Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 6th of February.

Michael O'Leary has been chief executive of Ryanair since 1994, and over the past three decades,

he's taken the carrier from a small and unprofitable regional airline to the biggest in Europe in

terms of passenger numbers. Ryanair is also the safest airline in the world in terms of the

number of passengers flown without a fatal accident. I've been talking to the airline boss

about a range of topics plans for Ukraine when the skies

reopened to passenger flights. The outlook for this coming summer and whether Ryanair will

be ordering any of the new boom overture supersonic jets following a successful test flight.

But I started by picking up on the comments

by the boss of EasyJet that his airline could move in at scale to Heathrow when the airport's

third runway is ready. I wondered, will Ryanair follow suit? They won't be around in 2040 or 2050 when the third runway, if it ever opens, actually opens. The third runway at Heathrow is a dead cat. Rachel Reeves knows it's rubbish. It will never get delivered, but even if it does, it's 15 or 25 years away. Rachel Reeves needs a much more immediate growth plan. We've given her that growth plan I wrote for an early December saying if you really want growth in aviation and tourism in the UK scrap APD, cost is only four million a year. It would be paid for by the millions of new visitors that would come here to the UK and we're waiting for action on that. If she's serious about growth, then scrap APD, but stop trying to distract everybody with a dead cat of a third runway at Heathrow. Will you be going back into Gatwick at a bigger size if they get more space? I think we're talking to both Gathwick and Stansett and Lut about growth. The problem is at the moment we're not willing to put any more aircraft into the UK while Rachel Rees is increasing travel tax from 13 to 15 quid a ticket. Our average ticket price is 45 quid. So, you know, the tax rate is now one-third of the ticket price is her stupid travel taxes. So we're not growing in the UK. Nobody else is growing in the UK. UK aviation, UK tourism is not growing because we are being stifled by Rachel Reeves's stupid and idiotic tax increases. Let's just look at a couple of other

issues. Boarding passes. You want to get rid of the paper boarding passes? Yeah, we're up to about

75% of pastures now using mobile or digital boarding passes. We want to move that to 100% by May

of this year. It will eliminate, I think, forever the risk of people having to pay a boarding card

reissue free at the airport because they forgot to produce their boarding card.

And I think passengers are increasingly moving to smartphones online and we want to automate the whole process.

Ukraine, you've said we're going to have aircraft in within six weeks of the skies opening.

How on earth are you going to do that?

We have a plan to pivot about 25 of our aircraft at bases all over Europe. So an aircraft in Stansted in Dublin, in Brussels,

in Milan. And we will cancel a route, say, from Stansted to the Canaries. And we'll send that

aircraft instead to Leviv or Kiev. We have about 14 million Ukrainians dispersed all over

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