easyJet has been named “Best Performing Small Airline” in the prestigious Aviation Week magazine Top Performing Airlines Awards, snatching the prize from Ryanair which topped the rankings for the past three years. easyJet was recognised as sharing a common trait with the winning airlines from other categories - “an ability to follow through on their business strategy, with few missteps, in a difficult operating environment.”

Both easyJet and Ryanair scored highly in the areas of operational effectiveness and financial stability, but it was its superior asset utilisation that allowed easyJet to knock Ryanair off the top spot. Aviation Week compared the ratio of debt to asset value, noting that Ryanair`s debt more than tripled between 1999-2001, reaching about two-thirds of its asset value while easyJet`s debt increased little during the same period, and stood at less than half the assets in 2001.

Since its inception in 1995, easyJet has played a pivotal role in bringing low-cost air travel to millions of people, and currently operates a total of 45 routes across 17 key European business and leisure destinations.

The Aviation Week Top-Performing Airlines Awards are based on a study of all airlines, using proprietary calculations by CSFB HOLT, a unit of Credit Suisse First Boston, to measure airlines` productivity, asset utilisation and financial health.
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