“That’s enough for us to see families returning to the beach of Europe during the summer in June, July, August and September.”
O’Leary’s television appearance followed the news this morning that Ryanair reported a Q3 loss of €306million.
The airline said in a statement: “COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc across the industry. Christmas and New Year traffic was severely impacted by UK travel bans imposed at short notice by many EU Governments on December 19 and 20.
“These flight bans, and travel restrictions, saw the Group’s December traffic fall by 83 percent to just 1.9m passengers.
“As announced on January 7, Ryanair expects the latest lockdowns and pre-arrival Covid test requirement to materially reduce flight schedules and traffic through to Easter.
“The Group’s full-year (FY21) traffic forecast was therefore reduced to ‘between 26m to 30m’ passengers.”
More to follow…