Ryanair strikes: New hack can tell you the likelihood of your flight being cancelled as walkout looms

How to assess the likelihood of cancellation

Action station? A Ryanair aircraft at Berlin's Schoenefeld airport (Simon Calder)

The travel plans of tens of thousands of passengers booked to fly with Ryanair on Thursday and Friday 22 and 23 August depend on the outcome of court cases that will be heard only on Wednesday.

Pilots’ unions in the UK and Ireland have called 48-hour strikes in an increasingly bad-tempered dispute over a range of issues, and Ryanair is challenging the legitimacy of the ballots.

The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa) has also announced a stoppage on 2, 3 and 4 September.

The union’s general secretary, Brian Strutton, said: “Ryanair pilots in the UK have a serious dispute with their company which will not be resolved by raising legal technicalities in the High Court."

Ryanair has been taking out advertisements in the Irish press slamming the proposed industrial action, claiming the pilots with annual earnings of €172,000 (£163,000) are seeking to have their pay doubled.

The ads read: “Ryanair recognises that our pilots do a very important job and they are very well paid for it.

“We sincerely thank the 75 per cent of our Irish pilots who did not vote for these unnecessary strikes, many of whom have confirmed they will work as normal next Thursday and Friday.”

Many passengers will be unaffected because their flights are crewed from continental bases.

The Independent has identified a hack that can help passengers identify the home location of the plane used for their flight – by seeing the operating pattern of the aircraft deployed on the same day a week earlier.

For example, Thursday’s Edinburgh-Bordeaux flight is FR6554. Tapping that number into FlightRadar24 shows that on Thursday 15 August the aircraft used had the registration number 9H-QAB.

Clicking on the registration reveals that the plane began its day at Bordeaux at 7.10am with a flight to Edinburgh, followed by trips to Dublin and Stansted and back. The aircraft ended the day back in Bordeaux.

Passengers can be confident the flight will operate as normal, because the flight will likely be crewed by French staff who are not striking.

Conversely, the first Stansted-Berlin flight on Thursdays, FR8542, was operated by a plane that started the day in the UK and flew to Berlin, Aarhus and Bari before returning to the Essex airport.

That is one of the flights that could be at risk, because it is operated by British pilots.

Any passenger whose flight is cancelled is entitled to be flown on the same day if a seat is available – on a rival carrier such as British Airways or easyJet if Ryanair has none available.