Ryanair to open maintenance base in Germany

Ryanair announced (20-May-2010) it has selected Frankfurt Hahn Airport as the location for its next maintenance hangar and crew training facility. The LCC plans to invest EUR25 million in the construction of a new two-bay maintenance hangar, including two aircraft simulators and a 16-room cabin-crew training centre. This investment, which has been supported by Frankfurt Hahn Airport and the Rhineland-Palatinate Government, will take Ryanair's jobs at Frankfurt Hahn up to 600. Ryanair will now allocate a substantial proportion of its maintenance requirements to the German facility, available by the end of 2010. The new facility supersedes the offer made to the Irish Government earlier this year for Hangar 6 at Dublin Airport. CEO, Michael O'Leary, criticised the Irish Government for not allowing the base. [more]

Ryanair: "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," Michael O'Leary, CEO. Source: Ryanair, 20-May-2010.