Ryanair Executives will eat your children

Category : Mobile Phone Gossip
Date Published : September 28, 2008

…and charge you £5 per kilo for the pleasure.

Arguably the world’s least enjoyable experience might be getting even worse as more details have emerged of Ryanair’s plan to let you make mobile phone calls from onboard.

Rather than making you keep your mobile phones turned off for the duration of your time spent in yellow and blue hell, provided you are willing to stump up £2 per minute and there are no more than five other fools doing likewise, then you can chat on your mobile phone to your hearts content as you wing your way to an ex-military airbase 5000 miles from your ultimate destination.

Because basically (according to the Guardian) the rules are going to be as follows:

…only six people can use their phones at a time, but anyone can text or use their Blackberry. At first the service will be on 14 of the 166 aircraft, but within six months if the trial is successful it will be rolled out to the rest of the fleet.

Calls are predicted to cost about £2 a minute and the airline will get a slice from each text, email or call.

£2 a minute? How could anyone who is flying on a Ryanair flight (and thus is not particularly important otherwise they’d be getting shuttled about by an airline that does business class, or at least doesn’t have a permanent two for one offer on spirits*) find a reason to make a call that could litterally cost the same as a month’s worth of land-based calls if the conversation runs to more than “I’m on a plane”…

Do you want 400 or 600 B&H from the Duty Free, pet?

400, alright. Anything else?

Are you sure… right oh. And does our Derek want a bottle of something?

[Derek....]

A bottle of scotch…. Oh heck, need to go love, I’ve spent all me holiday money on this call….

Basically, it would seem that the brave new model of Ryanair budget flying is is to lose money on the seat, and hope that the flight is stuffed full of folks that get drunk enough on the two-for-one booze to spend a small fortune on the million euro scratch cards and calling their pals (cause they can).

Which, based on my frequent experience (*see, it takes on to know one) of Ryanair flying, seems to be working out pretty well for them despite all the financial woes currently being suffered by other, less in-your-face, airlines.

So if you can’t wait to make some of the most expensive mobile phone calls of your life, best get on to the Ryanair website and snap up one of those amazingly cheap flights for 1p (+£15 taxes, £6 booking fee, £3 credit card fee, £24 baggage fee, £6 check in fee, £6 priority boarding… etc, etc).

As for the impact calling will have on the in-flight ambiance, Ryanair spokesperson, Evil O’Killer, said: