I have always been fascinated by timetables. I still have the timetables that I picked up in the Italian Tourist Office in London on July 7th, 1938.
I particularly like the KLM timetable that announced: "London to Australia in only 8 Days by Land-Plane": so much better than going in an old-fashioned flying-boat!
But I also fancy the Air France timetable which shows that almost 70 years ago you could get from central London, via Croydon and Le Bourget aerodromes, to central Paris faster than any air service can get you there today.
Of course, we can now get from London to Paris by train in two hours 15 minutes - faster even than by plane 70 years ago! - leaving from the wonderful rebuilt St Pancras station that I recently visited.
You'd be surprised at what you can learn from a timetable. In early 1949 the Russian state airline, Aeroflot, published its full timetable in an international airline guide.
That provided me with a scoop. I contributed the lead article in News Review, (the British equivalent at that time of the US's Time magazine), in which I was able to show that Aeroflot was then the largest airline in the world.
It had 250 aircraft, with a total of 8,500 seats. My recollection is that many decades were to elapse before Aeroflot again published its full timetable.
I am reminded of that experience because I have just been studying the Dublin airport winter timetable, which tells me a lot about the current state of Irish air travel.
Over 90 per cent of the 15 million passengers travelling to and from Ireland annually now go by air. And the differential between summer peak and winter traffic is now a mere fraction of what it used to be: that ratio is currently less than two to one, whereas when I delivered a paper on this subject in 1958, just after I had left Aer Lingus, the August peak was then over eight times greater than the average traffic flow in winter.
Even in winter, Dublin airport now handles about 270 scheduled departures each day, spread over 20 of the 24 hours, and almost a million passengers go through the airport each winter month. Between 25 and 30 flights are currently scheduled to leave during the half-hour between 6.15 and 6.45 each morning: almost one per minute. Because this is a bigger volume than can comfortably be handled by air traffic control in such a brief period, some of these departures are inevitably slightly delayed.
By contrast, when 70 years ago my eldest brother Desmond FitzGerald, then 25 years old, started designing the first airport building at Collinstown - a terminal that happily has in recent years been brought back into service - the average daily load was less than one passenger per day each way, through the military aerodrome at Baldonnel.
And when I joined Aer Lingus 10 years later, even then only there were only about 10 departing flights each day, carrying between them fewer passengers than one of Aer Lingus's flights today.
This winter, 34 airlines are scheduling flights from Dublin to almost 115 cities in 30 countries. The two dominant airlines are, of course, Aer Lingus and Ryanair. Together with Aer Arann, these Irish airlines operate over three-quarters of all flights both to and from Great Britain and also to and from Continental Europe. Only across the Atlantic do foreign airlines achieve near-parity with our own.
The situation as between Aer Lingus and Ryanair is particularly interesting. On routes to and from Britain, Aer Lingus has chosen to concentrate on London (Heathrow and Gatwick), Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. On these routes it generally operates frequencies fairly close to those of its Ryanair competitor. It has dropped other routes that I had persuaded the company to open in the 1950s, such as those to Bristol, Cardiff and Leeds. (Back in 1936 its first route had been to Bristol, at a time when its single five-seat aircraft seems to have been unable to reach distant London!)
But Ryanair also operates to nine other points in Britain not served by Aer Lingus, and overall it operates almost twice as many flights as Aer Lingus to Britain.
However, on routes to the Continent, Aer Lingus more than holds its own. Although it serves one-quarter fewer cities than does Ryanair, its much higher frequencies, especially to centres like Frankfurt and Brussels, as well as to Paris and Milan, together with its monopoly of flights to Amsterdam, Dusseldorf and Barcelona, give it a clear advantage over Ryanair. Only in a couple of cases does Ryanair now offer more than a single daily flight to a Continental destination. In the case of 16 cities on the Continent, Aer Lingus and Ryanair are in competition from Dublin - although in half-a-dozen of these cases Ryanair operates to a much less convenient airport than Aer Lingus. In over half of these 16 cases Aer Lingus operates a higher frequency than Ryanair - and in only one case - Warsaw - does Ryanair have a frequency advantage - of a single additional flight per week. Overall, where the two airlines are in competition, Aer Lingus is operating almost half as many more flights than does Ryanair.
The fact that Ireland is an island, dependent on air transport for over 90 per cent of its contacts with the rest of the world, has meant that we have had to develop skills in civil aviation that have given us an advantage over many other countries. This is true not only of commercial air transport but, thanks to Tony Ryan, also of the whole very specialised area of aircraft leasing.