• Bloomberg Business Week, Friday, September 3, 2010 10:41 AM

Felix Gillette's long profile of Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair, concludes with a bit of braggadocio that must have Mary Wells very happy that she was doing her work in the day when "Mad Men" ruled the branding roost: "We finally exposed the myth that air travel was some kind of a uniquely sexual experience," O'Leary says. "It's not. It's just a commoditized way of getting from A to B."

O'Leary also suggests that two pilots are a luxury (in case of emergency, call a flight attendant who has been trained to land). He also proffers the ideas of selling standing room passage and installing pay toilets. Sound like the calculated ravings of headline hound? Warns Gillette: "Dismissing his comments as the calculated ravings of a headline hound would miss an opportunity to peer into the airline industry's psyche, which is usually hidden behind smiling, innocuous faces."

Wilder fantasies aside, the bottom line behind the thinking of the man who has spent 17 years turning Dublin-based Ryanair into the largest low-cost airline in Europe is that passengers are "willing to endure discomfort and indignity just so long as they get to their destination cheaply and with their suitcases." As most travelers will attest, that concept is as hot among his peers as a turbine engine at 30,000 feet.

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