Ryanair reported that the so called traffic has grown 2% year on year in the month of November (click HERE).

If one analyses the small print, the number refers to and I quote:

"Represents the number of booked seats sold by Ryanair."

Obviously that means that it counts bookings where nobody turned up to fly and perhaps even in the case where the flight did not actually take off?

See the disclosure for the period of the ash disruption.

What I am amazed by is that no Ryanair shareholder nor analyst has asked any questions about is the fleet size year on year?

According to the links below the fleet size grew by 16% year on year.

• December 2009: 218 Boeing 737-800s - no available data for Nov 09 (click HERE - see slide 5)
• November 2010: 254 Boeing 737-800s (click HERE)

In simple English, Ryanair paid for another 30 something Boeing aircraft that in fact did not carry any incremental passengers.

Thirty aircraft was the size of the easyJet fleet in 2002 and today is the size of a medium size European flag carrier.

That means the demand might not be there any more for such additional aircraft investments.

In fact BA carried incrementally more passengers year on year in Europe according to their disclosure