The service, which is being operated by the newly established airline Ryanair, is aimed a businessman, willing to pay £198 with time, as against the £210 for what Ryanair says is the equivalent type ticket offered by the major airlines on the Dublin London Run.

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

It's Tuesday the 8th of July, and that's part of a news report by the Irish broadcaster

RTE from the 8th of July, 1985, from Waterford in Southeast Ireland.

A new airline Ryanair had just launched a route to London Capwick using a 15-seat Brazilian-made Bandaranti aircraft.

The lead in fare, 99 pounds each way, sounds preposterously expensive by today's standard.

But as the report said, it was actually lower than the cost of a ticket from Dublin to London on

Aer Lingus or British Airways. Within a year, Ryanair was allowed to compete between the Irish and British capitals

and used a couple of bigger planes for the route from Dublin to Luton Airport.

But as the airline expanded, it just lost more money.

By 1989, investors were down 20 million pounds. A young accountant named Michael O'Leary had just joined Ryanair, which at the time looked as though it just needed to be put out of its misery. In a last-ditch effort to stave off closure, Mr O'Leary travelled to Love Field in Dallas, Texas,

the home of South West, a young and thriving low-cost airline that was transforming aviation

in America. The visionary in charge, Herb Keleherher was happy to share in the secret of his success,

not chasing after more established rivals, but cutting costs and fares to entice an entirely new

market to take to the skies. As you will have spotted, Ryanair did not close down ignominiously.

Today, it's Europe's biggest budget airline, and Waterford is one of the few airports the carrier

doesn't serve.

Over the past decades, Ryanair has attracted plenty of controversy,

partly because of the controversial Mr O'Leary.

I've been fortunate enough to interview him many times over the past quarter century, but for today's podcast I wanted to pick just one conversation,

which happened to be just before the COVID pandemic took hold in 2020.

Much has changed since then, but as you'll hear, the chief executive's view of aviation and

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