Ryanair boss and IATA’s Willie Walsh sound alarm over Boeing delays

The bosses of Ryanair and the world’s most influential airline body have sounded the alarm over production issues at Boeing as European airlines struggle with delivery delays. The International Air Transport Association’s director general, Willie Walsh, said delivery delays from the US planemaker and its European rival Airbus would pose a problem for many years. “It’s massively frustrating for airline CEOs and it’s having a big impact,” he told an Irish thinktank on Wednesday. “It’s going to be a problem for a number of years to come. The message I get from airline CEOs is the situation doesn’t look like it’s getting any worse, so it seems to have bottomed out or plateaued, but it’s not yet getting better.” His comments came after Ryanair said it would have to lower its passenger traffic estimates for next year because of expected aircraft delivery delays from Boeing. The Irish budget airline’s CE, Michael O’Leary, said it had been due to receive 20 deliveries before the end of December that were now likely to come in January and February. He said the airline would still have them in time for next summer’s peak travel season. O’Leary said Ryanair would be doing well if it got 10 or 15 aircraft from Boeing after next March, instead of an expected 30. The Ryanair share price fell by as much as 3.5% after the comments before easing to a fall of 1.7%. Boeing is grappling with a strike by 33,000 workers that began a month ago, and the persisting fallout from safety fears, prompting the US planemaker to announce a year’s delay to the first delivery of its 777X commercial jetliner and moves to cut 17,000 jobs worldwide.<br/>