Original subtitles

Did you really want to charge to use toilets on Ryanair planes? Yes.

How do you rate pilots? Pilots are glorified taxi drivers.

Is the customer always right?

No, the customer is nearly always wrong.

(Laughter)

Ryanair dominates the European sky.

Valued at 30 billion euro, its low-cost model has made travel

affordable for everyone.

It is the most extraordinary commercial story in any country.

Yet, it's never far from controversy.

We've to leave for Portugal in 10 minutes, so as soon as that door

opens, grab your bags, take your rubbish and fu...

They are crass, they're rude, they're not nice to customers.

Fucking Ryanair.

They're expecting you to freak out, they want you to have a meltdown.

Tony Ryan's Ryanair had business class.

Our passengers were really important to us.

Here's to Ryanair!

A brand we love to hate.

Ryanair is the only airline in the world that flies you from no place

to no place.

Sorry about the delay, we'll be blaming the Germans.

Led by, shall we say, a polarising character.

That kind of pugnacious, in-your-face denim.

He's quite forceful.

For fuck's sake, Duggan, compete!

He bullies people.

First thing he said was, who the fuck are you?

Go back to where you came from.

He would call us the ugly women brigade.

This is the story of how a brash, scrappy Irish airline became a giant

in global aviation.

I will personally come up to the boarding gate and kiss your...

I have a feeling Donald Trump studied the Michael O'Leary story.

In 1997, Ryanair's new, cocksure CEO brought the airline to the stock market.

Michael O'Leary was confident in securing 300 million punts in the

flotation, despite, only a few years earlier, calling for the airline to

be shut down.

What led to that turnaround is a story of vision, hubris, sharp elbows

and dogged accounting.

It starts with a tale of two Ryans.

Here's an early photograph of dad, 1956, I believe.

My dad was from Kilsheelan in County Tipperary.

A very proud Tipperary man, as a lot of them seem to be.

He had ambitions, what he wanted to do with his life.

He saw a job advertisement for Aer Lingus.

He decided to jump on his motorbike and travel to Shannon for

the interview.

He was successful in getting the job.

On his first day, he met another Tipperary man, a man by the name of Tony Ryan.

Will you welcome please, Tipperary's own Dr. Tony Ryan.

Sharing a home county and a last name, Tony also had a fierce ambition.

Where I was growing up in the mid-50s, you had a couple of jobs to

go, you had the Air Corps, ESB, Aer Lingus.

And if you got any one of those, you felt you had made it.

The men joined the world of aviation as clerks and soon became

close friends.

There's an early picture now from 1956, I think it is, with dad and

Tony back in their days in Shannon.

They're so young, they're like 19, I'd say?

Dad was 19, I think Tony was 20. Yeah, great picture.

They dressed like pilots, really, didn't they?

Yeah. Even the ground staff.

Yeah.

That's where a lifetime of friendship, a lifetime of aviation

history kind of begins.

And that's the genesis of the Ryanair story, really.

Tony Ryan's wedding with dad as a groomsman.

Yeah, early 60s, I think that was as well.

The top hats are great.

Dad was godfather to Tony's second son, Declan.

They also ventured further afield then to the United States, station

manager positions in Chicago, in New York.

It was around that time that an opportunity came for Tony Ryan.

At Aer Lingus, Tony Ryan hit on a moneymaker that would change aviation

in Ireland forever.

The idea was simple, renting idle airplanes to airlines.

This meant that airlines didn't have the major capital expenditure

of buying an expensive aircraft.

He took that on, but then he charged

expensively for the annual rent.

And it turned out to be an exceptionally

valuable business and became very big

very, very quickly.

The new venture, Guinness Peat Aviation, kept the old friends together.

They were always in touch with each other, even when they went their

separate ways, they always seemed to come back together.

All the way through to Guinness Peat Aviation, Tony actually requested

that dad come over to help with the operation.

So that was an interesting time for aviation, for the world, for him.

Millie, where did she go?

Now, here you go, Millie.

Here you go, Millie.

Millie!

So I was elected as the youngest TD in the door in 1981.

I believe that I represent a progressive modern Ireland.

I would have taken over 400 flights

at that time as a minister and TD.

Come on, Millie.

I haven't flown for 20 years, I have a phobia about flying.

I get an absolute panic attack.

Over the last 40 years, I've had a front row seat of Irish business and government.

Ireland in the 80s was, let's face it, somewhere you didn't want a front row seat.

It was a very entrenched society, which was still under the influence

of the Catholic Church.

We had deep social regulation, no permissibility on divorce,

contraception, abortion, all of that good stuff.

What does being a punk mean?

It just means being different from everybody else.

Punk wants to change society the way it is.

We don't like society the way it is.

Ireland in the 1980s, we were

looking over to the UK, we were

looking off to America with very

rose-tinted glasses, and we really

thought the best thing about Ireland then was getting out of it.

Aviation was a rich person's pursuit.

Dubliners used to dress up in their

Sunday best to come out to the

old terminal and watch rich people getting on planes.

Chances were, if you were taking a flight from Ireland, you were either

rich or emigrating.

The continuing flow of emigration traffic forces many to despair.

It's a phenomenon now affecting almost every family in the land.

Ireland's favourite export, young people, left in their thousands.

My father encouraged me to join Aer Lingus because he said it's the only

Irish company at the time that's

really looking outside Ireland.

And fortunately enough, I was successful.

When it came to headhunting, only the best would do for Tony Ryan's new venture.

And one Christmas Eve, I was in the Hibernian Hotel and I met Tony Ryan

and he asked me when I was coming to work for them, the fledgling GPA,

and I said, Ah Tony, you couldn't afford me.

Of course, that was red rag to a bull because Tony felt he could

afford anything and everybody, and sure enough, he did.

Tony's idea hit the jackpot.

He basically set up the aircraft leasing business.

We were on planes out of Ireland, marketing aircraft to airlines in

Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and Jamaica and Brazil and wherever.

Profits for the GPA group last year were over £100 million.

I often said that Tony, if he had an idea while he was shaving in the

morning, wanted to have a press release on the transaction out by lunchtime.

I don't think there's any written rule that people have to

work extraordinarily hard.

I think they do it of their own volition.

They enjoy the challenge and they get on with the job.

Is the feeling that they will take additional airplanes?

They may not go to the full 37...

Tony's Monday morning meetings were the stuff of corporate legend.

Tony could be remorseless if the deal wasn't going well, wasn't going

to his expectations, wasn't happening as quickly as he would

like it to happen.

At the end of the meeting, there would be blood on the walls.

Not even Tony's old pal Christy could escape the relentless pressure.

He decided that he needed to take a bit of a break on his doctor's advice.

He was burnt out, pretty much.

Aer Lingus, the legacy national carrier since 1936, presented a

green-tinted vision of Ireland.

The Aer Lingus brand, to me,

stands for prestige and everything Irish.

So the whole marketing of Aer Lingus, from the air hostesses right

across, was very much the shamrock, the harp.

It was, as much as Guinness, as part of Irish culture, Irish emblem on

the global stage.

In the 1980s, it wasn't clear-cut that private enterprise was good,

that the consumer should be looked after.

Sky-high prices kept most of us grounded.

And that was at a time when a Dublin-London flight could be 300 quid.

That would make it the equivalent of a flight to Australia now.

Flying was for the elite.

The rest of us...

HORN BLAST

...got the ferry.

It's a pretty strong childhood memory for many Irish people,

getting sick on the boat to Holyhead.

Aer Lingus enjoyed wide-open skies, unburdened by competition.

Aer Lingus, back in the 1980s, just wanted the game to itself.

All traffic in and out of the island was controlled by Aer Lingus, and

that's the way it liked it.

Over the years, many small ventures often tried to get off the ground and

into the national carrier's airspace.

When competition came, it was able to depend on the Department of

Transport to crush it.

The government was behoven to Aer Lingus and it allowed Aer Lingus to

behave in an aggressive fashion.

Somebody had to come along and state the case for the consumer.

After GPA, Christy ran Aer Arann, a tiny island hopper in the west of Ireland.

Dad's time at Aer Aran really got the cogs turning in his mind with

possibilities and the potential of establishing a new airline.

He wasn't alone in spotting a need in the market.

Liam Lonergan was a visionary in the Irish travel trade.

He had a vision of bringing low-cost travel to the masses.

The men shared a vision and Tony had the firepower.

He saw the opportunity, encouraged by friends such as Christy Ryan and

Liam Lonergan to set up a new airline.

I had three sons.

I wanted them to enjoy some of the magic of aviation that I've enjoyed

over the years.

And I put up money for them.

They decided to split the company up, 10% to my father for a £50,000

investment and then the other 90% was going to be owned by Cathal and Declan.

He put the ownership effectively into a trust for his sons and they

were nominally the owners, whereas everybody knew that it was Tony

Ryan's money that was paying the bills.

You know, you invest some money, whether it's to buy a farm for your

sons or whether it's to buy a Mickey Mouse airline at the time for your sons.

But what to call this new airline?

My dad and Tony and his two sons were at Tony's house talking about

their new venture and they started banding around a few names.

Shamrock Air, Emerald Air.

There was a Tipperary one. Trans-Tipperary Express.

Trans-Tipperary Express, doesn't really roll off the tongue.

And within earshot was Tony's youngest son Shane and he pipes up

and says, there's three Ryans sitting around the table, why not

call it Ryanair?

And they all thought this was a great idea and that was how the

naming came about.

The first flight then was set for the 8th of July, 1985.

This is at least the third statue in the south of the country which is

supposed to have moved in recent months.

The next item has caused us considerable trouble this week.

The item is about lesbian nuns.

There are people watching this show tonight who are firmly convinced

that if you came on you would have horns sticking out of your heads.

Oh, you didn't notice?

This Ryanair camper van.

Great memories of spending time in this.

We had the board meetings in our dining room and people running around.

Here's me in the cockpit of the Bandeirante.

The old Bandeirante which was Ryanair's first plane.

Engineers on the Bandeirante.

Seeing our family name pasted across airplanes was incredible to us and

there was just a general feeling of something really new and exciting happening.

They chose Waterford for their launch, appealing to local business

travellers looking to avoid the long drive to Dublin airport.

Oh yeah.

So from 1st July, new Waterford-London-Waterford service

will save you five hours.

So that's what they were really promoting was the business aspect of

the airline.

Yeah, Ryanair, the London Express.

They were kind of trying to scoot under the radar a little bit and not

come head to head with Aer Lingus at the time.

Operating out of Waterford airport was not in direct competition.

The Ryanair reservations book. Yeah.

And the first flight.

Yeah.

So I love this.

People ringing up, buying a ticket, paying their money and then

everything being kept in the journal, basically.

8th of July '85.

For take-off, Ryanair needed a licence to fly from the Department of

Transport and for the minister to take a gamble on this Mickey Mouse airline.

My father contacted the city manager of Waterford and I think he was

nearly laughed out of the office.

The city manager said, look, secure your licence first and then come

back to me, thinking that he probably wasn't going to come back.

Never going to see him again.

So they needed a break.

My father, through his connections then with Jim Mitchell, the Minister

for Transport, who he had known working for Aer Arann, he actually

jumped in his car and he met Jim Mitchell at half past ten in the

Ashling Hotel in Dublin.

Jim Mitchell signed the licence papers.

My father drove back down to Waterford and he was in the city

manager's office the next morning and it was all systems go.

A party of VIPs, including the mayor of Waterford, boarded the 15-seater

turboprop plane for the inaugural flight of the new service, which is

being operated by the newly established airline Ryanair.

July 1985, their first flight of 18 people from Waterford to Gatwick.

And that was pretty revolutionary.

I'm not sure many people even knew when that first flight went out.

It would have been that little odd little Irish company, Ryanair, which

is trying to make its name.

Once upon a time, flying was rarefied, a spectator activity for most.

I remember when I used to go out with my mother on a Sunday, we'd go

out onto the old terminal in the

airport and you'd wait an hour and a

half before one plane did land and

you'd be delighted to see one plane.

My parents were Cork, so I spent a lot of my summers in West Cork.

My memory is of rain, but I still enjoyed them.

In my childhood, people didn't leave the country.

From 1970 almost to the present day, I went to Drumkeady.

I did go to the Gaeltacht, and very much enjoyed that as a child.

Tramore, Dunmore East, Duncannon, or spending weeks in our grandparents.

I don't think we took many holidays as a child.

We used to go swimming off Bray Beach.

We mostly went to Donegal, and then there was a trip to Tralee, which

was fantastic.

Living here in Connemara, so it's like a holiday year round,

it's beautiful here.

Back in the day, foreign holidays were beyond the reach of most Irish people.

I think that's why a lot of people were very surprised when Ryanair was set up.

Who actually would want a new airline?

What were the chances of it actually succeeding?

The new airline had a sharp incline to get airborne.

The airline, Ryanair, was his baby at the very start, his third baby after us.

He was so driven at the time.

Christy Ryan, as Managing Director of the newly established Ryanair,

says that after just 2 weeks of operation, they're getting twice as

many passengers as had been hoped.

It was all very small in a Brazilian Bandeirante aircraft, and you can't

really make money on a single aircraft airline.

When Ryanair started off, I mean, they were a Mickey Mouse airline.

I joined in 1986.

I was just 17 at the time, and

nicknamed the baby of the airline.

May the Lord be with all those who travel and guide them in safety and joy.

You had people who had never, ever stepped foot in an airport, never

mind on an aircraft before, and you'd turn around and they were

around the other side of the aircraft, thought they went in where

the bags went in.

To make a profit meant expansion, so they opened a Dublin to London route.

Because we were small, we knew our customer by name, our passengers

were really important to us.

Anything over 2 hours, you did the full meal service.

We did have a business class.

Here's to Ryanair. Thank you very much.

Beautiful new aircraft. Thank you very much.

My first flight with Ryanair was a dream come true.

This was something that

was new, it was exciting.

The scrappy new airline caught attention.

Today's announcement by Virgin Atlantic is the latest salvo in the

airfares war.

People started to sit up and realise that maybe, you know, we were being

taken for a ride for a long, long time in terms of cost.

We met many celebrities on the flights over the years.

Fatboy Slim, yeah, great fun on those flights.

You were very proud to wear the Ryanair uniform.

Rivals of Aer Lingus at the time, it was the blue versus the green.

Ryanair, the only airline with nothing going for it.

Have you noticed how more people are flying Aer Lingus these days?

Is it because we offer a range of low fares from as little as £57 return?

The legacy airline could no longer ignore the new kid on the block.

Aer Lingus weren't tremendously worried about Waterford.

What it didn't like was when Ryanair started looking at some of the other

bigger airports that Aer Lingus was entrenched in.

Ryanair were the first to break open the champagne this morning for the

inaugural of their new route, Dublin-Manchester, already served by

Aer Lingus.

It's the first time the two airlines have been in direct competition.

Aer Lingus responded by operating flights to Stansted, which in the

Ryanair growth plan, Stansted was massively important.

To us. And the new route.

Here's to Stansted.

We'll be waiting.

Stansted.

Aer Lingus undercut them.

Ryanair was in the brink of collapse.

Cheap seats were a hit with the public, but Ryanair failed to turn a profit.

They had no idea what the costs were.

There were bills arriving that they had no idea where they came from.

It's worse than £3 million, as has

been reported, and has been worse than £3 million.

Tony had to put a lot of his own money into Ryanair.

People have shown courage in terms of changing the political culture.

The Minister for Transport broke from the status quo and threw Ryanair

a lifeline.

He said, Aer Lingus, stay out of Stansted, concentrate on Gatwick and Heathrow.

Ryanair had a free run on Stansted.

So it's a very big day for Irish

aviation, and more importantly,

it's a very big day for Irish tourism.

Seamus Brennan, as Minister for Transport, probably deserves more

credit than anyone else for the Ryanair story.

I believe what Seamus Brennan did is

one of the most important things

that was ever done for social and

economic development of our country.

It was a linchpin in helping Ireland grow to the next stage.

Exclusive use from Ireland to London's shiny new airport would give

the airline a chance to establish growth.

Ryanair now had a flying shot.

Timofte against Bonner...

LOUD CHEER

The 90s was a time of having wasted the 80s.

We started to get our act together.

I was elected by men and women of all parties and none, and above all,

by the women of Ireland, mna na hEireann.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

The nation holds its breath...

Yes, we're there!

The 1990s brought something new to Ireland, optimism.

Tony Ryan's other aviation story continued to rake in the cash.

And in the five years up to 1992, we sold, I think, $5 billion worth of

aircraft to investors in 32 countries.

Tony Ryan is one of Ireland's richest men.

His Shannon-based aircraft leasing company is worth an estimated $3 billion.

Tony had made a lot of money from GPA.

He was quite a wealthy man.

Ryanair was really a plaything, it was something he set up for his three sons.

Tony wasn't coy about his success.

Tony was kind of a grandeese, quite rarefied.

He was a generous donor to Irish arts and culture and infused his pet

project, Ryanair, with a touch of gold.

At the time, Ryanair sponsored the Eurovision Song Contest and they

were sponsoring horse races when they really didn't have the money to do it.

Financially, I think he didn't quite get it.

Tony needed a cash influx for new planes.

Cocksure, he decided to bring his golden touch to the stock market and

sell GPA shares.

He had made big commitments to the purchase of aircraft and didn't have

enough money, so what he needed to do was raise about £850 million, an

enormous sum of money, billions in today's money.

In business, as in life, timing is everything.

As I report to you, air attacks are underway against military targets in Iraq.

The outbreak of war in the Gulf brought fuel prices sky high.

Aircraft leasing rates have dropped by 20% in the past two years and

orders for new planes have plummeted.

In addition, stock markets are very weak.

I mean, the GPA IPO was...

Goldman Sachs told Tony that the price is too high, you've got to

reduce it by $2 or $3, and Tony refused.

The whole thing collapsed and it was all pretty heart-rending at the time.

Tony had gambled the house and lost.

With insurmountable debt, his beloved GPA was in imminent danger.

The stock market flotation crashed and burned and over the next year,

GPA more or less went with it.

This was your life's work to date.

Did you feel devastated by the whole thing?

There must be a stronger word than devastated.

Knocked off my ass, if I may use a crudism like that.

But in life, you have very few alternatives.

If you're knocked down, you've two choices,

either stay down or get up and, you say, dust yourself off.

Though Stansted had saved them from collapse, Ryanair was still

under Tony's protection.

When the GPA IPO didn't succeed, this would have affected Tony Ryan's

personal finances.

There was a bit of concern, would the airline be able to continue?

It's not as easy to set up an airline as one would think.

You have to go through a certain process.

You have to test out your management.

Tony had a great ability in hiring fast and firing slow, and I always

felt he should hire slow and fire fast.

Over the years, Ryanair had seen management come and go, including one

of its founders.

He was kind of edged further from the decision-making.

Your dad didn't stay at Ryanair, when did he leave?

Yeah, I don't know if I want to go into that, to be honest.

I mean, I'd love to get into it.

Can you get into it in a tactful way?

Eventually, Christy Ryan bowed out of Ryanair and he sold his shareholding.

My father used to have an expression, that the best deal goes

through the hottest fire.

You'll never have character, my son, without pain.

Tonight, for the first time publicly, the chief executive of the

company, Michael O'Leary, gives us his thoughts on where the airline is going.

As you will see, when it comes to being a chief executive, he is not

your typical one, and actually has a very individual style.

But it's not on Armani suits that this young cork-born whiz kid spends

his fortune.

No, his standard dress for work is blue jeans and check shirts.

That kind of pugnacious in-your-face denim is the first thing you get.

You knew from the very get-go that you were getting something that

wasn't your standard chief executive material.

But we don't frankly care what people do or what way they wear when

they come to work, as long as when they're in work for Ryanair,

they're working hard for us.

Believe it or not, Michael was very, very shy, found it hard to give any

of us eye contact.

♪ Where did you come from? Where did you go?

♪ Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe?

♪ If it hadn't been for Cotton Eye Joe

♪ I'd been married a long time ago...

Michael O'Leary is very much a country boy turned country man.

O'Leary had earned his stripes with Tony years before.

Michael O'Leary was working in KPMG in the tax department.

So he was a sharp mathematical accountancy brain and he was

entrepreneurial.

Tony Ryan was looking around.

He went to Michael O'Leary and he says, will you work for me?

So he did.

Michael looked after Tony's vast personal accounts, but with Ryanair

in the gutter, he was sent in to assess the damage.

We were losing a lot of money.

Tony Ryan sent him in to find out where was the hole.

It came about because the place was going bankrupt and they couldn't get

anybody else to quit and be CFO, so he was losing all of Ryan's money,

so I was sent in to stop the losses, do whatever you want to stop the losses.

He became the CFO and then subsequently, in 1994, the CEO of Ryanair.

Tony liked people with initiative and strength.

Dublin Airport is our most expensive airport.

This is a point we have repeatedly made.

We knew if Tony had requested for Michael to come in and assess things

that, you know, this guy knew what he was doing.

When he went into Ryanair, he went in on a deal that he would get 25%

of the profits of anything above £2 million at the time.

O'Leary applied his accountancy brain and came to only one conclusion.

Michael O'Leary advised Tony Ryan to close it down.

Close down the airline, it's not going to work.

Tony said, it is not going to close down.

I want it to make money.

Tony Ryan exploded.

Now, he didn't have any solutions as to how they were going to save the

business, but he told them, probably because of pride, that you're not

going to sell it.

But Tony Ryan was not for turning.

A solution had to be found.

In order to help Ryanair survive, the business model had to change.

They needed a success story to draw inspiration from.

Tony used to go to these airline meetings, and he became very

friendly with Herb Kelleher.

If you're embarrassed to fly the airline with the fewest customer

complaints in the country, Southwest will give you this bag.

If, on the other hand, Southwest is your kind of airline, we'll still

give you this bag.

For all the money you'll save flying with us.

Southwest Airlines was very much a disruptor.

Low-cost carrier, single aircraft,

and under represented airports.

Tony sent Michael to Texas to spend time with his friend Herb Kelleher to

see what he could learn.

O'Leary came back speaking, he had seen the future.

Tony, if this thing is going to work, it's got to be low-cost.

We've got to shave everything we can.

O'Leary now had control of the scissors, and he started to cut.

He was absolutely stringent on reducing every cost.

You know the stories about Michael not allowing people to charge their

phones in the office, telling people to steal pens from hotels.

He was just into that sort of level of detail of low, low cost.

And that's where Michael really was different from Tony.

Tony Ryan used to fly around on Concorde, and he had this vision

that you could fly around on Concorde but charge 10 euro

airfares, which was insane.

And so he wanted it very stylish and elegant, but cheap.

Tony's aunt was travelling on a flight with Ryanair, and Tony sent

Michael a note, would you ever please see that she gets a drink?

And Michael took Tony's note and wrote on the bottom, send three

pounds, and sent the note back to Tony.

No prisoners taken.

Michael had a vision, and we could see that he was looking to change things.

Just an incredible ball of energy.

He's like a bullet, he's like the roadrunner through the office.

Michael O'Leary turned that energy into cutting costs.

Ryanair entered a new era of efficiency that would rattle both

competition and passengers.

We did invite Michael O'Leary himself to partake in interview for this.

I'm going to need my glasses to read this.

(Chuckles)

"Dear Aisling, thank you for your letter dated 7th of July.

While I wish you every success with your documentary,

I have no interest in participating in documentaries about Ryanair or

our changing national self-perception."

"It sounds far too much like pulling wool out of our collective navels

while watching paint dry."

"In Ryanair, we prefer to look forward rather than look back."

"I therefore hope you'll understand if I politely decline."

"Michael O'Leary, Group CEO."

I got one of those letters myself when I was writing biography of him

back in 2017.

And he wished me Godspeed.

By the mid-1990s, the O'Leary effect had fully taken hold.

He was cutting costs and buying planes.

I was working at Manchester Airport and I was looking at some numbers

and this Irish airline, Ryanair, was

starting to do remarkable things.

Michael O'Leary came and told me how little they wanted to fly to Manchester.

However, if we made them an offer, they might consider it.

Michael's unique negotiating style made Ryanair stand out like a sore thumb.

I was dealing with about 40 airlines from across the world.

Ryanair were quite the most demanding, obnoxious, belligerent

new airline that we'd ever had the misfortune to deal with.

Every deal felt Michael's squeeze.

Now, why should a £59 fare from Dublin to London be any different

just because a group of travel agents said they're going to boycott us?

It's not a good enough reason.

If I was to describe someone as "no-shit Sherlock", it would be

Michael O'Leary.

But Tim was not going to take this tactic lightly.

Ryanair weren't paying their bills, had had a massive row with his

finance director.

If you don't pay your bills, you'll pay the same price as everybody else's.

There was some surprise at that approach.

How dare I speak to them like that?

So it was a total surprise when Michael said, would I like to join

the Ryanair team?

Nothing could have made me less want to work for Ryanair than the

experience I'd had in the previous six months.

Being in Ryanair, there's always an extra layer to negotiate.

When people say it's a final offer,

it's never a final offer.

There's always haggling to be done and nothing is ever off the table.

Anyway, we came to an agreement and so I did go and work for Ryanair.

Hundreds of East Germans have come over in the last four hours.

Many say they've never seen West Berlin.

In the decades since Ryanair's first flight, Europe had come to see

dramatic social changes.

The newly formed European Union opened borders and created opportunity.

Europe has been massive for us.

Irish politician, Peter Sutherland, freed the European sky

from restrictive travel regulations.

Peter was very keen on getting rid of all the monopolies in European aviation.

Which effectively meant that in any country there had to be a

competitive position.

He was very much pushing the policy of the world opening up.

The open skies, the deregulation, the enlargement of Europe which gave

you a whole lot more countries to go into.

The race for the European sky was on.

To expand, Michael needed cash and lots of it.

To raise that, they had to try to sell shares.

But the ghost of GPA's failure lingered.

He made it clear to Tony Ryan, you cannot be the chairman of Ryanair

when it goes to the stock market because you're associated with a failure.

And that's when they brought David Bonderman, who was a famous American

investor in, as chairman of the company.

Ryanair needed a trusted titan of industry to act as chaperone to

Michael's Wall Street debut.

Michael at the time was expanding the airline, he was making

it profitable, he was making Ryanair into a real success.

And obviously David saw that.

David was impressed and liked the aggression of Michael and he came

along with it.

Ireland's pace of change is now bewilderingly fast.

We grow more complex by the day.

Well, after months of speculation, Ryanair has finally announced its

plans to float on the Dublin and New York stock exchanges.

We plan principally to use it to pay the debt we currently have and the

balance will be used to enable us to buy six more aircraft this year.

The expression that was heard very often was, it's got to get away.

When the Ryanair flotation was coming up, everybody in the company

knew about it for the simple reason that everybody in the company was

getting shares.

One of the carrots at the time when you were joining the company was

that you received shares.

I'm confident we have a very good story to sell.

We have a group of very committed management and staff, all of us

working to make Ryanair a success over the next four or five years.

This was going to be the real catalyst to allow the airline to

really expand.

Michael said, we're doing this.

Expectations were high.

After 12 years of scraping, fighting and elbowing its way into the market,

Ryanair was facing the biggest test of its viability yet.

On the day, there was great excitement.

For everybody in the company, there was something at stake.

Watching the share price from the sort of bottom left-hand corner of

the graph at the opening of trading.

The sharp rise in value of Ryanair shares within minutes of opening

caught even the most optimistic by surprise.

While analysts expected the shares to trade at a premium, no one

expected the immediate premium to be so much.

And the flotation was an overwhelming success.

And so we finished up with a lot of people in the company probably had

made enough to buy a car.

Ryanair's value has jumped from £307 million this morning to £390 million

this afternoon.

Tony Ryan and his family saw the value of their 35% stake go from

£100 million to £132 million, and all in the space of just 10 minutes.

While one Ryan family celebrated, another commiserated.

Many years before, under a gentleman's agreement, Christy had

handed back his shares to raise cash for the fledgling operation.

My father missed Ryanair an awful lot when he left the airline.

Michael O'Leary has written to me personally and said success has many

fathers, and definitely I agree with him.

To not really see the fruits of his labour, you know, years down the

line, it's tinged with sadness.

Christy Ryan died in 2007 with no connection to the airline he helped start.

So for me, it's just a great legacy and we're just so proud to be part of it.

I didn't want to cry.

No longer a scrappy disruptor, Ryanair was becoming a main player.

Once the IPO had happened, they could start buying new aircraft.

And so they could go along with the cash in hand and Michael's

negotiating ability to Boeing and to Airbus.

There was plans at the time to purchase Airbus A320s.

I got a great photograph standing in front of an Airbus engine.

He had signed a letter of intent with Airbus on a Friday.

Champagne had been drunk in Toulouse.

He sent a letter of intent off to Boeing over the weekend and said,

if you match this by Monday morning, I'll go with you.

Boeing matched.

The deal was an order of 45 new 737s for $2 billion.

I know that Airbus were very unhappy, but that's the way business is.

From Tony, he would have learned the aggressive style, not taking no for

an answer and just do it, get out and do it and don't hang around.

Michael's a predator.

If he can't go through you, he'll go around you.

If I can draw an analogy between a wildlife documentary where the

wildebeest are drinking quietly at the lake and then the crocodile

bursts out and grabs one of the wildebeest, drags them to an

untimely death, while the other wildebeests swish their tails and

walk quietly off, saying, thank God it wasn't me.

Well, that was not dissimilar to a Monday morning meeting.

Sometimes you got it and sometimes you didn't.

Now, with a single fleet of 737s, Michael could fully realise the

vision of the Southwest model.

The 737 was by far the most successful short-haul airliner in the world.

The thinking behind having a common fleet is very simple.

If you have more than one type of aeroplane, you have to hold spares

for them, you have to have different training, the pilots can't fly both,

so you have to have a different set of pilots.

Having one fleet is just pure efficiency.

Michael implemented a feat of operational brilliance that has

become industry standard in European short-haul, the 25-minute turnaround.

At the time, the standard would have been 45 minutes to an hour for

short-haul, and we cut it down to 40 minutes and then to 35, and

eventually down to 25.

Planes on the ground cost money, planes in the air make money.

When you hear Michael talk about it, he just looks at it like it's a bus

going from A to B, how can I get most bums on seats?

How can I do it at least cost with the quickest turnaround time?

The 25-minute turnaround.

When the plane lands, and what they call taxi to the gate, once it's at

the gate, it takes 25 minutes to take passengers off, to put

passengers on, taxi back out to the runway, and off you go again.

There wasn't time to have a cup of tea or a coffee on the turnaround.

You had to be more efficient, be better prepared.

If that was repeated three and four times a day, an extra pair of

flights could be operated each day.

Increase plane use, increase profit.

The only pitfall, if you care about that kind of thing, is the customer experience.

When you are boarded, you're boarded at a really fast pace, the

crew ushering you on, getting you through as fast as you can, being

quite assertive, quite pushy.

But the second you get through the gate, you're all standing on the stairs.

And you're wondering, what's going on here?

They've literally just made us run and sweat, and now we're standing in

the stairs.

But as you do that, you're seeing people walk off the plane.

The next step then, they bring you on to the tarmac, where you stop again.

Sometimes it could be raining, it's windy and it's cold.

People don't realise you're part of the operational process, which means

that your tickets are cheaper because of this waltz that you're

doing with the airline.

You know, you may not have the best

user experience, but you've got a

really low-cost flight.

The 25-minute turnaround became central to everything Ryanair did.

We see most of our growth, certainly next year and maybe the year after,

coming on these successful new routes from London into continental Europe.

Europe was always on the agenda.

The two big markets were Paris and Brussels.

Charles de Gaulle was the centre of Air France's world and wasn't going

to cut any sort of deal

with the likes of Ryanair.

The level of disinterest shown by Orly reinforced the notion that

there wasn't going to be the welcome mat shown in Europe.

It was kind of us against the rest of the world.

Unable to wedge into established airports, Ryanair deployed another

Southwest model strategy and identified small airfields.

None of us knew where Beauvais was, that Charleroi even existed.

The fact that Paris was about 75km from Beauvais Airport mattered not.

You were flying to Paris, which, of course, you were.

Just not Paris as you might have imagined it to be.

Ryanair is the only airline in the world that flies you from no place

to no place.

Is Stansted a London airport?

You're nearly in Norwich, for God's sake.

It's widely known at the moment we've been talking to airports in

Germany, in Scandinavia and in Italy.

The first Copenhagen airport it flew to wasn't even in Denmark.

It was in Sweden.

You're only paying goddamn nine euros for it, what do you expect?

On the very first day of Ryanair's service to Paris, Aer Lingus took

out a full-paid advert which read, Aer Lingus will take you to Paris

with a picture of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe, not

thereabouts, and a picture of a haystack and a pitchfork in it.

If nobody knew about Ryanair's service to Paris starting that day,

by God they did by the time Aer Lingus had done all our marketing for us.

I think we put together a superb management team.

I also think we put together an extraordinary bunch of young Irish

people, 600 of them, who work very hard and just love doing what they do.

Tony Ryan and Michael O'Leary fought, like cat and dog.

Tony, while he wanted Ryanair to be a low-cost airline, he also wanted

to be sort of a nice airline.

Michael O'Leary brought that absolute direct cutting through all opposition.

That probably led to a little bit more conflict than there should have

been between the two men.

And we got to a stage in Ryanair where it was Michael O'Leary who

made the decisions, not Tony Ryan.

Michael had taken the vision of the men before him and executed it beyond

their wildest expectations.

It's not a boom that we're experiencing, it's a boom that

Ryanair has created.

Ryanair's growth was exponential.

By the end of the 1990s, they were now flying 5 million passengers

annually and had increased profits to 43 million punts.

He looked at all the numbers, he'd say, how the hell can you fly

somebody for a tenner or 20 euro or whatever?

But he just manages to do it.

I don't know how he does it, but he does.

Given the huge job that Michael had done in changing us into an

efficient low-cost carrier, we were quite confident that we would be

able to take on anybody and beat them.

Ryanair soared, confident in its power to overcome any and all

challenges ahead.

It is the most extraordinary commercial story in any country.

Our shares have had a very good run, we're up 18%.

They are crass, they're rude, they're not nice to customers.

Is the customer always right?

No, the customer is nearly always wrong.

He really doesn't care who he upsets or who he hurts.

If I were you, I'd go back to where you came from, I'd go back to Connemara.

Why Ryanair did its utmost to put off people, I don't know.

You paid 1 euro 50 for this flight, what do you think this is,

the Orient Express?

Dark patterns are practices that are seen to be deceptive and misleading to users.

The World Trade Centre attacks on 9-11 brought aviation to a halt.

Michael O'Leary arrived in Seattle.

It was certainly one of the best deals in history.

Yet, it's fair to say Ryanair is fairly litigious, he says, shifting

in his seat.

Nobody looks like they're enjoying themselves more than Michael O'Leary

in these pictures.

Aviation is probably one of the fastest ways you can burn fossil

fuels and Michael O'Leary knows this.

You're on record as saying emissions are a load of bollocks talked up by

sandal-wearing Greens.

I've a feeling Donald Trump studied the Michael O'Leary story.

Trump got elected by being an arrogant little brat.

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