 took another hit on Thursday, as the company announced it would be cancelling another 18,000 flights between November and March.){kind=link}
Shares in troubled airline Ryanair (LON:RYA) took another hit on Thursday, as the company announced it would be cancelling another 18,000 flights between November and March.
The company confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that it would be suspending several key routes over the winter period, including London Stansted to Edinburgh and London Gatwick to Belfast. This is likely to affect another 400,000 passengers, on top of the passengers affected by cancellations over the last two weeks.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said: “From today, there will be no more rostering-related flight cancellations this winter or in summer 2018.
“Slower growth this winter will create lots of spare aircraft and crews, which will allow us to manage the exceptional volumes of annual leave we committed to delivering in the nine months to December 2017.”
The company have said its problems have been down to “messing up” holiday scheduling, but the level of disruption has led to speculation that Ryanair are suffering a shortage of pilots. However, Ryanair responded to this by saying:
“In the current year less than 100 of over 2,000 captains left Ryanair (mainly retirements or to long haul airlines) and less than 160 F.O’s [first officers] who have mainly left to join long haul airlines.”
Ryanair also withdrew from its bid to buy failing Italian airline Alitalia, in order to give management more time to focus on sorting out leave.
In the wake of the problems Ryanair launched a share buyback programme, spending almost €70 million on buying back shares after the airline’s share price slumped earlier this month.
In total the airline has purchased 4 million shares since September 14 at an average price of €16.85 each. These will now be cancelled by the airline.