Features September 2, 2010, 5:00PM EST

Ryanair's O'Leary: The Duke of Discomfort

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary is remaking commercial flights in his image: shabby, crabby, and cheap, cheap, cheap

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By Felix Gillette

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Why does every plane have two pilots?" asks Michael O'Leary, chief executive officer of Ryanair (RYAAY), the largest low-cost airline in Europe. Wearing sneakers, jeans, and an off-the-rack short-sleeved shirt, O'Leary is pontificating in his office at the company's conspicuously shabby headquarters on the outskirts of Dublin Airport.

"Really, you only need one pilot," he continues. "Let's take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it." What happens if the pilot has a heart attack? One member of the cabin crew on all Ryanair flights would be trained to land a plane. "If the pilot has an emergency, he rings the bell, he calls her in," O'Leary says. "She could take over."

From time to time, O'Leary, 49, lets loose with a statement like this—a reliably provocative idea about how he'd like to make air travel cheaper by doing something seemingly nutty. It's easy to dismiss his comments as the calculated ravings of a headline hound, but to do so would be to miss an opportunity to peer into the airline industry's psyche, which is usually hidden behind a phalanx of smiling, innocuous faces. At moments like these—or later, when O'Leary explains how he'd like to introduce standing cabins and pay toilets on all his flights—he gives voice to the industry's most primal survival instincts. He is the id of the airline business.

If times were lush, rival airline executives could afford to ignore him. But in recent years, with much of the global industry struggling to survive, O'Leary's subversive vision looks increasingly like a viable alternative to the status quo, which is threatened by obsolescence, attrition, and consolidation. He says what the others are thinking, and, more often than not, doing.

These days, any commercial flight may leave you with the impression that airlines consider you cattle. Only O'Leary will call you a cow, lick his chops, and explain how he plans to carve you up for dinner. His 17 years at the helm of Ryanair have been one long feast. During an era in which the bulk of the commercial airline industry has lurched from one crisis to another—from the attacks of September 11 to the April explosion of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland to the ongoing global recession—Ryanair has grown from a tiny regional airline into a legitimate powerhouse with 7,000 employees, flying 1,100 routes to 155 airports in 26 countries. In July, Ryanair became the first airline in Europe to carry more than 7 million passengers in one month. The company has a market cap of $7.2 billion, dwarfing competitor easyJet ($2.3 billion) and Ireland's legacy airline Aer Lingus ($612 million) but still falling short of Southwest (LUV) ($8.29 billion) and Delta (DAL) ($8.22 billion). Over the past decade, at a time when the global airline industry collectively lost nearly $50 billion, Ryanair turned healthy net profits in 9 out of the 10 years—most recently earning $431 million in the fiscal year ended in March.

None of this guarantees that any of O'Leary's wilder fantasies will ever be realized, only that his ideas will shape air travel for years. Beneath his success as a CEO is a radical reassessment of the nature of the commercial air traveler—a reclassification that has gained momentum over the years, evolving from fringe hypothesis to near-universal theorem. At the heart of the O'Leary philosophy is the idea that commercial air passengers are not delicate creatures whose repeat business depends on free pillows, blankets, and tea. Rather, they are hardy beasts—parsimonious when buying a ticket, profligate once in the air—willing to endure discomfort and indignity just so long as they get to their destination cheaply and with their suitcases. The question hanging over the airline business and passengers alike is not whether the O'Leary Way will be further adopted by airlines scrambling for survival but how far and fast his paradigm will spread.