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Ryanair (RYAAY-0.24%) CEO Michael O’Leary is back to bashing Boeing (BA+0.04%) once again. The outspoken airline executive said that delivery delays from America’s largest planemaker are threatening to wreck a second summer in a row for the carrier.
“We were supposed to get 20 deliveries before the end of December,” O’Leary said in an interview with Reuters. “They’ll probably come now in January and February, and that’s fine. We’ll have them in time for next summer. The big issue for Ryanair is we’re due 30 aircraft in March, April, May and June of next year, and how many of those will we get?”
Should the delays persist, it would be the second consecutive vacation travel season where Ryanair has faced capacity constraints tied to a lack of planes. O’Leary has been chiding Boeing for its difficulties putting planes in Ryanair hangars for years, but ever since a door plug fell off a Boeing 737 Max 9 in Jaunary, the company hasn’t been able to produce as quickly as it did before (by federal mandate). And that was before a machinist strike halted whatever production was managing to get done.
Things got so bad earlier this year that Ryanair decided to spend $873 million on stock buybacks rather than wait on jets it didn’t think were going to arrive on time.