TV review: Turbulence an excellent look at the drama of Irish aviation
Turbulence The Story of Ryanair on RTÉ One & RTÉ Player
They read out a letter from Michael O’Leary on (RTÉ One & RTÉ Player). It’s addressed to the makers of this excellent two-part documentary on Ryanair, politely declining to take part with the acerbic observation that an examination of Ryanair’s role in a changing 1990s Ireland would be an exercise in navel-gazing.
Luckily you don’t miss O’Leary much here, because there is no shortage of clips where he says thing like “the customer is nearly always wrong”.
That said, you do miss him for the first 30 minutes, when the airline was in its polite phase. This is where they tried to take on Aer Lingus in the mid-’80s with a single business-focused flight from Waterford to Gatwick. It was brave and doomed to failure. At which point, founder Tony Ryan brought in a young tax accountant called Michael O’Leary. From then on, it was denim all the way.
O’Leary insisted the only way to succeed was to strip out every cost possible and take on Aer Lingus as the budget airline that didn’t dress up just to go to the airport.
Turbulence is brilliant here on the changing norms in Ireland. The shackles were coming off in a country where, as one contributor noted, people used to put on their Sunday best and drive out to Dublin airport to watch rich people getting on their flights.
Ryanair played to this. It felt like they were flying people to a piss-up while Aer Lingus were bringing people to work. Ryanair was fun, unless something went wrong of course, and it was tricky getting a refund.
That’s reflected in Michael O’Leary. He’s very funny unless you’re the object of the joke. A senior manager recalls the Monday morning meetings in Ryanair, likening it to wildebeest at a watering hole, with one of them getting savaged by a crocodile (O’Leary) while the others sauntered off glad it wasn’t them.
A documentary always has a view, and this one likes the airline in blue. Poor Aer Lingus comes across as a pearl-clutching aunt. When Ryanair launched a flight to Beauvais and called it Paris, Aer Lingus took out snotty newspaper ads offering to take you to Charles de Gaulle if you paid a bit more. As a former Ryanair manager noted, it just advertised their cheap flights to Paris.
Bertie Ahern crops up because you can’t have a documentary about 1990s Ireland without Bertie. He acidly notes the similarities between O’Leary and Donald Trump, spitting out that “Trump got elected by being an arrogant little brat”. Yeah, but O’Leary is our brat. And we love the cheap flights. Give this a watch.
