CAPTAIN MORGAN FISCHER A HERO...O'LEARY (the mouth) BULLY

Financial Times: 13th September 2010

Ryanair crews’ no-frills idea: Drop the boss

By Pilita Clark, Aerospace Correspondent

Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary has for years endured complaints from passengers about his famously no-frills Irish airline.

Now a senior Ryanair pilot has taken the rare step of publicly challenging his boss after the outspoken chief executive said he was trying to convince authorities to let his aircraft fly with only one pilot. A flight attendant could do the job of a co-pilot if needed, Mr O’Leary said last week, because “the computer does most of the flying now”.

Captain Morgan Fischer, who trains other pilots at Ryanair’s Marseilles base, says he knows the airline is dedicated to keeping its costs as low as possible, so why not go one better – and replace Mr O’Leary with a junior flight attendant?

“I would propose that Ryanair replace the CEO with a probationary cabin crew member currently earning approximately €13,200 net per annum,” Capt Fischer has written in a letter to the Financial Times, which reported Mr O’Leary’s comments last week.

“Ryanair would benefit by saving millions of euros in salary, benefits and stock options,” the captain said, and there would be no need for approval from the authorities.

Mr O’Leary quibbled with some of Capt Fischer’s numbers but, in characteristically mischievous mode, he effected to agree with some of his points.

“Michael thinks that cabin crew would make a far more attractive CEO than him – this obviously isn’t a very high bar – so we are going to seriously look at the suggestion,” said Stephen McNamara, a Ryan­air spokesman. “After all, if we can train cabin crew to land the plane, it should be no problem training them to do Michael’s job as well.”

Capt Fischer, 41, who has been based in Marseilles for the past five years and has 20 years’ flying experience, mostly with TWA and American Airlines, declined to comment further on Monday.

Mr O’Leary is well known for his ability to generate headlines with eye-catching ideas, from coin-operated lavatories to “fat taxes”. But his thoughts on ditching co-pilots – first raised in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview earlier this month – seem to have struck a sensitive nerve among some.

Ryanair employees have complained to the media in the past, but most have done so anonymously.

Seeing a pilot publicly poke fun at Mr O’Leary, as Capt Fischer has done, is “extremely unique”, said Capt Evan Cullen, president of the Irish Airline Pilots’ Association, who has also written to the FT about Mr O’Leary’s comments.

Capt Cullen was provoked by Mr O’Leary’s suggestion that, in 25 years, Ryanair had had only one pilot who had suffered a heart attack in flight, “and he landed the plane”.

Capt Cullen said Mr O’Leary must have been referring to a 2002 incident in Belgium when a pilot collapsed with a heart attack shortly after take-off from Charleroi airport south of Brussels. A doctor on board who assisted the pilot described him as “clinically dead”, according to a report by Ireland’s Air Accident Investigation Unit, and the co-pilot had to return the aircraft to the airport.

“The safety implications are obvious, as is the reason for having two qualified pilots in the cockpit,” said Capt Cullen.

Mr McNamara said this was not the incident Mr O’Leary had been referring to, “although the fact that the first officer landed the aircraft without incident underlines the fact that a first officer in the cabin, or a suitably-trained cabin crew, could readily land an aircraft in such an emergency”.

He said the issue at stake was that aircraft were now heavily automated, and with more than 500,000 flights a year the second pilot was rarely, if ever, called on to land in an emergency.

Some safety experts dis­agree. “It is true that aircraft are far safer today than ever before and many of the processes have been automated,” said Paul Hayes, air safety director at Ascend aviation consultan­cy. “But in a high work-load situation, say an instrument approach in congested air space or in an emergency, I’d still like to have a pilot and co-pilot working together as a team.

Financial Times: 6th December 2010 Pilot who crossed O’Leary resigns By Pilita Clark, Aerospace Correspondent Captain Morgan Fischer is scanning fresh horizons The Ryanair pilot who said the airline should replace Michael O’Leary, the low-cost airline’s chief executive, with a junior flight attendant to save money has quit after being reassigned from southern France to the “Siberia” of a base in Lithuania. Captain Morgan Fischer was one of almost 30 Ryanair pilots working at Marseilles who had to move after the airline announced in October that it was closing the base following a disagreement with French authorities. The pilots were asked to bid for new bases. Most did so and were offered work at bases in Spain, Italy,Portugal and elsewhere, including some a few hours’ drive from Marseilles, where many live with their families. Capt Fischer, who had worked for Ryanair for almost five years and had spent almost a year resolving a contractual dispute with the airline, said he wanted to discuss any move first, according to a close colleague. This was because he was concerned the low-cost carrier could treat a request to shift bases as an agreement to a new – and possibly inferior – contract. The 41-year-old American, who lives with his family in the pretty town of Aix-en-Provence, was then offered a transfer to Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city. “That was a fairly considerable kick in the teeth for him,” said the colleague. “Kaunas is considered Siberia for Ryanair pilots. It’s very unpopular to be sent there. It’s the back of nowhere with a completely different language. You’re in eastern Europe and the money is dreadfully bad.” As a result, Capt Fischer resigned. He declined to comment but, speaking from France, his colleague said the pilot had the option of going back to work for a US airline. Capt Fischer’s resignation comes two months after he offered a cheeky riposte to Mr O’Leary’s comments that airlines could save “a fortune” if flight attendants replaced co-pilots on aircraft now so sophisticated that “the computer does most of the flying”. In a letter to the Financial Times, Capt Fischer suggested his own idea to shave costs: replacing Mr O’Leary with a “probationary cabin crew member currently earning about €13,200 net a year”. Stephen McNamara, Ryanair’s head of communications, said the airline could not comment on individual employees or their contracts for confidentiality reasons. But he said fewer than 10 of the almost 30 pilots at Marseilles had not said where they would like to be transferred, “and so these have been offered transfers to other bases in Spain, Italy, the UK and Lithuania, according to where we have pilot vacancies”. He added: “All of our Marseilles pilots have been offered positions at other Ryanair bases, and the vast majority have already accepted these offers. “Should some pilots choose not to, and resign, then much as we would regret such a decision, we would respect it and wish them every success with their future careers.”

john say's
Captain Morgan stood up against O'Leary and was bin baged out of ryanair.McNamara(puppet) head of liers at ryanair up to his tricks again...