He once proposed charging passengers a pound to use the toilet at 35,000 feet. The press called him a lunatic. He called them back to float the idea of standing-room-only tickets.

Meet Michael O'Leary, the man who turned a bankrupt Irish puddle-jumper into the sky's most unstoppable machine.

In 1994, Ryanair carried 2.25 million passengers. By 2024, that number was 183 million. O'Leary didn't grow an airline. He rewired the physics of how Europe moves.

The formula was violent in its simplicity. Strip the flight to a seat and two engines. Bags, boarding, a sandwich, the privilege of avoiding 29E - all cost extra. Legacy carriers laughed. Passengers cursed. Then they booked anyway, because Dublin to London was 9.99 euros.

Because O'Leary wasn't competing with British Airways.

He was competing with your car.

Hundreds of routes between cities no flag carrier would touch - Kaunas to Charleroi, Knock to Bergamo, Bratislava to Bari - suddenly had daily jet service. He didn't steal passengers. He invented them.

Every outrageous quote was a weapon. Nobody wants to hear the bloody safety demonstration for the 1,000th time - that quote generated millions in free press. Competitors bought billboard campaigns. O'Leary just opened his mouth and let the tabloids work for free.

But the real genius lives on the tarmac.

Ryanair operates over 500 Boeing 737s and nothing else. One aircraft type. One spare-parts inventory. One pilot training syllabus. And when Boeing developed the 737 MAX 8-200, a variant engineered with a single exit door removed to squeeze in 197 seats versus the standard 189, only one airline had ordered it. Ryanair. O'Leary had co-designed his own weapon with Boeing, extracting eight extra revenue seats from the same metal tube.

That's not cost-cutting.

That's aeronautical chess.

The airlines who mocked him in 1995 have spent three decades photocopying his homework. Next time you see an a la carte fee on your booking screen, look out the window at the winglet cutting through the clouds and know that the most hated man in aviation put you there.