Ryanair and the potential for further ExMax orders

 There are speculations that Ryanair will place a further 150 ExMax orders before Christmas if the plane is given the all clear to fly again by then. But in case what would this order consist of.

To get the best deal they would probably have to take some of the estimated 100 white tails. These are built planes where the customer have gone or cancelled the order and most of them are of versions 8 or 9. Ryanair have ordered version 10 with 230 seats a longer fuselage, an extra emergency exit and a levered landing gear to avoid tail strikes. Not many of them are built or abandoned. Running 2 types of the airplane would be against the grain of Ryanair. However the group now consists of 3 airlines. Ryanair DAC, Buzz, Malta Air and Lauda. And the last one have earlier this year abandoned its Airbus order. There is nothing in the Low Cost rulebook saying that Lauda couldn't be an ExMax 9 only airline.

Lauda air is the airline for the german speaking part of Europe. One could speculate in if O'Leary would abandon this name after its founder passed, but the fact they have recently announced in their management structure that Lauda now have 2 CEO's, one of them a long standing Ryanair Chief, could be significant. There certainly should be possibilitiees in the German market with Lufthansa's weakend position. 

Such a strategy would make Ryanair as a group a litle less flexible when it comes to moving its planes around as bothe leverage and full flexibility. It would also mean keeping even more spares at central locations depending on how many is common over the whole ExMax range. Ryanair do keep a couple of business jets at Stansted to fly urgently needed engineers and parts to airports without a maintenance base, to avoid long delays that triggers compensation rights, and this would have to be expanded. But this have to happen anyway with a combination 800 and 8200 (ExMax) fleet. 

Alternatively they could use the smaller planes for routes where 230 seats per flight simply is to many. But knowing Ryanair they would proably stuff these with extra cheap ticket passengers instead. And question is how much you would save flying lets say 180 passengers on an 800 instead of a more fuel efficient 8200. A change in departure duties from number of passengers to number of seats could however change this. Purchasing new planes is a long term financial lock-in and much could and will happen with environmentally driven policies over the next 10 to 20 years.