Ryanair transatlantic flights for $13? Not so fast

Put your wallets back in your pockets, penny pinchers. A report that Irish budget airline Ryanair will soon offer transatlantic flights from Europe to Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere for about $13 plus taxes is looking like a lot of hot air.

The report, carried Sunday by the Irish Examiner newspaper and on an Irish news website and picked up by the BBC, said Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O’Leary would announce details Monday. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, according to the Guardian newspaper and other British news reports, O’Leary said his proposed venture is tentative, unrelated to Ryanair, and in any event wouldn’t start for more than two years.

O’Leary said he first would need to buy 50 to 60 long-haul planes over the the next 18 month. If he succeeded, which he is quoted as calling a “huge if,” the service could start 12 to 18 months after he gets the aircraft.

Props to Budget Travel blogger Sean O’Neill, who after carrying the early Ryanair story, posted an “Oops,” with corrected facts today. That’s more than the Irish news website appears to have done, last time I checked.

— Jane Engle, assistant Los Angeles Times Travel editor

[Photo: Adam Berry / Bloomberg News]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 1:19 pm by Jane Engle and is filed under Airline travel, Business Travel, Europe, Frequent Flier, New York. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.