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Ryanair today announced that it had selected Frankfurt Hahn Airport in Germany as the location for its next maintenance hangar and crew training facility. At a press conference in Mainz today, hosted by Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary and Minister for Economics and Transport, Hendrik Hering, Ryanair announced that it would invest €25m in building a new two bay aircraft maintenance hangar including two aircraft simulators and a 16 room cabin crew training centre, in a move which will create up to 200 new Ryanair jobs at Frankfurt Hahn Airport.
This investment which has been supported by Frankfurt Hahn Airport and the Rhineland-Palatinate Government will take Ryanair’s jobs numbers at Frankfurt Hahn up to 600 people. Ryanair said it will now allocate a substantial proportion of its base maintenance requirements to this new German hangar facility which will be available from the end of 2010.
Ryanair said the new facility and jobs will replace those previously offered to the Irish Government earlier this year in the empty Hangar 6 at Dublin Airport. Ryanair said it regrets that even today, many months later, Hangar 6 remains unused for base maintenance, while up to 900 SRT Engineers remain unemployed, drawing the dole. Many of these people could have found skilled, well paid work, with Ryanair, had the Irish Government accepted the airline’s offer to buy or lease Hangar 6 and divert a significant proportion of Ryanair’s base maintenance to Dublin Airport.
In February 2009, Swiss group SR Technics (SRT) announced the closure of its maintenance operations at Dublin Airport with the loss of 1,135 jobs.
It is not credible that Ryanair would have employed many of the former SRT operation which was highly unionised,. It was previously owned by the then State airline, Aer Lingus.
Ryanair had apparently wanted to use Hangar 6 as its new headquarters.
Speaking today in Germany, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said:“While we are pleased to announce this new investment in Germany and Frankfurt Hahn Airport, I regret that the Irish Government stood idly by and did nothing to win these new jobs for Ireland. The Irish Government talks a lot about competitiveness, but is short on action.
“At a time when traffic and tourism is collapsing in Ireland, the Irish Government prefers to impose tourist taxes, and order big increases in Dublin Airport’s fees, rather than work with the world’s largest airline to lower access costs, win investment in maintenance or create hundreds of well paid engineering jobs at Dublin Airport.
“Sadly in Ireland, we are stuck with a Government which likes talking about the “smart economy” but prefers implementing 'dumb policy.' The sooner they reverse these tourist taxes and slash high costs at the Government owned DAA airports, then the sooner Irish airports and tourism can return to low cost access and traffic growth.”
