Unveiling its upcoming winter schedule on Wednesday, Ryanair announced that there will be 57 routes for Malta, including 6 new ones to Glasgow, Luxembourg, Norwich, Newcastle, Gothenburg and Palma. It added that there will also be an increase in frequency for 20 other routes, including Milan, Porto, Bucharest, and London.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary also said that the airline will be adding another aircraft based in Malta, raising Ryanair's Malta-based fleet to 9 aircraft from November onward. He said that this is a $100 million investment which will create another 30 jobs for pilots and cabin crew at the Malta International Airport.

The airline stated that this increased route schedule will grow its Malta traffic to over 5.2 million passengers in 2025, which it commented is a 15% increase. It added that this, in addition to having 9 aircraft based in the country, represents a total investment of over $1 billion on Malta. It said that this growth supports over 4,300 local jobs, and added that it will continue to reinforce its long-term commitment to Malta.

O'Leary commented that Malta "needs no growth here during the summer". He said that there are a lot of charter airlines and a lot of tourists coming to the country during the summer, but that the key challenge for Maltese tourism is to bring visitors during the shoulder months and to keep winter tourism going.

With that in mind, he said that this is where the strength of Ryanair is, but that it can only be done because the airline has a unit cost advantage over every other airline.

He said that there are obstacles, and spoke of the Draghi report, which he said calls for more competitive EU aviation to scrap taxes and reform air traffic control, which O'Leary remarked "is not happening". He continued that Ryanair is talking to the Maltese government about making its voice heard in Europe, as it is more likely that flights to Malta would get cancelled due to cases such as French refusal to allow overflights in the case of worker strikes. He said that this is because France has minimum service rules which allow flights into France during French ATC strikes, but not over France.

O'Leary added that the Draghi report, which he said was published in September 2024, had identified that if effective air traffic control reforms were implemented, then around €6 billion would be saved annually in lower airfares or lower costs for European consumers.

Speaking more about the new routes, O'Learly said that including Palma was a suggestion put forward by the Malta Tourism Authority, as he said that the MTA believes that there is a source market of hospitality workers in Mallorca who spend all summer working and would then want to get out in the winter.

The Ryanair CEO commented that the airline has "a very good dialogue" with the MTA. He remarked that Maltese institutions are "very accessible" and that it is much easier to have conversations when compared to elsewhere, where one has to go through "layers and layers of bureaucracy".

Malta Air CEO David O'Brien remarked that Malta Air is "Malta's number one airline" and "Malta's national airline". He said that Ryanair is number one for on-time and in customer satisfaction for all major airlines, and O'Leary commented that the airline hit a new record of 89% in the month of August due to high on-time performance and people being satisfied with the service.

On the topic of reroutes and overflights, speaking again about the case of France, O'Leary said that whenever France closes, then everybody wants to reroute, and the ATCs of surrounding countries are not able to cope with the capacity. He said that France's minimum service legislation protecting local French flights and cancelling overflights is a fundamental breach of the single market, and added that the European Commission should have been tackling the matter since five or six years ago, "but we have a useless president of the Commission called Ursula von der Leyen".

"Europe has wasted about 20 years and spent about €20 billion pursuing this single European sky where we'll have this communist utopia, where you have French productivity and Spanish pay rates for air traffic controllers, and basically none of them will ever come to work. It doesn't work and they've made no progress," he said.

Ryanair concluded by saying that in celebration of its 6 new routes, a seat sale has been launched with fares starting from €21.99.