Yes, this is a post about Italy, but believe it or not, Alitalia isn’t the main focus. It’s the bungling Italian government that has caught my eye once again for their plans to help Alitalia and kick low cost carriers to the far corners of the Rome metro area. If your flag carrier can’t win through competition, might as well play dirty and help them out, right? Sheesh.

I don’t speak Italian, so my understanding of the situation relies on Google Translate and a Ryanair press release. Here’s what seems to be happening.

Noise has been a sensitive issue for those living around Ciampino airport, a mere 10 miles from central Rome. The airport had been growing with Ryanair and EasyJet having substantial operations along with smaller operations from Wizz and, apparently, an airline called Romavia (which still flies a 707?!). Alitalia and pretty much everyone else fly from Leonardo da Vinci Airport at Fiumicino, about 25 miles from the city center.

The region’s government decided to turn Viterbo, an old military base about 60 miles north of the city into the third airport for the area. Just to get an idea for how far out this place is, take a look at this map:

If they want a third airport, that’s there own business, but now all the noise complaints caused them to run a study. According to Ryanair, the results prove that there isn’t a huge noise issue, but the region’s government is still looking to shrink or shut the airport anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me.

Raise your hand if you know who would get the biggest benefit by having Ryanair and EasyJet move to the far away Viterbo airport. That’s right, it’s our good friends at Alitalia.

If anyone knows more about this story AND speaks English, hit the comments. By the way, if you just want to complain about the noise around the airport, don’t bother. That airport is one of the oldest in the world – it’s been there since 1916 – so you knew what was there when you moved in.

It’s amazing how much traction a false story can get. Last night, it was supposedly leaked that Ryanair would announce in its earnings call today that it would begin transatlantic flights very soon. Today, it was proven that the rumor wasn’t true . . . yet.

Michael O’Leary has been quite vocal in the past in saying that it would happen (remember beds and blowjobs?), but he reiterated today that the time is not yet right. He’s waiting for it to become easy to get airplanes for cheap on the used market. Once that happens, he’ll start it up.

Listen to the BBC interview with Michael O’Leary for details.

I swear, I’m going to have to change the name of this blog to Cranky Mythbusters, because there is just so much ridiculous stuff flying around the media right now. Once again, it’s my favorite whipping boy, the AP. This time, the title of the report is “Mid-air panic as plane plunges 26,000 feet.” Will someone please put a muzzle on these guys?

The story is this. A Ryanair flight was traveling from Bristol in the UK to Girona (outside Barcelona). It lost pressure at altitude and quickly descended in order to get to an altitude with breathable air, 8,000 feet. Then the plane diverted to Limoges, the nearest airport.

The AP article would make you believe that the plane plunged 26,000 feet as a result of the depressurization, but that’s absolutely ridiculous. The plane quickly descended because that’s how pilots are supposed to respond when the plane depressurizes.

See, those oxygen masks are attached to tanks that don’t have a ton of oxygen in them. They’re basically there to tide you over for a few minutes until you can get down to a level where you can breathe on your own. So as soon as a plane loses pressure, the pilots purposefully go into a steep descent to make sure that you don’t run out of oxygen. (The pilots, by the way, have more oxygen available for themselves.)

So the AP goes out there and hears the cries of terror from passengers and decides to pounce on it. The passengers were freaking out because, well, they were descending very quickly, and the pilots didn’t come on right away to say anything. You know why? The pilots were too busy actually trying to keep them from running out of air! Once the plane was stabilized at a lower altitude, they were able to come on and talk about what was happening, but priority number one is to get everyone to safety. Then they talk to the passengers.

If you’d like to learn more, I recommend going to this highly respectable report from the BBC that describes aircraft depressurization in much more detail. Kudos to them for actually reporting correctly on this. As for the AP, just ignore them.

Nobody has ever accused Ryanair of being a “nice” airline. On time? Yep. Cheap? Oh yeah. But if you’re looking for more than that, you’re in the wrong place. That’s why it’s no surprise that Ryanair is starting to crack down on how people buy tickets on the airline. To make sure you don’t get caught in the crossfire, if you fly these guys, you’ll want to book direct at ryanair.com.

So what exactly is going on here? I must admit, I had no idea this type of problem even existed. Companies can’t just start selling tickets on an airline unless they have access to the airline’s schedule, fares, and availability. When airlines participate in distribution systems like Sabre and Worldspan, travel agents all over gain access to that. When it comes to selling on the web, the big sellers will tend to have deals with the airlines directly that allow them to make more money from a sale as well.

Ryanair isn’t a fan of these things, so it doesn’t participate. The airline isn’t alone here. Airlines like Southwest have long shunned these distribution systems because it costs money. Southwest has recently begun playing more and more in the systems in order to get the business traveler, but you still won’t see them on any consumer-facing sites. Ryanair, as far as I can tell, doesn’t play with anyone and has really clamped down since they told everyone to stop selling their tickets back in May.

So I was surprised when I saw the news that Ryanair announced it would be canceling reservations that were booked on third party sites against their will. I couldn’t figure out how this was happening, but I think I get it now.

Some websites out there were scraping fare and availability info from the Ryanair website and then selling the tickets via their own interface. I have to assume this meant that they were just automatically making the bookings via Ryanair.com and then charging the passengers extra for it. Back in May, Ryanair told them to knock it off, and the bigger guys did. Some of them continued, and now Ryanair says it will cancel bookings made through those sites.

So, if you’re heading over to Europe and you want to fly Ryanair, you should really book direct. Or, if you just want to fly on those routes and you don’t care who it’s on, you should definitely shop around. The online travel agents are trying to fight Ryanair by giving good deals elsewhere. Check out CheapOair, for example. They’re offering 15% $15 off flights on routes that Ryanair flies as long as you fly on a DIFFERENT airline on that same route. It’s true that there aren’t many airlines that fly to Ryanair’s remote airport locations, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any overlap.

As far as I’m concerned, Ryanair has the right to do whatever they want with their own inventory. If they don’t want anyone else selling it, so be it. But as a consumer, I’d be happy to take advantage of the deals that seem to be popping up because of this spat. Do your homework, but if you choose Ryanair, make sure to book on their website so you don’t find yourself in trouble.

Edited @ 742a on 8/19 to change CheapOair discount from 15% to $15.

I thought about writing about more cuts that were announced by Frontier, Northwest, and Delta, but really, aren’t you getting tired of this? Click the links above if your answer is “no.” Otherwise, keep reading for a little bit of escapism to end the week.

It’s been a long time since I wrote a book report. I mean, throughout school it usually meant finding a way to write paper after paper on books that absolutely drove me insane. It’s safe to say that I haven’t fully recovered from “Ethan Frome.” Of course, this time around it’s a different story. I’m writing about a book about airplanes, well mostly about airplanes, so that’s a good start. This time, I’m writing about “Ruinar: How to be Treated Like Shite in 15 Different Countries . . . and Still Quite Like It.”

The title had me interested right away. That and the pretty airplane on the cover. So when the author offered to send me a copy, I was more than happy to dive in. It arrived and the first thing that caught my eye was the big red sticker on the front saying, “Only €0.01* – *price excludes fees and charges of €12.98 (full price €12.99)” I love it. The author clearly knows Ryanair well.

So what did I think? It was a fun read without question, but there were a couple of things that seemed to be thrown in just to fill up space and other parts that didn’t seem to fit at all. Overall, it’s a worthwhile read if you’re looking for something light (mostly) with a dry and witty humor.

The premise was simple enough. The author had a bad flight on Ryanair back in the day, and he paid €300 for the privilege. So, he decided to try to fly to every single country in the EU with a couple others thrown in (not counting recent Eastern Europe additions) for the same price and tell his story. You might think (and hope) that the book would focus more on his flying experience, but it seems to be more of a hybrid. While he talks about the flights, he spends an equal or greater amount of time talking about his experiences in the countries themselves. In those chapters that focus on his flying and traveling experiences, the book works quite well.

Possibly the only thing that really bothered me was the intentional misspelling of airline names (Ruinair, EZjet, etc) throughout the book. I’m not quite sure why he had to do it, maybe he was afraid of a lawsuit or maybe there are some funky EU laws that made him change them, but it seemed rather odd to me. He also seems to be a little dusty on his facts sometimes, especially regarding Southwest Airlines. He mentions that Southwest requires you to pay for food and drink (uh, no) and that Southwest doesn’t compete with other airlines, just train transportation. Sounds to me like he picked up a book about Southwest from 1985 and has missed the fairly significant changes since then.

But those are nits, because they are not central to the book. The author’s snarky and dry sense of humor worked well. (“In the recently upgraded Galleria lounge a glorious Bentley GT is parked centre stage. . . . ‘Would you like a car like this?’ he asks. Talk about asking a bleeding obvious question. It’s £200,000 plus. ‘Nah, I already have one.’”)

And yes, it even works when he’s taking his potshots at Americans. For example, “Only 20 per cent of Americans possess passports so we must be grateful for small mercies . . . .” Oh but don’t worry, he’s an equal opportunity insulter. “Greeks are dark, short, stocky, squat and hirsute. And that’s the ladies.”

A warning for those of you like me who are not very familiar with Irish pop culture: he has plenty of references that leave me running to Google to figure out what he’s saying. “Much like the duck at Fawlty Towers I suspect one can have tripe with orange sauce, tripe with cherry sauce, or tripe surprise.” Now, I’ve heard of Fawlty Towers, but that’s about as far as my knowledge goes. Jokes like this are completely lost on me, but it’s easy to read beyond them.

As I said, when he’s writing the chapters on his country trips, it’s really a fun read. Yes, there are some helpful travel tips, “Never eat in a restaurant with a multilingual menu. Never eat in a restaurant with pictures of the food on the place mats. . . .” I couldn’t agree more. He also apparently shares my love of Mars bars (the European kind without nuts, not the second class US version), but there are a couple of times he strays into oddly serious territory. His chapter on the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the horrors of the holocaust seemed out of place with its humorless (obviously) and dark tone. It didn’t belong in this book.

Toward the end, it seemed like the author had a set number of pages to fill but ran out of content. There are a good 25 pages of material copied straight from the internet. Online reviews of the airline at Skytrax, a note from the PPrune board, and an excruciatingly-painful description of a video on YouTube left me skipping further to find more of what I couldn’t find for free online.

In the end, I enjoyed the read. The author certainly has a love-hate relationship with Ryanair, and it’s one that I think many people feel all over Europe. The airline will get you there cheaply and mostly on-time, but when things go wrong, it can be an ugly experience if you’re not prepared for it. It’s worth picking up a copy.