Neil Sorahan: Yeah. Sure, Stephen. Eight years is a relatively young fleet. In the past, we would have flipped out aircraft at eight years because we just had such big order books back in 2005, 2006, and we were running out of warranties. We’re absolutely no difficulty running the fleet older. And in fact, the scimitar winglets, which reduced the fuel for about 1.5%, adds to the longevity of the aircraft. They do get more expensive to maintain, particularly when you’re up to maybe 16, 17, 18-year checks. But we’ve got a lot of very young aircraft in the fleet, nowhere close to that and on the warranties for the next few years. So no, eight years is good, and we’re happy to let the fleet age a little bit over the next few years.
