April 13, 2007 – LOW-COST carrier Ryanair is planning to take another shot at raising revenue from IFE following an ill-conceived attempt to introduce handheld players on its European network.

The Dublin-based airline briefly offered digEcor digEplayer handhelds on its existing network a couple of years, only to find that flight durations allowed too little time for cabin staff to issue and retrieve the devices and for passengers to watch anything worthwhile. That should not be a problem on Ryanair’s new transatlantic operation, announced yesterday.

Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary told Flight International that the move had been prompted by the recent Open Skies agreement, which will allow airlines to operate transatlantic flights without individual national bilateral deals from next year. Promising a cheapest fare of $12, O’Leary said his company would serve secondary airports such as Baltimore, Providence (Rhode Island) and Long Island (New York), making a large part of its revenues from sales of food, drink, duty-free goods and IFE. The new operation would also have a premium class pitched against the offerings of carriers like Virgin Atlantic.

O’Leary expects to launch around the turn of the decade, ultimately using a fleet of up to 50 Airbus A350s or Boeing 787s to serve five or six US cities from its 23 European bases.

The new airline will be run entirely separately from Ryanair, with its own executives and board and a different name, O’Leary said. There would be no cross-ticketing or connecting luggage. Running the long-haul operation as a subsidiary “would be a distraction for Ryanair,” he declared. “The minute you put a long-haul business on top of a short-haul operation you kill it.”