Ryan · 1985
Tony Ryan launches Ryanair from Waterford
On the morning of Monday the eighth of July 1985, on the small commercial runway at Waterford Airport on the south-east coast of Ireland, the small fifteen-seat Embraer Bandeirante turboprop of the newly-incorporated Irish carrier Ryanair Limited took off on the inaugural commercial Waterford-to-Gatwick service, with the forty-nine-year-old Thurles-born aviation-leasing executive and majority Ryanair shareholder Tony Ryan watching from the small Waterford Airport apron. The Ryanair operation had been incorporated in November 1984 on Ryan's commercial decision (taken across the long summer-and-autumn of 1984 in his Tipperary country house outside Thurles) to challenge the standing Aer Lingus-and-British-Airways pooled monopoly on the Ireland-United Kingdom passenger-aviation market, on the strategic premise that the Irish-and-British regulatory framework would support a low-fare independent carrier under the standing 1944 Chicago Convention bilateral arrangements, and that the small under-served regional airports of the south-east of Ireland and the south-east of England could carry the foundational route network on which the operation would scale. The Waterford-to-Gatwick inaugural of the eighth of July 1985 was the central single foundational moment of modern European low-cost aviation. The airline expanded across the next forty years from the single fifteen-seat Bandeirante and the single Waterford-to-Gatwick route to the standing position as the largest single passenger-aviation operator in Europe by passenger-miles-flown, with the fleet of approximately five hundred and ninety Boeing 737 aircraft, the standing operational base at fifty-six European airports, and the standing annual passenger-volume of approximately two hundred million passengers per year.
An airline is rarely launched by a single Tipperary-aviation-leasing-executive on a small regional Irish runway with a fifteen-seat Embraer Bandeirante turboprop. Tony Ryan had spent the previous decade building Guinness Peat Aviation at Shannon Airport into the largest single commercial-aviation leasing company in the world; by the summer of 1984 he had concluded that the standing Aer Lingus-and-British-Airways monopoly on the Ireland-United Kingdom passenger market was administratively-and-economically vulnerable to a low-fare independent challenger, and committed his personal capital and the standing GPA-and-Ryan-family operational expertise to the Ryanair launch.
THE THURLES BOY
Anthony Patrick Ryan was born at Thurles in County Tipperary on the second of February 1936, eldest son of Martin Ryan, a Great Southern Railways engine-driver of the Thurles railway depot, and Cathleen Barry. He was raised in the small Thurles working-class railway-employee terraces, was schooled at the Thurles Christian Brothers' School to the age of fifteen, and on his sixteenth birthday in February 1952 took the standard Aer Lingus traffic-clerk apprenticeship at Shannon Airport on the standard Aer Lingus apprentice rotation that the Irish national-airline carrier had instituted in the early 1950s.
He worked across the next twenty-three years at Aer Lingus on the standard commercial-and-operational career ladder: traffic clerk at Shannon (1952 to 1958), station manager at Cork Airport (1958 to 1962), Aer Lingus station manager at Heathrow (1962 to 1965), commercial sales manager at the Dublin head office (1965 to 1972), and from 1972 in his thirty-sixth year as Aer Lingus's senior aviation-leasing executive on the standing Aer Lingus international-fleet-management arrangements. The aviation-leasing role gave him the foundational commercial-and-financial understanding of the international-aircraft-leasing market that became the basis of his subsequent commercial career.
GUINNESS PEAT AVIATION
In 1975 in his thirty-ninth year he co-founded with the Aer Lingus chairman Michael Dargan and the Guinness Peat Group chairman Sir Maxwell Joseph the new Shannon-based commercial-aviation leasing company Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA), with Ryan as Managing Director on a small founding capital of approximately fifty thousand Irish pounds. He built GPA across the next decade from the small Shannon-office start-up into the largest single commercial-aviation-aircraft-leasing company in the world: by 1985 GPA was leasing approximately three hundred and fifty aircraft to over a hundred and fifty international airlines on a leased-fleet-value of approximately five billion US dollars, was the central single financial-and-operational architect of the international commercial-aviation-leasing market of the period, and had made Ryan personally one of the wealthiest single individuals in the Republic of Ireland.
THE RYANAIR DECISION
Through the spring and summer of 1984 Ryan studied the standing Ireland-United Kingdom passenger-aviation market with his GPA commercial-analysis team. The market was, on the standing 1984 numbers, approximately two and a half million passengers per year on the Dublin-London routes (the Aer Lingus-and-British-Airways pooled operation) and approximately a hundred and forty thousand passengers per year on the small Irish provincial-to-United-Kingdom routes (the small Aer Lingus regional operations to Cork, Shannon, Waterford and Knock). The standard return-fare on the Dublin-London route was approximately two hundred and eight Irish pounds at the 1984 prices; the standard return-fare on the Waterford-to-Gatwick route was approximately ninety Irish pounds (under the small regional-aviation pooled tariff).
Ryan concluded that the standing fare-structure was approximately three times the operational cost-per-passenger and that a low-fare independent challenger operating under the standard 1944 Chicago Convention bilateral-aviation arrangements could capture substantial market share at fares approximately one third of the standing Aer Lingus-and-British-Airways prices. He committed his personal capital across the autumn of 1984 (approximately one million Irish pounds), formed the Ryanair Limited company on the twenty-eighth of November 1984 at Dublin Castle Yard under the Companies Registration Office, took the standing Irish Department of Communications air-operator certificate across early 1985, and leased the small fifteen-seat Embraer Bandeirante turboprop from the GPA fleet for the inaugural operation.
THE EIGHTH OF JULY
The inaugural Waterford-to-Gatwick service operated on the morning of the eighth of July 1985 with the small fifteen-seat Bandeirante (registration EI-BPI, the Ryanair-leased EI-BPI Bandeirante that became the first Ryanair operational aircraft) under the captaincy of Captain John Hickey of the Ryanair operational staff. Ryan watched the inaugural take-off from the small Waterford Airport apron with the Ryanair commercial-and-operational team. The single-aircraft single-route operation across the rest of 1985 carried approximately five thousand passengers on the Waterford-to-Gatwick route at the standing fare of ninety-nine Irish pounds return (approximately half the standing Aer Lingus-and-British-Airways pooled fare for the equivalent journey).
THE FORTY-YEAR EXPANSION
Ryanair expanded across the next forty years from the small Waterford-to-Gatwick single-aircraft operation to the standing position as the largest single passenger-aviation operator in Europe. The 1986 expansion added the Dublin-to-Luton route on the strength of the standing 1986 Aer Lingus regulatory-protection appeal that the Irish Department of Communications had refused; the 1988 expansion added the Dublin-to-Liverpool route. The 1990-1991 financial reorganisation under the new chief executive Michael O'Leary (the Trinity-College-Dublin-trained chartered accountant who had joined the Ryanair commercial team in 1988 and was promoted to the chief-executive position in 1994 on Ryan's recommendation) restructured the airline on the explicit Southwest Airlines low-cost-carrier model (point-to-point routing, single aircraft-type operation, secondary-airport landing fees, no-frills cabin service, online direct booking).
Under O'Leary's chief executiveship across 1994 to 2024, Ryanair expanded across the European continental-aviation market on the strength of the 1997 European Union Single European Aviation Market liberalisation (the regulatory framework that removed the standing 1944 Chicago Convention bilateral-restrictions on intra-European Union aviation operations), grew the fleet from approximately twelve aircraft at the close of 1994 to approximately five hundred and ninety Boeing 737 aircraft at the close of 2024, and reached the standing position as the largest single passenger-aviation operator in Europe by passenger-miles-flown with approximately two hundred million passengers per year across approximately fifty-six European operational bases.
Tony Ryan retired from active management of Ryanair in 2003 in his sixty-seventh year, continued as Chairman to 2004, and died at his Lyons Estate country house outside Celbridge in County Kildare on the third of October 2007 at seventy-one. The Ryan name in modern European commercial aviation carries the weight of the small Bandeirante take-off from Waterford on the morning of the eighth of July 1985.