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Air Force pilot and husband of Maureen O’Hara, the Hollywood film star, to operate aforty-two-seat flying boat from Lough Derg, in County Tipperary. Blair’s plane, the
Southern Cross
, flew under the Aer Arann licence and took tourists to the south and west coasts of the country for a flat £15 fare. By 1978 Aer Arann could offer a charter service to 32 airports across Ireland as well as destinations in the UK and Europe. It was hardly a threat to the national airline, but by 1982 Aer Arann, still in deep financial difficulty, had decided to expand and started a service from Galway to Dublin.
    Once Aer Lingus attacked Avair by launching services and cutting prices across Ireland, it was inevitable that Aer Arann would be forced to retrench. In 1984 it withdrew back to its narrow routes, abandoned its expansion plans and focused instead on flying to the islands. Remarkably perhaps the airline never went under and has been able to resuscitate its ambitions in recent years. It now operates flights from a number of Irish airports to destinations across Ireland, the UK and one continental European destination.
    Tony Ryan, his GPA millions burning a hole in his pocket, was prepared to take the fight to Aer Lingus at a time when Avair’s experience would have discouraged most aspiring airline entrepreneurs. Along with Lonergan and another early collaborator Christy Ryan, a namesake but not a relation, Ryan would have the field to himself.
    The airline would bear Tony Ryan’s name and swallow his cash, but it would be owned by a trust of which he would not be a beneficiary. It was an arrangement that allowed him to honour his contract with GPA, which prevented him from owning an airline. Ryanair was, he said, for his children. Declan was working in the airline industry in the United States at the time, while Cathal had trained as a pilot. Both were appointed directors. Shane, the youngest son, was still at school when the airline launched, but he would too become a beneficiary of the trust that owned the company.
    No matter the ownership structure, the new airline was very much Tony Ryan’s baby, and he was determined it would be successful. His determination to launch a new carrier came, inlarge part, from his knowledge of what deregulation had already achieved in the US air transport market. Ryan’s GPA leased planes to American operators, and Ryan excelled at predicting future growth patterns for the industry. He believed that deregulation in Europe would inevitably follow deregulation in the US, and he wanted to be one of the first to take advantage of the new regime. In the early 1980s Europe’s aviation market was dominated by legacy carriers – state-owned airlines heavily subsidized by state coffers. State support had allowed these airlines to wallow in their own inefficiencies, and competition was nearly non-existent.
    Aer Lingus and British Airways had no interest in increasing the size of the market on routes between Ireland and Britain; all they wanted was to extract the highest possible price from every passenger. Competition between the two was irrelevant, because at the end of each year the two airlines simply divided the revenues from the routes between themselves. There was no incentive for either airline to win business, because the spoils would be split.
    Change had long been in the hands of the politicians, but there was an initial reluctance to embrace reform because they feared that competition would destroy the market rather than prove a catalyst for growth, a view encouraged by Europe’s legacy carriers, which exerted exponential influence on their own departments of transport.
    Aer Lingus, which knew it would feel the direct brunt of any new competition, had lobbied intensely against it, arguing that it would bring about its destruction and, by extension, that of Ireland’s tourist industry. The airline insisted that the market would be cannibalized, not stimulated,