Getting Hammered: For European longhaul airlines, pressure from Gulf carriers continues

European airlines watched with horror last week as Gulf carriers ordered another 400 widebody aircraft, auguring huge competitive capacity increases. Worse yet, all this demand for new planes is pushing up aircraft ownership costs for airlines everywhere—even Ryanair, which normally couldn’t care less about what Gulf carriers are doing, cites that as a reason widebodies are too expensive for it to consider a new transatlantic unit.