Ryanair (RYA) will reduce its scheduled aircraft for the summer of 2020 from 58 to 30 jets, in anticipation of delays to the delivery of its Boeing 737 Max jets. The airline has 135 737 Max 200 jets on order with options for a further 75 planes. The Max is currently grounded worldwide after two software-related crashes.
Ryanair hopes to see the jet return to service around September. But chief executive Michael O’Leary said that the company believes it “prudent to plan for that date to slip by some months, possibly as late as December”. Ryanair hopes to receive its planes sometime between January and February. As the airline can only take delivery of between six to eight new aircraft each month, its summer schedule will be based on 30 aircraft deliveries up to end of May 2020.
The downward revision will see Ryanair's summer 2020 growth rate drop from 7 per cent to 3 per cent, meaning that full-year traffic growth for the year to March 2021 will be cut from 162m passengers to around 157m. This shortfall will require base cuts and closures for both summer 2020 and the winter 2019 schedule. Mr O’Leary said that the airline would work with Boeing and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) “to recover these delivery delays during the winter of 2020, so that we can restore our growth to normal levels in summer 2021".
Prior to this news, broker Berenberg this month forecast full-year 2020 operating profit to drop to £948m from Ryanair’s 2019 level of £1.19bn.
