Discount airline Ryanair continues to wage war on dignity and comfort with a plan to remove all but one of the toilets from its aircraft, leaving 200+ people to share one bog:
The prospect of only one toilet being shared by 195 passengers and six crew caused alarmed in the travel industry. A spokesman for Abta, the travel association, said “We all know how inconvenient it can be if a toilet on a plane is out of order or the annoyance of queuing if someone has air sickness in one of the cubicles. This move could be a step too far in Ryanair’s on-going mission to provide a totally no-frills service.”
But the aviation consultant John Strickland said the soaring cost of oil could accelerate the process: “High fuel prices are making it difficult for even Ryanair to keep fares low, so anything which helps them to reduce costs is essential. Having six more seats on the aircraft would not require more cabin crew and would reduce cost per seat.”
I'm not surprised — after all, this is the airline that once threatened to have me arrested for getting up for a pee after we'd been sitting on the tarmac for 45 minutes and were still 20 minutes away from takeoff. Clearly this is an airline that wants to master the process of elimination, by eliminating it.
(via Consumerist)
(Image: ryanair, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jayfresh's photostream)
