Tony Ryan founded Ryanair in 1986 with just a single 15-seat passenger aircraft and saw it grow within 20 years into Europe’s largest low-cost airline — and the world’s largest by passenger volume — and a byword for lean commercial aviation operation.

The son of a Tipperary train driver, he had set his foot on the commercial aviation ladder more than ten years before when, in 1975, he founded Guinness Peat Aviation, an aircraft sales and leasing company. Set up with £50,000, the company grew to be worth $4 billion at the apogee of its fortunes. But in a climate of turmoil in the aviation industry engendered by the first Gulf War, its value plummeted dramatically after the cancellation of its planned stock market listing in 1992, and Ryan subsequently sold it. But by that time the founding of Ryanair had given his energies a new direction. .

Tony Ryan was born in Thurles, Co Tipperary, in 1936. One of four children, he had ambitions to go to university. But his father died of a heart attack when he was 18 and he suddenly became the family breadwinner. He liked to say that transport was in the family blood — even his grandfather had been a station master.

In any event, after leaving school, he joined the national flag carrier Aer Lingus in 1956, as a management trainee. He worked in management for the company for a number of years, supporting his mother and siblings.

He always liked to say that the inspiration to go into business on his own account came to him on an evening in 1974 when he watched the painstaking care with which a South-East Asian street food vendor went about the preparation and selling of his products. “I felt it a pity that such marketing, technical talent and energy was devoted to a process which produced a mere penny. Then and there I determined that when I went into business on my own account, I would apply my energies to developing and marketing a big-ticket product which could sell for vastly more.”

The following year Ryan put up £5,000 of his own money, and borrowed a further £45,000 from Aer Lingus and the London merchant bank Guinness Peat Group. With this he set up his own aircraft leasing corporation at Shannon in the West of Ireland, which he called Guinness Peat Aviation, soon to be known simply as GPA. Over the next 15 years the business grew to be the largest aircraft leasing company in the world with assets under management of $7.5 billion.

On the eve of the dramatic collapse in its value, its share register included some of the world’s most powerful institutional investors, and it had placed orders with aircraft manufacturers worth $20 billion, at that time 10 per cent of the world's aircraft production. It was showing an annual profit of $280 million.

In the meantime, Ryan had become one of Ireland’s biggest philanthropists and supporters of the arts. But an $800 million global flotation in June 1992 proved a disastrous overvaluation and the stock market listing was cancelled, leaving the company worth no more than a twentieth of its assumed value, and leading to its eventual sale in 2000.

In the interim, in 1986 Ryan had joined two fellow businessmen, Liam Lonergan and Christy Ryan to found the low-budget airline Ryanair, which in the following year began to operate flights between Dublin and London. The going was tough at first. Ryanair’s prices were lower thabn those of Aer Lingus, but its costs were much the same.

However, under Ryan’s protégé Michael O’Leary, who took over as chief operating officer in 1993, in return for a stake in the airline, and was soon to become chief executive, Ryanair was to go from strength to strength, through the lean efficiency of its methods, and the new CEO’s mastery of the principles of budget flights. It was O’Leary, for example, who first proposed getting rid of food on Ryanair. “The family were appalled,” Ryan recalled. “We told him the passengers would go spare.”

O’Leary was vindicated when, not ony did no one complain, but crew were able to use the time saved to sell duty-free. Ryan, after a short period as honorary chairman, was happy to take a back seat. This year Ryanair is expected to carry about 52 million passengers.

He had amassed a considerable fortune and had homes in Monaco and Co Kildare. The sale of the AerFi, the successor company to GPA, had earned him ¤

Tony Ryan, businessman and founder of Ryanair, was born on February 2, 1936. He died after a long illness on October 3, 2007, aged 71