Tony Ryan, the founder of Ryanair, died
Oct. 3 after a long illness. He was 71.
Ryan was lauded by
Dan Loughrey, chairman of the Chambers of Commerce of Ireland's Air
Transport Users Council, as someone who revolutionized the aviation
industry "through the force of his personality, chutzpah and
imagination."
Loughrey also said
Ryan was the only person to receive ATUC's Lifetime Achievement
Award, in 2005, because "he left Ireland a better and more
successful place."
Ryanair CEO Michael
O'Leary called Ryan "one of the great Irishmen of the 20th century"
for his achievements in business, education, sports, the arts and
heritage preservation.
In the aviation
industry, Ryan is best known internationally for founding Ryanair,
which has grown to become Europe's largest low-cost carrier and
which ignited Europe's low-cost carrier revolution.
Ryan founded
Ryanair in 1985, with a staff of 25 and a 15-seat aircraft
operating daily from Waterford, Ireland, to London's Gatwick
Airport, carrying 5,000 passengers in that first year. In 1986,
Ryanair received permission from regulatory authorities to
challenge British Airways and Aer Lingus on the Dublin-London route
that had been exclusive to them.
Ryanair wasn't a
low-cost carrier at the start. That didn't happen until 1990, when
Ryanair found itself with accumulated losses and a need to
restructure after three years of intense price competition with Aer
Lingus and British Airways.
The Ryan family
invested more money, copied Southwest's low-fare model and
relaunched under new management as Europe's first low-fare
airline.
The carrier reduced
fares to make them the lowest in every market, cutting its lowest
fare by about 40%. Ryanair added more flights on its routes, moved
to a single aircraft type and scrapped free drinks and expensive
meals onboard.
The number of
passengers carried by Ryanair increased from 644,000 in 1989 to
745,000 in 1990. After weathering a sharp decline during the Gulf
War in 1991, Ryanair has been skyrocketing ever since.
This year it
expects to carry 50 million passengers on 557 routes across 26
European countries.
Ryan's early
aviation career was with Aer Lingus, working for the carrier at
Shannon Airport and in Chicago and New York, where he took over as
station manager.
He returned to
Dublin in the early 1970s to take charge of Aer Lingus' aircraft
leasing operations. Around that time, Aer Lingus purchased three
Boeing 747s, but because Aer Lingus' transatlantic business was
seasonal, it needed to offload some of its capacity in the winter
months to help finance the purchase of new planes.
Success in that
endeavor led him to found and aircraft leasing company, GPA, in
1975, with Aer Lingus and Guinness Peat Group. Ryan used GPA to
turn aircraft leasing and finance from an airline back-office
function into, as the ATUC citation put it, "a global business that
is now key to fleet development by airlines worldwide."
In the early 1990s,
GPA was the world's largest operating lessor with a fleet of more
than 400 aircraft. Today, Ireland is a global center for the
aircraft leasing and finance industry.
To
contact reporter Andrew Compart, send e-mail to [email protected].