Aer Lingus unlikely to reintroduce Cork-Dublin route, says CEO

Aer Lingus has no plans to reintroduce its Cork-Dublin service and it is likely thatthe service will never be reintroduced, chief executive Christoph Mueller told Cork’s business community yesterday.

Addressing the Cork Chamber Business Breakfast, in association with the Irish Examiner, Mr Mueller was asked about the future of the Cork-Dublin route.

“We would consider it, if we could make money with that,” Mr Mueller said.

He recounted that when the TGV started running the 270km from Brussels to Paris, — 2 hours and 15 minutes by road, similar to Cork-Dublin — Aer France and Sabena stopped flying the route at the same time and it has never been reintroduced.

“Economically it does not make sense to reintroduce that route, and it’s similar with Galway, and these routes will most likely never be reintroduced,” he said.

Mr Mueller apologised to customers of Aer Lingus Regional, operated by Aer Arann on behalf of Aer Lingus, for some punctuality problems. He explained that this resulted from tightening schedules after Aer Arann lost an aircraft in Shannon due to a collapse of nose gear and Aer Lingus opted not to cut services there.

Mr Mueller said Aer Arann was very important to them, enabling them to serve locations in Britain multiple times a day, allowing people to fly out and return on the same day.

“Routes that we use Aer Arann on are supposed to switch over to the main line at some point. That is classically the business model, that you would use your regional carrier to ramp up the route to build a critical mass. We have that situation already in Edinburgh,” he said.

“You can expect, as we go forward, all dependant on the economy, that more and more routes currently on regional will be replaced by Aer Lingus 320 aircraft and we will move regional to the Leeds, to East Midland type of development,” he added.