Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

The main benefit to BA and other non-FR flyers is that through competition Ryanair have drastically reduced the average fares (in real terms) paid by most economy passengers on many routes.

Unfortunately it's a double-edged sword as this has been achieved at the detriment of employment terms and conditions for many BA staff and contributed to the cost-based "enhancements" that continue to impact premium and non-premium travellers.

Basically, whilst O'Leary may not have started the race to the bottom, he's certainly the pace setter.