Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary is famous for, among other things, his public complaints about how quickly (or, rather, slowly) Boeing delivers airplanes to his company. And since Boeing is struggling to build planes more quickly after regulator-imposed slowdowns following a door plug blowout earlier this year, Ryanair has an idea of what to do with that money instead.
“As Ryanair faces into a 2-year period with no new aircraft deliveries from mid-2025 to mid-2027, it expects cashflow to receive a short term boost due to this temporary cut in aircraft capex,” the company told investors in a securities filing. What that means for shareholders in concrete terms is that Ryanair plans to buy back €800 million ($873 million) more than it had previously expected.
Boeing’s orders-and-deliveries page says that it owes Ryanair 204 planes. Even before the blowout, O’Leary had been telling Boeing that its management team was “running around like headless chickens” instead of building jetliners on time that the company needed “a reboot or a boot in the arse.”
Though he publicly stood by the planemaker at the start of its blowout scandal, he has more recently gone back to his regularly scheduled annoyance.
Ryanair’s stock was up about 4% in Thursday trading.