Ryanair flew their new plane STN - DUB - STN on its first revenue flights today

But it doesn't appear to be scheduled on that route for the rest of this week

Has anybody spotted scheduled on another route out of Stansted ?


independent travel planning: Ryanair Boeing 737 Max 8200 - first revenue flight

EI-HEZ has been flying revenue flights for a week now: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/ei-hez . It would appear that Milan BGY and Dublin DUB are the current MAX destinations.

Ah, so they have EI-HEN and EI-HEZ flying ... just not very much !

I travelled back from Malaga (AGP) to Stansted on Saturday 17th July in EI-HGO - the newest of the fleet. It was probably the best flight I have had on Ryanair. I estimate the load factor to have been about 50% so both the current wife and I had 3 seats to ourselves each. The seats were thinner, but still comfortable for a 2.5 hour flight. Still had the "new plane" smell. The toilet was noticeably smaller and the seatbelt length was exactly the same as on the older model we travelled out on 10 days before. We left a couple of minutes early and landed 20 mins early which was a result. Hardly any queue at STN so, from wheels down to getting in my car was 30 minutes.
What was interesting was the safety card on the seat back - it shows 2 versions of the aircraft - one with 10 exits and one with 8 exits.

Detail of the safety card showing the different exits

It looks like the rearmost doors cannot be used in the event of a water landing.

Yes, that is indeed the difference between the 10 and 8 exit illustrations. The good old MD80ies had something similar.

There are now 6 of the MAX 200 with 4-6 daily flights out of Stansted, but haven't spotted a flight with a new seat map yet. I assume they are not scheduled yet as MAX 200 flights?

One is on the Stansted to Castilian and return route.

Agree . Seat map is not that accurate.

They got 2 more now, so 8 in total from STN.
But the seat maps are still showing 737-800, looks like they are still not selling the extra seats.

Could be if they need to "swap out" a max, then they have to offload pax - costly for FR

They may also need extra FAs to operate the MAX to full loads.

The minimum FA requirements are set by number of seats, not by number of passengers. I can't imagine even on a full flight FR would have more than the absolute minimum legaly required number.

It's by the number of seats filled. I've been on a number of A320 flights with 3 FAs and only 150 seats filled. That's considered to be ok.

Of course it depends on the country, but by EU rules, they would need to apply for an exemption from the rule. Which would need to be short notice sickness of a crew member that could not be replaced, or a similar type of reasons. And while they are pretty standard to get, I can't imagine FR. filing such exemptions without a better reason than we scheduled a bigger plane than planned, or we did not schedule crew for the size of the plane in the first place, as that certainly would be an exemption reasons.

I've flown on EU carriers that have routinely flown with fewer than min number of FAs based on seats (Spanish and Portuguese airlines come to mind).

Did they operate with conversion seats? Back in the day when the J seats could convert from 3-3 to 2--2 that did actually count as a reduction in seating capacity. Which sometimes explained why they did not convert them back a stretch down the economy class on a flight. Most airlines have removed those types of seats for weight reasons though.