Ryanair planes
© Jason Cairnduff/ReutersRyanair planes at Dublin airport
The Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has said he will not cancel flights despite the government's new quarantine rules for travellers arriving in the UK, because "British people are ignoring this quarantine. They know it's rubbish."

O'Leary's comments come after Ryanair, easyJet and IAG, the owner of British Airways, started legal action against the government in an attempt to overturn rules requiring all passengers arriving in the UK to self-isolate for 14 days, which came into effect on Monday.

Breaking the rules, which are designed to help prevent a second wave of the coronavirus, is punishable with a £1,000 fine. The policy is to be reviewed every three weeks and the idea of "air bridges" to popular destinations for holidaymakers such as Portugal has been discussed.

However, O'Leary said thousands of Britons were still booking holidays with Ryanair, which intends to operate almost 1,000 flights a day from 1 July. He added that he had no intention of cancelling flights in the peak months of July and August if the rules were still in place then.

Speaking to the BBC's Today programme on Radio 4, he said:
"No [we won't cancel], because the flights are full outbound of the UK. British people are ignoring this quarantine. They know it's rubbish. Ryanair is operating a thousand daily flights to points all over Portugal, Spain, Italy [and] Greece from the 1st of July, the 2nd, the 3rd and every day after that."
O'Leary said he expected British tourists would still book holidays in Europe but European travellers would be put off travelling to Britain.

He added that inbound bookings to the UK were the only notable weakness Ryanair was finding as it prepared to resume flights after the coronavirus lockdown. Outbound bookings from the UK, Ireland and northern Europe to the Mediterranean were strong.

The airlines argue that the rules have come into force much too late to stop the transmission of Covid-19 and will kill off any nascent recovery in their industries. O'Leary said the airlines planned to file legal papers on Monday or Tuesday and hoped the case would be heard this week.

Johan Lundgren, the chief executive of easyJet, said the government rushed through the measures and that the airlines had a good chance of winning the legal action to have them scrapped:
"We think that there's enough evidence and there's a strong case here that this should be challenged by the courts. This is something that has been rushed through. It's not in proportion."
Lundgren also warned that the quarantine measures were likely to lead to more job losses. Last month, easyJet announced it was planning to cut 30% of its workforce, some 4,500 jobs, because of the impact of the coronavirus on the aviation industry.

Asked if the quarantine could lead to more job losses, he said:
"I fear so ... I think and I fear unless there is a change to this [the quarantine rule], that the aviation industry as we know it here in the UK will not be intact."
He said he hoped the threat of legal action would push the government to replace the measure with "a targeted approach that is based on the solutions of air bridges", which allowed people to travel freely between countries with low infection rates.

John Holland-Kaye, the chief executive of Heathrow airport, has warned that "millions" of jobs could be lost if the government did not come up with a plan to allow restriction-free travel.
"We cannot go on like this as a country. We need to start planning to reopen our borders. If we don't get aviation moving again quickly, in a very safe way, then we are going to lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs in the UK just at the time when we need to be rebuilding our economy."