Ruinair. Paul Kilduff
there will be a delay in departing. He says there is fog in France. All Ruinair pilots graduate with highest honours from the Aviation School of Expectation Management. We are advised we will sit in the aircraft going nowhere for one hour. We get another explanation. ‘We were also a bit delayed here earlier with all the planes moving about at this hour of the morning. We had to get the plane from the hangar.’ So that’s where they keep them. I have seen them tow many aircraft to gates at 7am, as if they manufacture them around the corner. We groan and curse, anger rising. He announces later it’s only a thirty-minute delay and we all smile. We take off thirty minutes late but somehow we all feel ecstatically happy about it. One excited child becomes vocal before the take-off: ‘We’re leaving. Quick. Put something in your mouth.’ The same child will later utter upon our planned descent: ‘We’re going down. Watch out. Mind the road.’
On board there are unending announcements made at foghorn volume about smoking, the lavatories or asking us to buy things. I know why they make so many announcements. Because they cost nothing. What’s wrong with putting a sign up somewhere and letting us rest in peace? When I get on a train, no one stands in the aisle each time to announce I can’t use the lavatory when the train is in a station. They put up a sign instead. And I just know it. We all do. The safety announcements are unintelligible since they are delivered in a language unique to this airline, referred to as Spanglish. A gentleman behind mutters under his breath, ‘Sure, I’d understand it better if she spoke it all in Spanish.’ The girl has such a heavy Spanish accent that I doubt even a genuine Spanish passenger could understand her chesty pronouncements.
One part of the safety announcement always grates. ‘In the event that we land on water, life vests are located under your seat.’ I’m not sure that if we do land on water this will be the first matter on my mind. More distracting matters such as staring at the fish outside the windows may take precedence. A life vest? Who’s going to need a life vest? I would rather have scuba diving equipment under my seat. But the most annoying aspect is when they ask us to read the safety card stuck on the back of the seat and some guy across the aisle leans forward and starts reading it intently. We are all experienced, nonchalant, big-time travellers so no one dares to follow suit and read the instructions, but we all sit there and worry that if we hit a mountain, he will appear on the RTE News to explain how he alone survived and watched us perish at Mach One. ‘The safety card I read made it clear what I should do in the event of plunging into a mountain.’
The cabin crew are vaguely good-looking in a lost, vacant sort of way. The lights are on but there’s no one on board. Some might be Eastern European since they don’t have much English. All they can utter is ‘Any drinks or snacks to buy?’ These are the people who will save us in the event of an emergency. They joined this airline to see all of Europe but now they only get to spend 25 minutes (maximum) in a range of ex-military airbases, where one of them draws the short straw to go face us passengers in the terminal.
There’s something fairly awful about these blue staff uniforms. The female crew are either very tall or very short, or are very thin or very not-so-thin but they all wear the same size uniform. I don’t know if Ruinair would consider doing uniform fittings for their staff? A small sum spent on what people would call uniform rules would go a long way to raising personal pride and corporate appearance. Grown men with bad haircuts wearing stained jackets and grubby off-white shirts try to sell us scratch cards, then tickets and telephone cards and Baggies of neat alcohol (and if we drink too many Baggies they will sell us a Lifeline ‘hangover preventer’ cure for three euros) and then perfumes and toys on this flying hypermarket.
The secret of success of this airline is that the seats are free but everything else costs us big-time, including checking in, boarding, luggage, food, drinks and even wheelchairs. They operate like Gillette where razors are cheap but blades are expensive; or like Vodafone where mobile telephones are cheap but minutes cost. Ruinair management don’t think like other airline management, they think like supermarket retailers. No passenger purchases a scratch card so evidently we’re not as stupid as we may appear. Mick has a view on selling scratch cards and so much more to passengers. ‘They’re for morons. On board our flights we don’t allow anybody to sleep because we are too busy selling them products.’
The coffee on sale on board is Fairtrade coffee but not for the right reasons. Mick says: ‘The fact that our tea and coffee supplier is a Fairtrade brand is a welcome bonus, but the decision was based on lowering costs. We’d change to a non-Fairtrade brand in the morning if it was cheaper.’ I never purchase their tea on board on principle. Ruinair charge €2.75 for a cup of tea. Last time I was in Tesco, 80 Lyons tea bags cost €2.78. Once they sell the first cup, Ruinair are making a profit. But I am thirsty.
‘Can I have a bottle of water please?’ I ask.
‘Still?’
‘Yes, I still want it.’
I always carefully read the description on the label of the bottle. A few years ago this airline’s highly profitable brand of bottled water did not come from a pure mountain stream or a rocky highland spring. It was mere tap water. Ruinair’s Blue Rock water, which cost £1.85 for a 500 ml bottle, was supplied by Britvic Soft Drinks in the UK. While the label did not claim the water to be genuine spring water, neither did it make it clear that it was tap water. The same product was pumped into thousands of homes by Thames Water at a cost to consumers of only o.o6p per litre. This is what is known as a L’eau Fares Airline.
It’s an inevitable fact of aviation that when people are stuck in a small metal tube for several hours with not much to do, one of the few distractions open to them to pass the time is to look at the cabin crew. The cashiers and shelf-stackers who double as flight attendants have exotic European makey-up unisex names such as Rosalba, Vaida, Danija (email me!), Edyna and Lorana but blondie Beata still remains the happiest crew member I will meet on my extensive travels. Most of the cabin crew appear to still be of schoolgoing age and are bunking off from lessons by having these day jobs. Their job description is to make really sure we don’t want anything to eat or drink. I buy something else for the one-hour flight but the girl leaves me twenty cents short in change. I assume she’ll return with the change but she doesn’t remember or care. I don’t bother asking. Twenty cents from each of their 50 million passengers will add an extra €10 million to their profit. Never in the field of human transportation was so much owed by so few to so many. Before we land we pass any of our rubbish to the crew, thereby becoming the world’s first self-cleaning aircraft.
There is a programme on BBC where the actor Tony Robinson looks at The Worst Jobs in History. He’s included jobs like Public Executioner, Rat Catcher, Sewer Cleaner and Collector of Bodies during the Bubonic Plague. In the next series he’s looking at working as cabin crew for this airline. This is in contrast to the best jobs in the world, such as coach to the Swedish women’s soccer team or Chief Taster for the Guinness quality assurance team with responsibility for all pubs in the greater Dublin area, who drive vans around Dublin on which locals have handwritten on the side: Emergency Response Unit. Or indeed the easiest jobs in the world, e.g. weather forecaster in southern Spain (er…tomorrow it’s going to be hot).
However, never dare to confront a member of the Ruinair crew. They might be armed and dangerous. Ruinair once sacked an air hostess who admitted keeping an illegal stun gun at her Strabane home. Sinead McDermott had worked for the airline for four years and was dismissed for gross misconduct and bringing the company into disrepute. The stun gun, which was shown in court, was capable of discharging 500,000 volts and could incapacitate somebody causing localised pain for up to five minutes. The brunette, who appeared in court wearing a low-cut top, skirt and boots, received a 200 hour community service order. McDermott listed the reasons for having the stun gun, saying she had received nuisance phone calls, her car had been burned, she had been followed and she feared for her safety. The resident magistrate said he took into account the fact McDermott had pleaded guilty at the first opportunity, which showed an element of remorse, her clear record and the fact she had lost a ‘good job’ as Ruinair cabin crew.
France is a country with the same population as the UK and has double the land mass of the UK, yet there is not a single domestic French low fares airline,