Ryanair: Airline facing customer crisis (file pic). Dave Thompson / PA Archive/PA Images

Ryanair has cancelled all flights between Scotland and London for four months from November.

More than 700 return journeys are believed to be affected by the move, announced by the airline on Wednesday.

Ryanair has already scrapped 2100 flights as a result of "messing up" pilot holidays, costing the airline around £43.7m in refunds and compensation.

Many travellers were hours from departure or already abroad when they learned their flights had been cancelled.

Chief executive Michael O'Leary said: "We sincerely apologise to those customers who have been affected by last week's flight cancellations, or these sensible schedule changes announced today.


"While over 99% of our 129 million customers will not have been affected by any cancellations or disruptions, we deeply regret any doubt we caused existing customers last week about Ryanair's reliability, or the risk of further cancellations."

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Mr O'Leary promised there would be "no more" flight cancellations at least until summer 2018.

He said every passenger affected by the disruption had been offered another flight or a refund, as a well as a travel voucher worth up to €80 (£70).

A total of 34 routes have been suspended between November and March, affecting about 400,000 travellers.

They include all flights between London Stansted and Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as those between Glasgow and Las Palmas, Gran Canaria; Edinburgh and Szczecin, Poland, and Edinburgh and Hamburg, Germany.


Ryanair's other 1800 routes will continue flying as normal and affected passengers will receive emails by September 27.

The airline has blamed its recent problems on a "roster failure" that resulted in too many holidays being booked between September and December.

Ryanair intends to recruit and train 650 pilots over the next eight months and buy 50 new aircraft by May 2018. It said the problem will not happen again.