Eddie Wilson: Yes. I mean, like if you go back to when we came out of COVID like Ryanair was the best prepared of all airlines and in Europe if not in the world for having sufficient crews, more than sufficient crews to run the schedule when many of our competitors were floundering. And it’s not a lesson that we have forgotten. And as we continue to grow, we will lean into having not just the sufficient crews, but we should build in extra resilience, because the reason we need extra resilience was primarily driven by poor ATC performance and we don’t want to be caught out by that. And that means that if we’ve got to – we have to remain competitive with our crews to attract and retain people and we’ll continue to do that.
If that means that we have to adjust pay like we have, then that’s what we will do. And it gives us the comfort in the medium term as that when ATC, if it’s ever ultimately resolved to get back to the sort of operational efficiencies that we – that means that we can pair back crews in time. But at the moment, we are not going to take any risk on that whatsoever. So, it’s about having the right crewing ratios in place to run the schedule against the backdrop of a really shoddy ATC environment.
Michael O’Leary: Yes. And I should just say as well as in terms of capacity, the Boeing being short of those aircraft from Boeing, we are finalizing our budgets at the moment, but we are walking back our full year traffic figure for FY ‘25. It’s going to come back from €205 million probably €200 million will be the working assumption. So we are going to have 2.5% less capacity out there through certainly the summer 2024 than we would wish to have at this point in time. So as I said previously, United want to walk away from any MAX 10 aircraft deliveries. We will be very happy to step into the breach in advance. Thanks for the question, Dudley. Next question please.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Jaime Rowbotham from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Michael O’Leary: Jaime, hi.
Jaime Rowbotham: Good morning. First one for Neil, maybe. I don’t want to obsess too much on these ex-fuel unit costs. But back in November, I asked whether there were any risks on the unit cost guide and Neil, you helpfully mentioned the route charges which I thought looked a bit higher this morning. Presumably, you’ve now got visibility on the higher Eurocontrol rates for the next 12 months. I just wondered whether these were also a little bit responsible for the extra €0.50 on the cost per tax guide into ‘24. And how much of a headwind there is on route charges into ‘25? At least I guess this will be the same for everyone. And secondly, Michael, given the focus on Boeing, you mentioned fewer delivery defects on receipt of recent MAXs. Could you expand a bit on that, describe the sorts of issues you were encountering before the recent improvement? Thanks.
Michael O’Leary: Okay, thanks.
Neil Sorahan: Yes. On route charges, Jamie, they are going to track up a bit year-on-year. We are just getting the final numbers in at this stage, running the budget, and I’ll give you a bit more color when we come out in May. But yes, the working assumption in the budget is that we’re seeing route charges tracking up slightly year-on-year.
Michael O’Leary: Yes. Again, I wouldn’t obsess that your unit charges in the third quarter, like the bigger driver of it on a quarterly basis was the slight slippage in load factor. We would have expected originally to grow that loan factor by maybe 1%. It’s down 1%. That will continue into January as well. So on a quarterly basis, it moves to die a little bit more. On an annualized basis, it doesn’t have that much effect. Boeing delivery defects, I mean, we’ve been jumping up and now with Boeing for about the last 18 months on the number – rate and number of defects that we are picking up. We now do about a 48-hour inspection of each aircraft on delivery here in Dublin, which again is kind of a sort of a painful process.
We pick up loss of little things. And I don’t want to go into the detail, but like spanners under a floorboard stuff in the cockpit, it shouldn’t be there. Those are the kind of small quality assurances we pick up. The bigger issues were kind of over the last 12 months of the known issues, you’ve kind of issues coming out of Wichita where both into the tailing we’re putting the wrong way, holds in the forward pressure, the seal or whatever. I don’t know what it is drilled the wrong way. stuff shouldn’t be happening on a $100 million piece of cake. We wouldn’t expect them if you were taking are of our buying cars from Mercedes or Audi, and we don’t expect them when you’re taking aircraft from Boeing or from Airbus. But – and some people would say this was probably – is a consequence of the 2-year grounding of production during COVID.
I think there may be a little bit in that. But it means that Boeing and Airbus both need to significantly improve quality control, both the oversight of the engines and on the airframe pure production. We are – Boeing are aware of this. I think they have significantly increased the numbers of engineers that have doing quality assurance on – the aircraft goes through the shop. And the 12 aircraft we got in the fourth quarter or in the December quarter, we found less sort of little silly things on those aircraft on delivery than we had in any of the previous Gamechangers over the previous 2 years. So we think quality is going the right way. It is very unfortunate, but you know that they had the MAX 9 door panel stuff. Boeing are getting an awful lot of unfair kind of coverage as – I mean, it was a near Canada aircraft took off last week and one of the nose wheels fell off.
