"They continue to disappoint us," Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary said of the troubled plane maker
Ryanair (RYAAY) CEO Michael O’Leary has returned to a familiar complaint about the company that makes its planes. In an interview with Reuters on Monday, O’Leary said once again that deliveries from Boeing $BA (BA), whose 737 Max delays led to Ryanair cutting its summer travel season expectations earlier this year, are taking too long.
The impetus for this round of haranguing was that Ryanair (RYAAY) was looking at getting just five of the 10 Max jets it had been expecting this month. “We’re working closely with Stephanie Pope and the new team in Boeing (BA), but they continue to disappoint us,” O’Leary told Reuters. Pope runs the planemaker’s commercial airliner division, and she was diverted there from expected CEO succession path before the company’s board went with incoming chief Kelly Ortberg.
Though he publicly stood by Boeing after a door plug blew out on an Alaska Airlines (ALK)-operated 737 Max 9 (and angling to scoop up any suddenly unwanted planes on the cheap), O’Leary has a long history of pushing Boeing to do better by the Irish carrier. In 2022, he said that the manufacturer’s management team was “running around like headless chickens” and that they needed “a reboot or a boot in the arse.”
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