A RYANAIR PILOT  has come up with a clever cost-saving alternative to replacing co-pilots with cabin crew.

Give the boss the heave instead.

In a letter to today’s Financial Times newspaper, Captain Morgan Fischer says he knows the airline is dedicated to keeping its costs as low as possible, so why not go the whole hog  –and replace Michael O’Leary with a junior flight attendant?

He writes:

The famously pugilistic Ryanair boss, who is not averse to the occasional eye-catching pronouncement himself, took the advice on the chin, the newspaper reports.

Michael thinks that cabin crew would make a far more attractive CEO than him – this obviously isn’t a very high bar – so we are going to seriously look at the suggestion. After all, if we can train cabin crew to land the plane, it should be no problem training them to do Michael’s job as well.

The war of words was sparked by O’Leary’s recent suggestion that cabin crew could replace co-pilots on Ryanair flights, a proposal that has provoked the ire of the Irish Airline Pilots’ Association, IALPA.

Eavan Cullen wrote to the FT to challenge O’Leary’s assertion that he had only had one pilot who had suffered a heart attack in flight, “and he landed the plane”.

Cullen claims O’Leary was referring to a 2002 incident in Belgium, when a pilot collapsed with a heart attack shortly after take-off from Charleroi airport. A doctor on board described the pilot as “clinically dead” – and therefore unlikely to have been able to land the plane.

Cullen said:

The safety implications are obvious, as is the reason for having two qualified pilots in the cockpit.

However, Ryanair countered that this incident – which was not the one O’Leary had referred to – underlined his point that properly trained cabin crew could be capable of landing a plane.

Although the fact that the first officer landed the aircraft without incident underlines the fact that a first officer in the cabin, or a suitably-trained cabin crew, could readily land an aircraft in such an emergency.

Would you be happier for a member of Ryanair’s cabin crew to: