This Will Not Stand

Ryanair is the Al Sharpton of airlines. Any possible chance to get publicity, Ryanair is on the scene.

Today there's another breathless story from Ryanair, in a British newspaper, the Mail. It quotes Ryanair's founder Michael O'Leary, a master of PR who recently got tons of publicity saying he was considering putting pay toilets onto the low-cost European carrier's fleet, as now saying Ryanair is thinking about having standing-room-only passengers.

Trust me, this idea ain't flying. Ever. It's a stunt.

Reminds me that some years ago, a gullible reporter in the U.S. managed to stir up a squall of publicity with his exclusive report -- which remains exclusive to this day -- that Airbus was planning to have a "standing-room-only" section on its (still undelivered at the time) A380 superjumbo jets. Turns out the reporter-with-the-scoop had based his half-baked reporting on pie-in-the-sky schematics Airbus engineers had played with and quickly abandoned, and which someone slipped him. The rest of us, including Boeing engineers, had quite a belly-laugh with that.

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