Ryanair gets more front. by Frank Murphy BUDGET airline Ryanair is enlarging its image —by giving its famous flying angel logo a breast enhancement.
 The airline’s boss Michael O’Leary ordered the cosmetic change for his new fleet of 150 Boeing 737-800 jets.
The out-in-front logo was spotted almost immediately by passengers and ground crew at Stansted Airport.
One said: “Ryanair have certainly given their image a boost. She certainly sticks out, compared with the old flat-chested image.
“She definitely is getting a lot more attention.”
Multi-millionaire O’Leary has ordered that all of the Irish airline’s fleet will have the new fuller logo by 2005, when it has changed over totally to Boeing 737-800s.
Ryanair, which handles 24 million passengers a year, owned up to tweaking its flying harp motif.
A spokesman said: “We decided to give our customers a more uplifting experience. We think she is now more aerodynamic.”
The airline has announced the launch of two new bases in Europe early next year, at Rome (Ciampino) and Barcelona (Girona).
The Rome base will see five new routes to France, Germany, Austria, Spain and Sweden as well as regular routes to London, Brussels and Frankfurt.
Barcelona will see eight new routes to France, Italy, Germany, Holland and England.
Meanwhile, Ryanair has been rebuked for using misleading advertising after a passenger turned up at a French airport only to find that her flight was leaving from another airport nearly 50 miles away.
The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint against the carrier for attaching “Lyon” to its advertisements for flights to St Etienne. The two airports are 46 miles apart.
The advertising watchdog said Ryanair’s destination claims had led to one passenger trying to check in at Lyon for a flight to Stansted. By the time she discovered that her aircraft was departing from St Etienne, she had insufficient time to reach the right airport and missed the flight.
Ryanair managers said they believed customers “would not be misled” by the advertisement. They said Lyon was written in small print underneath St Etienne, in the same style used for two other French routes, Reims/Champagne and Dinard/Brittany.
But the authority rejected this argument and told the airline to remove “Lyon” from its promotional material.
In a separate court case, a disabled man has begun a test case against the airline, saying that an £18 fee for a wheelchair to help him to his flight at Stansted was discrimination.
Bob Ross, 54, who suffers from cerebral palsy, needed the wheelchair to take him the half-mile from the check-in desk to the departure gate for a trip to Perpignan. He was levied the same amount on his return.
The airline says that the airport’s owners, BAA, should pay for wheelchairs.
A Ryanair spokesman said: “We fly to 86 airports and at 80 of them wheelchairs are provided free of charge.”
BAA says it provides them free up to check-in, but the cost of airside movement must be met by the relevant airline.
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