Ryanair (Dublin) has announced it will make further cuts at its Edinburgh base with the closure of eight routes and 60 weekly flights from October 2012. The airline is making the additional cuts due to “BAA Edinburgh refusing to offer a competitive cost base for more Ryanair growth”.

According to the airline, “Ryanair’s Edinburgh traffic will now fall by 500,000 passengers per year per (from 1.8 million to 1.3 million passengers), leading to the loss of up to 500 “on-site” jobs according to ACI figures.”

The planned cuts will include routes from Edinburgh to Bratislava, Bremen, Frankfurt, Fuerteventura, Gothenburg, Kaunas, Lodz and Poznan. This follows the closure of five routes from Ryanair’s Edinburgh summer schedule and Ryanair warned that deeper cuts to its winter schedule may be inevitable if BAA Edinburgh fails to agree an extension to its five year base agreement (which expires in October 2012) on more competitive terms.

According to Ryanair, “The BAA’s failure to secure a long-term growth deal, with Europe’s largest airline, is further proof that the BAA has no interest in securing the future of Scottish tourism, traffic and jobs as it artificially increases charges in the hope of making a killing on the sale of the airport for its Spanish shareholders.”

These latest Edinburgh cuts become effective in October 2012 for the Ryanair winter schedule and include: