In a rare show of remorse, the outspoken airline boss has written to staff apologising for the chaos surrounding recent flight cancellations and problems with working rosters that means crews have been posted around Europe to fill gaps. The crisis prompted a crackdown by the CAA, which ruled that the airline had to compensate and reroute passengers.

The budget carrier cancelled 2,100 flights in September and will ground 25 aircraft this winter in order to let pilots take holidays and maintain their work rotas. The letter claims: ‘grounding these 25 winter aircraft means we can protect your calendar month of annual leave’. It adds that the airline can ‘allocate a lot of the 2018 annual leave in quarter one, well before our busy summer 18 schedule’.

O’Leary then goes on to detail ‘our respect for our pilots’ and claims comments he made about them last month about them being very well paid for doing a ‘very easy job’ were ‘misreported’. ‘The critical comments that I did make were specifically directed at pilots of competitor airlines and their local unions’, he said.

He went on to spell out pay rises and changes to working practices and promises that ‘we will beat the pay (and the job security) of Norwegian, Jet2 and other competitor 737 operators’ at your base’.

However, a Ryanair pilot, speaking anonymously to the Daily Mail, said it was “crystal clear” that the airline had a pilot shortage and that crews were being sent away from their home bases to operate ‘anywhere in the network’ to fill gaps.