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Don’t compare hours, compare takeoff/landing cycles. That’s when most of the stress on the airframe occurs.



Ryanair doesn't do any long haul flights as far as am I aware of, so the number of cycles should be pretty much comparable if not larger for Ryanair.


I can't find solid numbers, but what I found suggests Southwest flies twice the number of flights Ryanair does. Don't know about this specific plane though.


Southwest has 511 737-700s (what 1380 was), and 712 planes total. Ryanair only uses 737-800s, and has "over 300 aircraft in operation"[0]. Close, but still different. Ryanair operates ~600k flights yearly to Southwest's ~1.25 million.

The math gets pretty bad when you try to average all that out but if you ignore that and do it anyway (science!) then you get 1,743 yearly flights per plane for Southwest and 1,503-1,993 for Ryanair (fleet size of 301-399 respectively). So they're likely very comparable, which makes sense because neither airline could likely afford to have its planes sitting around idle for any more than absolutely necessary.

[0] https://www.ryanair.com/us/en/useful-info/about-ryanair/flee...


And on the engine, which was likely the point of failure in this incident. Although you have a different cycle count for engines since you can run it up without taking off.




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