Cork Airport Information

1. Aer Arann are headed for bankruptcy unless management gets off its rear end and does something about it. When I was young I looked at guys like the management of Aer Arann and said what geniuses they were and that they must know something I did not know, but now with long experience behind me I simply shake my head and say the bloody fools!

2. Aer Arann have just lost the PSO route from Dublin to Kerry. This is disastrous for their finances and will inevitably hasten their demise.

3. The management is so bogged down in the minutiae of running an airline and fighting brushfires that they have lost sight of the broader picture which the entire management have now done. As a result they have lost sight of of running a profitable airline.

4. Operations are a shambles. No airline can survive posting the delays that they post, day after day. Ryanair, for all it failings, manages to keep the best on time record in Europe. It is nothing short of amazing, but is due to ruthless management attention. That management attention is missing at Aer Arann and the managers do not manage. The airline is not being managed but instead is simply happening. There is not sufficient management attention being paid to delays, their cause and their prevention. The Aer Arann management do not believe in hands on management. They are executives and they do not dirty their hands.

5. The management have little or no experience of hands on running an airline and so they lack the necessary experience to make Aer Arann operationally sound. They certainly have no idea how a ground operation should be conducted properly.

6. Their ground handlers, mostly Servisair are a disaster and have even less of a clue and leave them down badly. I do not believe that anyone in Aer Arann has ever done a time and motion study of the ground ops, much less tell Servisair how to do it. Time and time again, the ground handlers play hell with the schedule due to poor ground handling and the management sit there and take it because they have not a clue either. The punctuality on the Cork to Dublin route is nothing short of appalling and passengers are – against their wishes – flocking to Ryanair because they do run to time. Aer Arann does not even have a proper, much less any, ground handling master plan.

7. Aer Arann have tremendous advantages such as short checkin, baggage allowance etc. but do nothing to promote it properly. In fact, they allow the airports to tell people come two hours before when all is needed is fifteen minutes. They totally fail to stand up to ridiculous rules imposed on them by both the airports and the Department of Transport.

8. The entire Aer Arann checkin system is crazy, uneconomic and needs radical overhaul. Nobody has ever looked at what they are trying to achieve by checkin and whether there a better way of doing it - and there is! A totally new approach is needed.

9. In flight service again tries to be good but nobody has looked at the simple things such as the fact that tea has to be made with proper milk. The milk supplied for the tea would make any decent cow sick at the thought that the milk originated with her. Again here management either do not know or are indifferent to the situation. But it is cheaper.

10. Baggage handling is appalling. This too needs radical rethinking as the way they are doing it has to be uneconomic. The current system is totally crazy.

11. Route changing and timetable changing is unbelievable. They cannot run a successful airline the way they are in regard to timetables. They change routes at the drop of a hat, they change timetables at the drop of a hat and they run routes that are so obviously uneconomic, that it is impossible to figure their logic. For example the midday Galway to Luton flight goes at four different times during the week. Cork to Edinburgh manages four different times for nine flights a week. Galway to Manchester for eleven flights per week has five different flight times. Manchester to Galway even betters this with six different flight times. You simply cannot run a profitable route with this type of carryon. Waterford to Galway, a guaranteed loss maker if ever there was one, manages seven different flight times for ten flights per week. You can’t do that if you want to build customer confidence.

12. Whoever picks their routes needs their head examined. It should be absolutely clear-cut that the two flights per week from Galway to Cork is a no brainer and totally uneconomic yet they persist. It should have been equally obvious that any service from Galway to Cork is a no brainer.

13. For that matter their proposed schedule using jets is totally uneconomic. Nobody, but nobody, makes money with 1-4-sicks, but Aer Arann intend re-inventing the wheel. There are only two airplanes in the jet category to make money which are the 737 and 320 families. The Aer Arann current route schedule is a recipe for disaster. The commercial director was the finance director so they must know the truth of what I am saying. They need to take drastic action right now and cut everything that is unprofitable. There may not be very much left but so be it. Their operation is engineering led, not market led, and is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

14. The franchising out to Nexjet is a further recipe for disaster. There is no way known to man that those routes can make money with the aircraft being used. The routes are being operated in a disastrous style. Aircraft is wrong, fare structure is wrong, ground handling is a disaster and timetables are wrong. You simply cannot make money doing it this way.

15. Nexjet is an interesting operation which is highly geared, to put it mildly. The authorised share capital is only €100,000 of which somewhat less has been paid up.

16. Their main director seems to be one Nicholas Fewer. He has an interesting track record. He is a director of Waterford Business Park Management Company Limited. They seem to have forgotten to file their accounts this year on time. He was a director of Renfive Limited which was dissolved in 2003 and whose last accounts were filed for March 2001. Poor Busvene Limited fared little better with a similar situation.

17. Nex Aviation has to be a very underfinanced partner for Aer Arann and certainly the use of a HS 1-4-sick on the routes by Nex Aviation has to be losing its shirt. The interesting question is which of the two, Aer Arann or Nex, is losing their shirt and it is doubtful if it is Nex, but somebody has to be. Even if all €100,000 was paid up capital you would not get much of an aeroplane for the lot. Whether underfinanced companies should be allowed to operate troublesome aircraft is a debatable point but I doubt if the Department of Transport has done much investigation.

18. Aer Arann maintenance is substandard and leads to an unacceptably high tech rate on the aircraft. The normal reason for this is that the maintenance chiefs either do not know what they are doing or simply cannot get enough downtime on the aircraft to keep them adequately maintained. Somebody needs to get their head of maintenance, give him targets for performance and tell him either he produces or he is fired as otherwise if they do not get that department in order they are doomed and they have far too many tech aircraft. The number of total engine closedowns is too high. In short, in my view their maintenance is not up to a safe standard because the maintenance staff is failing to deliver. Now is the time to take severe action, not after the inevitable accident when everyone will say they did not see it coming and that it was someone else’s fault.

19. The management have come up with the novel solution of spending €180 million on new aircraft which they need like they need a hole in their heads. This is insane for an airline like Aer Arann. They would be better giving Michael O’Leary ten million per year to run the place – which he would – and then they might have a chance. Nobody but nobody with Aer Aranns route structure can make money with ATR 72 aircraft, much less the ATR 42 which is even more uneconomic. A guaranteed recipe for bankruptcy is what they have done in buying new aircraft and one can only surmise it was to satisfy the ego of the Chief Executive. You cannot reinvent the wheel and nobody can make money with an ATR especially in Ireland. And as for new aircraft, forget it. The depreciation will kill you. The only hope at all is with written down aircraft.

20. In short with fuel approaching €200 per barrel buying new aircraft is total madness.

21. It is interesting to note that their own figures indicate a average load factor of 36 passengers per ATR 72 flight or roughly 50% . Who is kidding who? Nobody can make money on this load factor. Cork to Dublin is a total disaster, yet it is not a lack of passengers, as Ryanair have much larger aircraft and carry vastly more passengers. Every Ryanair passenger should be a potential passenger for Aer Arann but the ineptness of the Aer Arann management makes sure the passengers flock to Ryanair.

22. Once you accept that the airline is losing money, in order to ascertain how long the airline will last is very simple. All you have to do is to divide the amount of cash plus available credit by the loss per month and you very quickly discover how many months you are going to remain in business. Very, very, simple! My research leads me to the conclusion that no accurate finance figures are available to the management of Aer Arann due to inaccurate and incompetent accounting systems and management fight on with a wing and a prayer? It is no way to run any airline.

23. The fact they receive public money and yet publish no accounts of any kind is a fraud on the taxpayer and if a company receives public money then it should publish its accounts. In this case, I believe, the taxpayer’s money is being wasted. It would be very interesting to know what their bankers are being told!

24. The Minister for Transport is worse to allow the situation to continue and should demand detailed accounts so that his department can assess the situation. Aer Arann are a vital part of the Irish economy and the fact they want to commit suicide is not a good reason to allow them to do so.

25. Their website while not the worst in the business needs major improvements. They should simply copy Ryanair, Easyjet or Aer Lingus which are better and stop trying to re-invent the wheel.

26. Connecting with Aer Lingus is vital, and Aer Arann made a great announcement about it but everyone is still waiting. A passenger coming in late on Aer Lingus is refused a booking change on Aer Arann. They can’t do that. They need Aer Lingus for survival and they certainly are making no attempt to look after the connecting passengers. Aer Arann have got so unreliable to Dublin from Cork in the morning that one cannot risk using Aer Arann to Dublin to connect with Aer Lingus, especially transatlantic. That is a brutal fact.

27. Their fare structure is devised by morons and takes no account of connecting passengers probably because nobody in the airline knows how to do so. Nobody even knows what a proviso is, for example!

28. But back to the website. Aer Arann advertise Hertz at €16 per day. I did one check for April 4 and came up with the cheapest at €63.50 per day. Why cannot they tell the truth? People would use them then but they are losing the most important commodity of all – trust. For their information, another company is €42. They can neither justify their false advertising but much less charging drastically more than the competition. Why not do a deal with the competition instead? The other car hire company even at their full rate they would be almost half Hertz. But why does Aer Arann they fashion a stick to beat themselves with? At the end of the day false, fraudulent, advertising never works.

29. Next, Aer Arann advertises hotels from only “€60” per night on the website. They must be joking! The reality is and I quote from further into their own website when you go to book : Cork €146, Dublin €109, Waterford €148, Killarney €243. Who is kidding who? Again I would not mind but most hotels are offered to the punter directly for half those prices so either they are making an exorbitant profit or else are being screwed by the hotel, the latter being more likely. But again why make a stick to beat themselves with? Can nobody in Aer Arann see that this is no way to do business. What is even more looney is that the hotel itself only wants €126 directly and Aer Arann wants €146 for their special discount! Again it is a fraud on the punter and cannot work.

30. Nowhere in their website does it indicate who runs what in the company, which may well be sensible as nobody can blame anyone then. Why are they afraid to put up their corporate structure and who runs what? It does appear from a press release that none of the executives, much less the board, of course, has any hands on experience in running an airline and this needs to be remedied drastically fast.

31. Floyd Hall of Eastern Airlines in the U.S. once said, only half in jest, that they only lost 50 cents per passenger but by god, look at the numbers they were carrying and how it was increasing month on month. Now I wonder could there be a moral in there somewhere which could apply to Aer Arann?

32. Aer Arann are doomed in the way they are being run. Their management are not really interested in doing things right and they are quite happy to live off PSO money. The loss of the Kerry route will put them into deficit and with the high oil prices they just cannot keep going to way they are.

33. If one is to read the papers one could be forgiven for thinking they now want to turn into a leasing company and have set up a separate company to do this, it appears. Tough on the creditors when the main Aer Arann goes broke and it can always be blamed on oil prices! Heaven forbid that anyone should think it was its own management which caused it! In the current aircraft supply climate, becoming a leasing company is lunacy. You can get all the leases you want, such as Manx, provided you do not expect to get paid for them.

34. Aer Arann needs to ruthlessly cut everything which is losing money right now and deal with all the problems listed above as fast as possible and before they go broke as go broke they must if they carry on the way they are. Time is running out!

35. Finally, the Department is failing to exercise a correct supervisory role and when Aer Arann goes broke it will have to share the blame for failing to take the necessary action in time. It is grossly negligent in the way it supervises airlines in Ireland adopting a reactive rather than proactive approach. It is now on notice of the true situation in Aer Arann, having received this report. It will not any longer be able to plead ignorance.

36. The loss of Aer Arann will be a major loss to Ireland as they have performed a valuable role, but it is not too late, yet, to prevent it happening. However, the present management is sufficiently incompetent to be incapable of taking the necessary steps and most of them should be fired.

LATE NEWS - MORE DIRTY WORK AT CORK AIRPORT