Mr. Michael O'Leary:

It is because it is a different business. There are two fundamentals that make Ryanair very difficult to compete with in short-haul traffic, and one is 25-minute turnarounds. We do a 25-minute turnaround when Aer Lingus at Heathrow would do about an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. If we do a 25-minute turnaround on six one-hour flights, we save three hours and we do two extra flights per day per aircraft, with the same aircraft and the same crew. On six flights, that makes us 33% more efficient, or on eight flights 25% more efficient than everybody else.

The other one is that on short-haul, whether in North America or Europe, premium business traffic is gone. Nobody will pay a premium. Nobody does business class anymore. When I first started flying 30 years ago, the rich businesspeople would be on the Aer Lingus red-eye to Heathrow, quaffing champagne in a business lounge in Dublin Airport. Businesspeople now want to get on the plane, get the hell out of there and go. Nobody will pay, so business class has disappeared on short-haul flights in North America and in Europe. We see that with Aer Lingus as well as with us. Long-haul is different for two reasons. First, it does not matter if we turn the plane around in 25 minutes or three hours; we are still only doing two flights per day per aircraft. Second, 20% of that marketplace will pay an enormous premium for business class or first class on transatlantic flights, and they want flat beds and so on. They will pay ridiculous premiums. The transatlantic airlines can sell all of the economy seats free if they want to and the premium business would still pay for that business.