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Ryanair has been stripped of two landing slots at Eindhoven Airport after Dutch regulators concluded the airline repeatedly operated certain flights behind schedule, according to a report from the Eindhovens Dagblad.
The decision was issued by Airport Coordination Netherlands (ACNL), the authority responsible for allocating takeoff and landing times at Dutch airports. ACNL determined that Ryanair’s Monday evening service from Sofia and its Thursday evening route from Pisa had shown a pattern of late arrivals. Because of this, the coordinator removed both slots from the carrier’s timetable for the summer season, a measure ACNL is not known to use often.
Ryanair has challenged the ruling, calling it an excessive reaction to delays it says were outside its control. The airline argues that the flights exceeded their scheduled arrival times by only around 15 minutes due to air traffic control setbacks, and claimed that other European airports apply far more lenient standards. The company has taken its complaint to both the European Commission and Dutch courts. ACNL has not publicly responded to the criticism.
The slot removal comes as Ryanair prepares broader cuts across its European network. The airline has announced that it will exit several French airports next summer, citing steep increases in local aviation taxes that it says make operations financially unsustainable. Flights to Bergerac, Brive, and Strasbourg are set to end in July, joining previously announced reductions in Spain, where the carrier plans to remove 1.2 million seats from next summer’s schedule and withdraw completely from Asturias.
Ryanair’s chief commercial officer, Jason McGuinness, has said the French tax hikes, some of which the airline says amount to increases of around 180%, undermine its ability to maintain low-cost services at smaller regional airports. He noted that despite healthy financial results, the company still expects winter losses and therefore plans to reassign aircraft to regions offering lower operating costs, such as parts of Italy that have eliminated their own aviation taxes.
According to McGuinness, France is becoming “less and less” central to the carrier’s future network strategy.
With information from independent.co.uk.
