Europe's largest airline group Ryanair Holdings has soared back into the black in the first quarter of its latest financial year as the impact of the Covid pandemic continues to ease.
The company revealed this morning that net profits after tax reached £144million in the three months to the end of June, compared to losses of £232million for the same period in 2021.
Revenue also jumped to £2.21billion from £315million previously, while customer numbers raced ahead to 45.5million as against 8.1million in Q1 of 2021.
Chief executive Michael O'Leary said: "While we remain hopeful that the high rate of vaccinations in Europe will allow the airline and tourism industry to fully recover and finally put Covid behind us, we cannot ignore the risk of new Covid variants in autumn 2022.
"Our experience with Omicron last November, and the Ukraine invasion in February, shows how fragile the air-travel market remains, and the strength of any recovery will be hugely dependent upon there being no adverse or unexpected developments."
The CEO said Ryanair's decision to work with the unions and agree pay cuts to minimise job losses throughout the pandemic was vindicated in recent months, as many other European airlines, airports, and handling companies struggled to restore jobs.
He added: "Ryanair seems unusual among the major EU airlines in summer 22, insofar as we are fully crewed, despite operating at 115% of our pre-Covid capacity."
Unprecedented delays
But the boss highlighted that Ryanair's business, schedules and customers were being disrupted by unprecedented air traffic control and airport-handling delays, but he remained confident that the airline will operate almost 100% of scheduled flights, while minimising delays and disruptions for customers.
Mr O'Leary pointed out that, over the past two-years, numerous airlines have gone bankrupt and many legacy carriers only survived by significantly reducing their fleets and passenger capacity, while receiving multi-billion-euro state aid packages.
He went on: "These structural capacity reductions have created enormous growth opportunities for Ryanair to deploy our new, fuel-efficient, B737 Gamechanger aircraft and our market share has increased significantly across major markets in Europe."
The airline's Scottish routes include Aberdeen to Alicante, Malaga and Faro.
Ryanair growth plans to 2026 will see it create over 6,000 jobs for highly-skilled aviation professionals across Europe.
The CEO added: "Over the next three years, we plan to expand our state-of-the-art training centres, investing more than £85million in two more, high-skills, training facilities.
"This summer, we take delivery of the first of 8 new CAE full-flight simulators. We continue to invest heavily in our engineering and maintenance teams and recently announced a new maintenance hangar facility in Malta, in addition to newly-opened hangars in Kaunas in Lithuania and Shannon in Ireland.
“These in-house facilities enable us to create cadet and apprenticeship opportunities for school leavers, bringing through the next generation of highly-skilled aviators and aircraft-maintenance professionals."