Not that everyone welcomed this attachment to the south of Ireland. Tony insisted that employees of GPA had to live near Shannon rather than commute. Eventually many would buy beautiful houses in idyllic spots such as Killaloe or Castlelough on the shores of Lough Derg, but to begin with they often lived in the bleak environs of Shannon.
The Free Zone itself was a barren, featureless landscape of grey concrete, with barely a tree in sight. In addition to the physical harshness, most GPA staff members felt like they were at the far end of the world, or worse. ‘Shannon was like the back of the moon,’ recalls one employee.
Another early recruit to the GPA team, Graham Boyd, remembers the shock of adapting to life in ‘a real backwater’. His journey to work involved driving from his house in Ennis to Shannon on a single-track bog road. At home in the evenings there was only one television station to watch, which began at 6 p.m. with the Angelus. The communications structure was dire. The Boyds were on the waiting list for a telephone line for well over a year. Even when the phone was put in, the line often didn’t work. Ringing Shannon from abroad was even worse. This meant going through the international operator, who often had little or no idea where they were trying to ring. ‘Caller, can you spell “Ireland”?’ became a familiar refrain. ‘In the morning you could be doing a deal in New York’, Boyd recalls, ‘and that evening involved in a hit-and-run with a cow in the middle of a bog road.’
No-one enjoyed finding humour in their situation more than Tony. For years afterwards he would recount with great gusto the story of trying to set up an alarm call from his home phone (‘Silvermines 29’) in Co. Tipperary.
With an early start the next morning, he had telephoned the local switchboard. ‘Hello, Mrs Hoare. Any chance you can give me an alarm call in the morning?’
‘What’s that then, Tony?’
‘Well, you call to wake me up and then you charge me for it.’
‘But I can’t do that. I haven’t got an alarm clock.’
Two hours later the switchboard operator phoned back.
‘Mrs Hoare, it’s past midnight. What can I do for you?’
‘Tony, it’s just if you’re getting up early, would you ever give me a call, as I have an early start myself.’
Whatever humour Tony found in the charms of rural life, ‘backwater’ was never an impression he allowed GPA staff to convey to potential clients. From the start he was obsessed with details of presentation and image in order to convey that GPA was a serious international player. GPA’s first brochure was a lavish, full-colour affair featuring photographs of Georgian Dublin and Waterford Crystal rather than the concrete jungle of the Shannon Free Zone.
Staff members were also expected to conform to Tony’s ideas about how to dress. One colleague remembers that
his specific notion was that you wear a suit. You wear a suit to the office. You wear a suit when you’re travelling. You wear a suit at all times and you look smart. Hungover or otherwise, in hotels at the back of beyond, sitting on aeroplanes—you had to look sharp.
Telephones were expected to be answered after the first ring, irrespective of whose desk they were on, not least because the chances of a call getting through to Shannon were about one in five; each call missed was potential business times five, and it conveyed incompetence. Employees told anybody who would listen how busy GPA was and how many hundreds of thousands of miles they travelled each year.
Even within the desolate Shannon business park, appearances mattered. At first GPA moved into an annex of Airport House, which was functional but drab. ‘Within a wet week of being there’, recalls one member of staff, ‘Tony was on his way out, and we moved into our second office block, which he immediately tried to get called GPA House. It was an image thing.’
The team that first joined Tony in Shannon was small and mainly comprised those he trusted from his Aer Lingus days. Christy Ryan, who had been with Tony from the start of his working life, now joined him on secondment from Aer Lingus. So too did Seán Braiden, a friend from Tony’s time in Heathrow. Billy Yeoman and Mary McCarthy, a typist, were also both Aer Lingus. Peter Swift, an executive from the charter airline Britannia Airways, was former Aer Lingus. Of the initial cohort, only Peter Ledbetter, an accountant and former international tennis player, was not connected with Ireland’s national airline. Ledbetter became director of finance. Swift dealt with the technical side of leasing agreements. Braiden, Christy Ryan and Yeoman took responsibility for business in specific geographical areas. Tony’s role, said Swift, was ‘to negotiate the commercial terms of the deal’. And to get the deal in the first place.
GPA’s first years were exciting but challenging. ‘We lived hand to mouth, with everything operating on a deal-by-deal basis,’ recalls Mick O’Carroll, another friend who soon joined Tony in GPA.
Liam Meade, who arrived in 1977, captured the sense of chaos that often accompanied the process of getting deals. ‘It was a case of running around with messages we didn’t understand, for planes we couldn’t find.’
They travelled everywhere and never took no for an answer. Every lead was followed up. The attrition rate for deals was high. ‘Of the six likely projects noted in the last annual report, only one materialised,’ Tony observed in the annual report for 1977/8.
The Aer Lingus connection was vital at the beginning in helping GPA even to get in the door for meetings. ‘Really we had to play the Aer Lingus card,’ says Braiden. ‘You rang up and made an appointment with an airline CEO for “Seán Braiden, Aer Lingus executive”, but when you got in the office you did your best to bring it round to leasing.’
That proposition was always a difficult sell. Leasing was still an emerging business, and to most in the industry there was something second-rate, even seedy, about it. Mainstream airlines felt that leasing was not as solid as buying. They were always suspicious about how much the broker was making from a deal. Manufacturers were equally unenthusiastic, as every plane leased was the lost sale of a new aircraft. Therefore GPA was always working against the grain, trying to drum up business in the face of hostility from established players in the industry. The only way to overcome that suspicion was to keep networking in face-to-face meetings, thereby gradually inserting themselves into the day-to-day life of the industry.
The trick for GPA was always to master information—to know which airlines had planes available, when they were available, how much money the airlines wanted for them, and where there were customers who might need them. Tony and his team pored over the vast amount of data that was available to the public from airlines and manufacturers. They became experts in route networks and the fleets of every airline, including the age of aircraft. Often business could be found in the gap between an airline’s current needs and the delivery of a new aircraft. Studying orders placed with manufacturers also provided information on when an airline planned to expand its business. That in turn would suggest broader trends about global travel, highlighting regions where tourism was growing, as had happened in Thailand.
Added to this comprehensive study of the industry were tips and gossip picked up around the world. Even if there was no possibility of a leasing deal, it remained vital to meet chief executives and purchasing and planning managers to get a grasp on future thinking by the airlines.
No inconvenience was too great to endure. Braiden remembers one occasion, in 1976 in Seoul, getting a call from Tony telling him to join him in Los Angeles, as he had a possible lead. Braiden’s American visa had just days until it ran out, so he went from Seoul to Tokyo to get a new visa from the US embassy, took a Pan Am flight to Honolulu and then another onwards to LA. When he arrived, after more than twenty-four hours of travelling and hanging around in airports and embassies, he was met by Tony, who told him that the potential deal now required them both to return to Seoul. So back they went across the Pacific. ‘It was mad, mad stuff,’ Braiden laughs.
The Aer Lingus name was vital in setting up many of these meetings, and the company also helped GPA
prepare for them. If Tony needed specialists to back up a plan or provide expertise, Aer Lingus offered it. This might include financial analysis of route costings, marketing support or technical advice about what was needed to support a certain aircraft type. That expertise gave GPA an important competitive advantage. It also gave them a financial one, as to have paid for the kind of knowledge that Aer Lingus had in-house would have been impossible on Tony’s shoestring budget.
This information on tap enabled GPA to negotiate contracts of great complexity, making deals where the possibility had not even seemed to exist. An early example was the involved lease that Tony put together in January 1977 between Air Siam, McDonnell Douglas and Korean Air Lines. While Tony was in Bangkok managing the Aer Lingus lease, he had assisted Air Siam in arranging a nineteen-year lease with McDonnell Douglas for a DC-10. The plane was put into operation, with McDonnell Douglas providing aircraft maintenance at their headquarters in LA. Everything worked well until Air Siam went bust in 1976. McDonnell Douglas repossessed the plane in a grab while it was on the ground in America. Even though they had possession, McDonnell Douglas couldn’t get rid of it, because legally Air Siam remained the owners. It was a stalemate: Air Siam owned the lease but didn’t have the plane; McDonnell Douglas had the plane but not the lease. Inevitably the issue was heading for the courts.
Tony, always on the lookout for an opportunity, now executed what became a trademark GPA manoeuvre. On his travels in southeast Asia he had picked up information that Korean Air Lines was seeking to expand capacity on the route taking workers to the Gulf states. He approached the airline, saying he could get them a cheap lease for a high-density format DC-10. He then went back to Air Siam, saying, in effect, ‘You need money up front; you’re not going to get your plane back, but I can get you some alleviation of your debt.’ A similar pitch was made to McDonnell Douglas: ‘You have a plane you can’t sell, you’re owed money, and I can get you a new deal with an airline that can pay.’
Neither McDonnell Douglas nor Air Siam was particularly happy about the arrangement, as they would both still lose money. But Tony had correctly calculated that each side would recognise that half a loaf was better than no loaf at all.
‘That was typical of Tony,’ concludes Braiden, whose round trip from Seoul to LA had paid off. ‘He could see three situations and knew how to pick his way through the relationships. It took a lot of insight and putting together. It really was a beautiful deal.’
Tony’s ability to pull off such complex arrangements stemmed in part from his willingness to fly thousands of miles to secure a contract. He was also rigorous about keeping everybody in the GPA operation on the same page. One of the methods he established early on to achieve this was the ‘Monday morning meeting’, which became legendary in Irish and international aviation circles. Like most legends, it contained more than its fair share of myth.
‘Every time I read anything about Tony Ryan or GPA,’ one early employee recalls, ‘you get this story about a guy at the morning meeting on Mondays beating the bejaysus out of everybody, and it was cobblers—absolute cobblers.’
Everyone in the organisation was expected to attend the Monday meeting, even if that meant flying in from half way round the world. In addition, there was a daily meeting of whoever happened to be in Shannon. Each gathering took place at the start of the working day, which in characteristic GPA style was at 8:30 rather than the more conventional 9 a.m. that prevailed in 1970s Ireland. The senior person in the office on any given day would chair the meeting. There was a short agenda that consisted mainly of deals that were being worked on. When Tony was in the office he took the meeting himself. Inevitably that meant a more charged atmosphere in the room. In particular, if something had not been done, or if somebody wasn’t pulling their weight, he communicated that fact and wanted to know what was going to be done about it. ‘But’, says one member of the team, ‘he wasn’t rude: he was forceful, not insulting, and there wasn’t blood coming off the walls or the windows rattling. That didn’t happen. In fact, if anything, he was a quiet man.’
That quietness could itself be unnerving. GPA staff members would often find themselves sharing long flights with Tony during which he might not speak a word to them beyond the usual basic courtesies. One employee endured a trip to Sri Lanka in almost total silence. ‘I thought that was very strange,’ he recalled. ‘Later I learnt that sometimes he was away in another world, and while you’re there you’re not the important thing in his world at that point in time. He was planning where he’s going and what he’s going to say when he gets there.’
The staff at GPA soon became expert Ryanologists, reading his body language for signs of his mood. ‘Even when he was saying nothing’, one says, ‘you could get a vibe from him. You would know if he was frowning inwardly.’
For most, this detachment could be intimidating. For others, particularly when they started in the job, it could be humiliating. Graham Boyd found his early days in GPA extremely difficult. He felt bullied by Tony and hated the frequent refusals to talk to him or even to acknowledge his existence. After six months Boyd told Peter Ledbetter that he couldn’t put up with this treatment any longer. Ledbetter took him for a pint at Durty Nelly’s pub, a few miles from Shannon, and twisted his arm to stay. ‘Good things are going to happen here,’ Ledbetter told him, explaining that Boyd had yet to prove himself to the boss.
Soon afterwards Boyd did his first deal. He still received little in the way of praise from Tony, but he felt he was treated with a new respect. Suddenly the morning meetings cheered up. ‘If you got a deal you would come home on a real high,’ he remembers. ‘It was a great buzz.’ Once a GPA staff member started bringing in business, then and only then did they have Tony’s ear.
Tony’s detachment, even coldness, was a characteristic that co-workers in Aer Lingus had noticed when he was station manager in JFK Airport. ‘He was a very private guy,’ recalls Derek O’Brien, who worked under him in New York. ‘You would only see him socially every now and again. You could have a few jars with him, but that would be it. He really kept a barrier between himself and people who worked for him.’
Although at GPA Tony could be very considerate about making sure that people had time to spend with their family when they were back from travelling, that sense of distance remained between him as the boss and those who worked for him. On one level that manifested itself as dissatisfaction with their work. While he would sing the praises of his ‘talented staff’ to the GPA board, that judgement would rarely be heard in Shannon.
‘I say this to his credit,’ Laurence Crowley judges, ‘but he was never content with the status quo. He always thought, This can be better, I can improve this thing, change the model and make it better.’
Boyd agrees. ‘If anyone got a deal,’ he recalls, ‘the response was always why hadn’t they got a better one.’
Sometimes that was inspirational; at other times it could be deflating. Only Christy Ryan, who had been with Tony from the beginning, was perceived to be close to him. Other workers found the chain-smoking Christy ‘cold’, like Tony, and utterly loyal to him. Staff members would be more likely to seek out Peter Ledbetter, as Graham Boyd did, or Peter Swift, as sympathetic voices to intercede on their behalf with Tony.
GPA’s major shareholders also found Tony difficult. On the one hand there was admiration for his dedication and willingness to go to the ends of the earth for a deal. A story did the rounds in Dublin Airport early on about the former Aer Lingus chief executive Michael Dargan taking a holiday in Nepal, only to find the GPA man sitting on his suitcase in the foothills of the Himalayas. ‘Why are you here, Tony?’ he asked. ‘Because I heard they’re buying 737s and we might get a lease out of them,’ came the inevitable reply.
Dargan’s successors, however, found Tony trickier to cope with. While the GPA boss was happy to take advantage of the technical expertise on offer at Aer Lingus—not to mention the savings on cheap flights, hotels and car rental—he was les
s inclined to take direction from their management. David Kennedy recalls that Aer Lingus nominees on the GPA board were constantly ‘annoyed’ because ‘Tony treated [them] in an off-hand manner.’
They would have been even more annoyed if Tony’s comments at the morning meetings had been reported back. ‘Will the board come along on that?’ Mick O’Carroll recalls Peter Ledbetter asking on one occasion. ‘Feck the board!’ Tony replied. That was more than just bravado in front of the troops: it spoke of a genuine contempt for his old bosses. ‘He had them running around in circles,’ O’Carroll says approvingly.
Tony’s most difficult task was getting both Aer Lingus and the Guinness Peat Group to take him and GPA seriously. In October 1975 the company achieved its first success when it leased a Boeing 737 to Egyptair on a four-month contract. The following month they began work on a bigger deal with the Japanese trading company Nissho Iwai, which had interests in All Nippon Airways. Four years later Nissho Iwai would become engulfed in a scandal involving illegal kickbacks to Japanese politicians when selling military aircraft on behalf of McDonnell Douglas, Boeing and Grumman. Following the suicide of one of the company’s executives and four arrests, the company withdrew from the aircraft-marketing business altogether. However, in 1975 they had 737s to sell. The deal GPA attempted to put together, which was far from straightforward, reveals how everyone in this nascent leasing business was operating less on a wing and more on a prayer.
On one level, everything looked simple enough. Nissho Iwai had their 737 to sell. Aer Lingus wanted to buy another 737, but not until March 1977. GPA lined up an airline, Air Zaïre, to lease the plane in the intervening year, before the Irish carrier needed it. Everyone was happy: GPA would buy the plane, lease it to the Zaïrean airline and then sell it to Aer Lingus. The problem for GPA was that neither Aer Lingus nor Guinness Mahon, which was financing the deal, was prepared to let GPA take the capital exposure of almost a quarter of a million dollars that it needed to buy its first aircraft.
Tony Ryan Page 6
