Mr. Michael O'Leary:

It is because there is a reluctance among the Commission and individual governments which do not want to upset the French and the French do not want to upset the French unions, etc. Our citizens and visitors are being completely screwed over while a bunch of French air traffic controllers go on strike. We fully respect their right to go on strike, but the French should take the hit. The Irish, Germans, Italians and Spanish who are not travelling to France should not take the hit. Second, Eurocontrol needs to separate the upper airspace from the lower airspace. The upper airspace is above 25,000 ft. An aeroplane at that height can fly direct and there is no need to zigzag. If I want to go to London, it infuriates me that I need to zigzag north of the Welsh hills and down to Bristol. An aeroplane going to Greece must fly across 18 different countries. It is zigzagging so they all get a fee. I want to go straight. The technology now exists. We inherited this system in the 1950s when aeroplanes did not have radar. They were flying through clouds and could not see where they were going. They now all have collision-avoidance systems and the infrastructure is there. Irish air traffic control could run most of Europe's overflight system on its own. We need to separate the upper airspace and allow that to be run by Eurocontrol.

While this might be impossible, the third element would be to abandon the single European sky. The single European sky, SES, has been one of the great European disaster movies of all time. It has been such a spectacular horror show that they have made a sequel, called SES2, which will be just as unsuccessful as SES1 which achieved nothing at all.