Dispatches is Channel 4's award-winning investigative current affairs programme:
Reporter Seyi Rhodes hears from pilots of Europe's biggest airline about their concerns around passenger safety. Serving Ryanair pilots reveal their worries over Ryanair's fuel policy and pilot working conditions. Rhodes also examines the events of one evening in 2012 when three diverted Ryanair planes radioed 'mayday' over an airport in Valencia in Spain.

And a Guardian article: We love to moan. But with Ryanair, what do you expect?, Marina Hyde

Watched the program, the only thing of news was the table of how the captains performed in relation to fuel consumption, the rest was Ryanair playing the fuel rules as close to the legal requirements as is possible. What else was to be expected.

Just another bit of Ryann Air bashing... sure policies are generally aimed at cutting costs and increasing revenues, but who can really blame them for following the legal minimums as a standard policy. Pilots always have the final say and can increase fuel loads when they feel the need. And those legal requirements also account for the expected circumstances for a flight, it's hardly a set fuel load.

And the policies seem to be working, no accidents and profitable.

These "investigative current affairs programmes" would be a lot more credible if they would include the percentage of flights (or flights to a specific airport) that have "low fuel reserves on landing, compared to other airlines. Might be revealing in showing that all have to divert once in a while.

I for one would be interested to know if Ryann Air scores significantly different compared to the others... or that it's mostly they pay their pilots and other staff less than the others, causing some resentment.

The Guardian article is overall positive.

If you pay less for something - you don't get the best. So is it not logical that if Ryan Air pay less to pilot, they will have a higher percentage of less experienced ones? It therefore follows accidents may be higher, or when the stuff hits the fan, the out come might be worse?

"Legal minimums" are that for a reason. They take into account broad considerations and assure that safety concerns are met. A diversion isn't unsafe, it's just a nuisance delay.

This becomes a balance. People who want cheap travel from A-B can have it and people who want to be coddled and less inconvenienced can purchase that on another carrier.

Same thing as car service vs. bus. Nobody complains that the bus driver doesn't wait for you.

RyanAir is still a safe airline, whether they give their pilots strict limits on fuelling or not there has not been one FR flight that has run out of fuel.

The way this way explained to me (by a RAF fuels specialist) was that at the point that an aircraft is coming in to land at its intended destination, even if the flight has been bumped up the landing list due to a fuel shortage on board, it will still have enough fuel left to abort the landing and re-route to another airport under emergency circumstances unless they have already been redirected or there is exceptionally bad and totally unforeseen weather.

in theory

True. In theory, Asiana is a safe airline though, and people only raised questions about their safety after the SFO crash, whereas a lot of people seem to be doing that to FR in advance of anything actually happening.

Don't get me wrong, I'll fight tooth and nail to not travel with FR, but that's about product quality rather than safety.

Quite frankly it looked a lot like sigling out by a British national broadcaster. There was not a recently broadcast report on the UKs low cost carrier EasyJet or BA, which has a far worse safety record.

I do understand that Ryanair pilots are not paid very generously and it is easy to see that some may be unhappy after paying so much to become qualified. But making a documentary about an airline following EU regulations is quite absurd.

The "legal minimum" is not an unsafe amount. A margin for error is built in. Michael O'Leary has repeatedly been quoted as saying that their own requirements exceed the legal minimum, and pilots have discretion to load additional fuel on top of that. With only 3 fuel incidents, all on the same day, all in the same area, due to severe weather in the area, and these being the only fuel incidents across more than a half-million flights, I don't think that there is any endemic safety issue. Ryanair is the airline regulatory agencies love to hate; if they were doing anything unsafely, I think they'd be called on the carpet quickly.

^ MOL knows all this. No objective data supports the assertion that FR is less safe than other airlines.

I'd say, quite the reverse. FR haven't had fatalities in scheduled pax operation over the past 20 years. Many other EU airlines have e.g. AZ.

If we want to investigate carriers pushing the margins, but remaining within the strict legal boundaries, what about BA operating their OEI 744 across the Atlantic and ultimately diverting to MAN?

and the sad thing is, if FR has one single accident, for whatever reason, they will statistically still be doing very well yet they well get ten times more bad attention and news coverage from press and the public just cause its them..