Ryanair on course for record profits

Ryanair remains on track to land record annual profits, despite facing lower passenger growth and pilot costs of up to 100 million euro (£88 million) following its flight cancellation fiasco.

The budget airline stuck by its full-year profit guidance of between 1.40 billion euro (£1.23 billion) and 1.45 billion euro (£1.28 billion).

But the Dublin-based firm added full-year traffic was now expected to decelerate from 131 million customers to 129 million after it grounded 25 aircraft.

Ryanair has been hit with fierce criticism after 700,000 customers suffered when the airline cancelled 20,000 flights stretching from September 2017 to March next year due to an error over pilot holiday rosters.

This came as Ryanair gave an update on its half-year performance, with pre-tax profits climbing 11% to 1.293 billion euro (£1.139 billion), up from 1.168 billion euro (£1.029 billion) over the period last year.

Shares were up more than 6% to 16.84 euro yesterday.

Chief executive Michael O’Leary said: “These strong H1 results reinforce the robust nature of Ryanair’s low fare, pan-European growth model, even during a period which suffered a material failure in our pilot rostering function in early September.”

The airline forked out 25 million euro (£22 million) to compensate customers.