Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

In a year in which many airlines suffered big losses, Ryanair has announced that its after-tax profits rose 59 per cent to ?239.4 million in the 12 months to March. Now one of the most highly valued airlines in Europe, the company has a market capitalization of $5 billion, higher than Lufthansa. Ryanair will fly 24 million passengers this year with only 2,000 staff. Lufthansa flies twice as many people but with more than 30,000 employees.

How does Ryanair do it? The answer lies in the personality of its boss Michael O'Leary, who gave a remarkably frank interview to Graham Bowley in the City Club in London. You can read it here in the Financial Times Weekend section.

Bowley notes that O'Leary swears quite a lot. Here he's talking about the nine per cent cut of fares travel agents used to take:

"Screw the travel agent," he says, rolling his eyes and scratching his neck. "Take the fuckers out and shoot them. What have they done for passengers over the years?"

Ryanair's strict no-refund policy is the source of most complaints:

"We don't fall all over ourselves if they... say my granny fell ill. What part of no refund don't you understand? You are not getting a refund so fuck off."

Here's O'Leary speaking about Jurgen Weber, Lufthansa's chief executive:

"Weber says Germans don't like low fares. How the fuck does he know? He's never offered them any. The Germans will crawl bollock-naked over broken glass to get them."

Asked if there's room enough for both British Airways and Ryanair:

"There is too much: 'we really admire our competitors'. All bollocks. Everyone wants to kick the shit out of everyone else. We want to beat the crap out of BA. They mean to kick the crap out of us."

What is it about this 42-year-old Irishman that makes him so energetic, so angry?

"They don't call us the fighting Irish for nothing. We have been the travel innovators of Europe! We built the roads and laid the rails. Now it's the airlines!"

O'Leary's ultimate goal? Free tickets. In a decade or so, airlines will pay travellers to distribute people around Europe, he predicts. The airline industry is Tesco, is Ikea, is network TV in the way viewers watch for free and advertisers pay for access to them, is the internet in the same way that websites earn money for delivering click-through traffic to other sites. Speaking of the net, Ryanair now sells nine out of 10 tickets online and its site clocks up an amazing 500 million page-views each month.

This is a great interview. Here's Graham Bowley's excellent final graf:

For the rest of us, the rise of the discount airlines simply brings countries closer, and puts on to planes people who would rarely fly — or never have flown before. In some cases, the new, 21st century jet-setters are flying to destinations they had probably never even heard of five or 10 years ago: Carcassonne, Haugesund, Jerez. When you see English weekenders clutching ?15 tickets stumble directly from plane to bar in, say, Trieste, you suspect that many of the new low-cost adventurers are not travelling because they need to, nor even because they particularly want to, but simply because they can. 'For years flying has been the preserve of rich fuckers,' says O'Leary with his grin, confidently assured of his vision as ever. 'Now everyone can afford to fly.'