An Irishman's Diary

Profiling yet another Irish aviation mogul recently, the Financial Times asked: "Is it something in the water?" The writer was not alone in wondering about this. Never mind the other examples. The mystery is how a mild-mannered country like this ever produced Michael O'Leary, unless it was an unusual hardness of the water supply where he grew up.

Willie Walsh is closer to the national norm, at least in his public personality. But this hasn't stopped him climbing to the top at British Airways and disputing European air supremacy with his pugnacious fellow countryman.

Then of course there is Tony Ryan, under whom O'Leary cut his razor-like teeth. Ryan's enormous wealth did not start with Ryanair. His aircraft leasing company GPA blazed a trail through the 1980s, until it crashed - en route to the stock exchange - in 1992. And to complete an aerial loop, it was at GPA that Domhnal Slattery, the man who caused the FT to ask about Ireland's water content, learned his trade.

Slattery's JetBird now aims to do for the private plane some of what O'Leary did for the public version. Promising reduced frills rather than none, his air taxis will be available for hourly hire by the "mass affluent".

Europe has as many millionaires as the US, he calculates, but far less private plane usage. If he can bridge the gap, Slattery will go from being rich to very rich, and add another chapter to Irish aviation's growing legend. Britannia can keep the waves. The clouds are where it's at these days, and Hibernia rules those.

The relationship between this country and the air used to be largely romantic. Before Michael O'Leary, the most famous Irish aviator was Major Robert Gregory, courtesy of his friend WB Yeats, who immortalised him in the poem An Irish Airman Foresees his Death. As Yeats told it, Gregory died not for any of the causes of the first World War, but for the sheer love of flying: "a lonely impulse of delight".

There were others like him: the second World War flying ace Paddy Finucane, for example, who claimed at least 26 enemy aircraft for the RAF before his Spitfire was downed by a German machine-gun over France. Unwilling to be taken prisoner, he flew his fatally wounded plane slowly out to sea, talking calmly on the radio to his colleagues. "This is it, chaps," was his last message. But the world has moved on since then. In 21st-century Europe, aerial dog-fights tend to occur in boardrooms. The modern Irish airman foresees his end-of-year profits, mainly, and is very skilled at maximising them. A fondness for flying doesn't necessarily come into it.

Willie Wash was a career pilot before he became an airline executive. By contrast, in one of the more polite quotes, O'Leary explained his attitude to aviation thus: "I am not a cloud bunny. I am not an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other platoons of goons who populate the industry." Yet there he is: the Biggles of budget air travel, notching success after success while laughing in the face of flak from competitors, governments, trade unions and the environmentalist lobby.

The modern Irish grip on aviation is all the more remarkable in that, in the industry's early years, this island's role was famously passive. Ireland was central to the development of transatlantic flight, but only as a place to crash-land when you got lost or ran out of fuel.

The story of Alcock and Brown is well-known: their death-defying flight ending in a Clifden bog that looked like a flat green field from the air. The duo mistook the waving of people on the ground as a typical Irish welcome. In fact, the locals were trying to warn them that the "field" was a swamp. They landed safely anyway, surviving to be heroes - though Alcock died soon afterwards in a crash in France.

Less famous is the story of Feliksas Vaitkus, although he is a hero in Lithuania. Vaitkus became the sixth pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic when he crash-landed in a field near Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, in September 1934. It need hardly be said that Ballinrobe was not the intended destination: the idea was to fly to his homeland.

But the first transatlantic pilots could not always be choosers and, long-before his countrymen started arriving here in large numbers, Vaitkus made a little bit of Lithuanian-Irish history. Seventy-two years on, moves are now at last being made to have his landing here memorialised in some form.

Vaitkus took on his mission after two other US-born Lithuanians died attempting the same feat. It didn't look good for him either when, despite waiting months for favourable weather, he flew into rain, ice, and fog.

Irish radio broadcasts told him that the fog extended to the Baltic. So after 23 hours over the Atlantic, exhausted and low on fuel, he settled for Mayo: no doubt disappointed not to reach his homeland, but relieved to look down and find that - to coin a phrase - there was something in the water.