Most of the low-cost airlines have studiously avoided competing against each other and Ryanair only has a competitor on one of its routes - Glasgow-London - where it is challenged by Easyjet.

The newer generation of low-cost airlines - Easyjet, Go and Buzz - have all avoided head-to-head contact with Ryanair, mainly on the basis that Ryanair is by far the most successful of the no-frills carriers, with a 10-15 per cent operating cost advantage, margins double those of its next closest competitor, cheaper airports and, in most cases, cheaper fares.

Quite simply, given Ryanair's financial strength and ruthless focus on the lowest cost, it would be an extraordinarily brave - some would say foolhardy - decision to go head-to-head with the Irish carrier.

With nobody willing to take on Ryanair, the other low-cost airlines are now going to war with each other, with Easyjet and Go soon to begin an aerial dogfight on the Belfast-Edinburgh and Belfast-Glasgow routes.

Already Easyjet and Go have been rubbishing each other about punctuality and it is likely that the war of words will increase in the run-up to the start of Easyjet's service out of Belfast in early May.

Ryanair itself reports full-year results in a few weeks, and pretax profits of more than €115 million and earnings per share around 27 cents have been pencilled in by analysts. That puts Ryanair on a 2001 p/e of almost 40, a rating that in most sectors would be seen as a signal to sell. That lofty rating, however, is unlikely to see any rush to unload Ryanair stock.

This week, ABN-AMRO has changed its recommendation from "reduce" to "add," although Ryanair's story is not yet compelling enough for an outright "buy" recommendation.

Current Account wishes that analysts could be a bit more straightforward about their recommendations. In ABN's note on Ryanair, does "add" mean buy a little while "buy" means buy a lot? No doubt, fund managers understood this code, but it only leaves the rest of us confused.

Merrion is a bit more straightforward with its "buy" tag for Ryanair and a 12-month price target of €13.00. Merrion is expecting 25 per cent earnings growth for the next five years, with passenger growth of the same amount.

Go's Barbara Cassani and Easyjet's Stelios Haji-Ionannou would give their eye teeth for that scale of growth.