Ryanair slashes Derry-London services

Ryanair is halving its daily service between City of Derry airport and London, and warned tonight it may scrap it altogether.

The Irish airline said it would only operate one evening return flight to Stansted from October.

The scheduling decision has been taken because Ryanair is changing its fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft to bigger planes which will be unable to land at Derry because the runway is not long enough.

The airline said Derry City Council, which owns the airport, had been aware of the situation for more than two and a half years .

The council has been considering extending the runway – involving the demolition of a number of homes – but has as yet come to no decision.

Ryanair is the airport’s largest customer, carrying 160,000 passengers a year on the route to Stansted.

That total will fall to an annual 80,000 following the reduction of flights and Ryanair said if there is no resolution to the runway length problem by the spring it will end services completely.

A spokesman said: “We are not abandoning them and are going out of our way to keep the single return flight a day.

“But the airport knows the situation and the clock is ticking”.

The airline is upgrading from the older Boeing 737 200 series to the larger 800 series which has 40 seats more and needs more runway to land.

The older aircraft are being moved to services operating out of Dublin and Ryanair warned that retaining one of the craft of the Derry route was only a stop-gap measure until the council made a decision about whether or not to lengthen the runway.