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I caught my first Ryanair flight, heading down from Edinburgh to London, and holy shit.
I didn't have very high expectations (and I think I got scammed by paying for extra baggage), but the experience was abysmal.
The initial point of failure was informational. Upon checking in online, the website presented me with a series of warnings, escalating in their shade of digital red, that as a non-EU citizen (despite possessing a UK residency permit, a distinction the system seemed unable to parse), a printed, physical boarding pass was a non-negotiable requirement. Failure to produce one at the airport, it was implied, would result in some combination of fines, exile, or possibly being sacrificed to the god of baggage fees.
This sent me on a quest through the Edinburgh airport for a Ryanair helpdesk, a quest which revealed that the designated helpdesk was less a "desk with helpful people" and more a "suggestion of a desk, currently unburdened by the presence of staff." (This is presuming someone's half eaten lunch doesn't count). The system, it seemed, had a single point of failure, and had failed.
An airport assistance employee who, taking pity, escorted me through a staff channel to a hidden check-in line. Here, the ground-truth epistemology contradicted the website's stated doctrine: no, of course I didn't need a physical pass. The dire warnings were, apparently, just a sort of generalized, non-binding advisory. This was my first lesson: the Ryanair informational layer operates on a different plane of reality from its physical one.
It only got worse. After getting to the terminal, I found myself boarding a perfectly normal airport bus. Tad bit crowded, when I got there, but no biggie.
And then people kept coming. And then more showed up. The bus showed no signs of readying for departure. Yet more people kept being shoved in, and you can tell that even the legendary British tolerance for minor inconveniences was taxed beyond its limit. We were semi-apologetically informed that there was only one bus operational today, which didn't really make things better.
People were loudly asking if they couldn't just walk to the plane, others made comparisons to being sardines in a can, and I added my own take by simply questioning why they didn't just do two trips if they had one bus?
Why didn’t they? One might hypothesize that the marginal cost of a second five-minute bus journey (fuel, driver time) was calculated to be greater than the cumulative disutility experienced by 180 passengers compressed into a human brick for thirty minutes. Or perhaps it's a form of signaling: you wanted the cheapest flight, and this is what The Cheapest Flight feels like. You are not a customer to be courted; you are a parcel to be shipped, and parcels do not have preferences about packing density.
Eventually, the boarding staff ceased their efforts, which had begun to resemble viral videos of shinkansen "pushers" in Tokyo, though with less efficiency and more audible sighing. Whether this was due to hitting a hard physical limit or a soft limit on potential passenger revolt remains an open question. The ten-minute journey to the plane was a miasma of condensation and shared misery, followed by another ten minutes of waiting in the poorly ventilated bus at the foot of the stairs before we were permitted to ascend.
The aircraft itself was a masterclass in apophatic design. An angry wasp, and just about as comfortable to ride. It was defined not by what it had, but by what it had aggressively stripped away. The cabin was a symphony in hostile shades of yellow and blue, a color palette that seems optimized to discourage any sense of calm or well-being. The seats, clad in a thin, sweat-inducing pleather, were clearly selected for ease of cleaning over any consideration for human comfort. The legroom was a theoretical concept, not that the seats could recline and take any more of it away.
I had paid a non-trivial fee to place my modest backpack in an overhead bin, a transaction that now felt like a failure of game theory on my part. Observing the general chaos and the apparent lack of rigorous enforcement, I suspect the Nash equilibrium for a frequent Ryanair traveler is to simply ignore the ancillary charges and bank on the operational entropy being on your side. The airline is running a tax on the risk-averse. They won't pull the same trick on me again, I promise you that much.
This flight can't leave soon enough, but now I half expect them to charge me if I use the toilets in-flight.*
(I promise you that even the most budget airlines in India don't cut as many corners. It's frankly quite impressive.)
*I fucking knew it. Their CEO had actually floated the idea of coin-operated toilets a while back, but was stymied by airline regulations. I'm no longer a minarchist or libertarian.
Michael O'Leary is famous for playing the media machine like a fiddle, making outrageous announcements for Ryanair's latest cost-cutting measure which he has no intention of enacting but which get the company's name in the papers for a press cycle.
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