“But in general terms, we think we are headed for a very, very strong traffic recovery through the second quarter, and there is a reasonable prospect that will be maintained.”

Market share opportunities are becoming more evident and Ryanair is ready to capitalise on these, said a Barclays research note. 

“Management have highlighted that many opportunities have opened up, most notably in the Italian and Scandinavian market where incumbents have downsized and retreated,” it said.

“We think that Ryanair continues to be well placed to capitalise on these opportunities. The circa 60 new 737-8200 [MAX] aircraft in the fleet by next summer allows for capacity to be allocated opportunistically, while the opening of bases and rehiring of pilots should support the growth strategy in the medium-term.”

Ryanair has spent €10m converting two adjoining Santry office buildings into a new training centre with four new flight simulators.

O’Leary told analysts on a call last week that the new centre would be opened soon and that it had “quadrupled our training capacity in Dublin”.

“So we've kept investing judiciously through the crisis of the shutdown, and we now have those facilities and those resources coming on stream for our pilot and cabin crew and technical team,” said O’Leary.

The Ryanair boss has learned the lessons from the airline’s rostering mess in late 2017 when it was forced to cancel flights due to pilot shortages.

The opportunity had “never been better” for hiring pilots and cabin crew but there were “enormous short-haul challenges”, he said.

“One of the challenges we have as an industry, not just Ryanair, as we've been essentially grounded for the last 18 months, is it has been very difficult to keep pilots and cabin crew current,” he said.

Aviation regulations mean pilots have to fly once a month and cabin crew at least once every 90 days and this has proven tricky for airlines with curtailed schedules.

“We've actually been flying empty aircraft up there to keep pilots current and cabin crew current because we knew that the recovery, when it came would be very strong,” he said.

Some of Ryanair’s competitors were struggling to crew aircraft now for this reason and so were facing capacity issues but Ryanair had chosen to cut pay rather than lay-off staff, he said.

“If you didn’t keep them current, you have to put pilots back into simulator training and cabin crew have to go back and do quite unproductive recurrent training courses again. It's a huge logistical nightmare. I think we've been vindicated in trying to keep everybody current because we thought the recovery would be strong.”

Ryanair had “aggressively” restarted its cadet training schemes, he said, with plenty of opportunities for hiring the 2,000 pilots it needs over the next three years.

“As we emerge out of this, there is a huge surplus of pilots, particularly on 737s across Europe with the Norwegian collapse. They were the only other significant 737 employer in Europe. Also the Gulf carriers have dumped huge numbers of pilots,” he said.

These carriers had begun to re-recruit again.

“Currently, we have more than 350 pilot cadets in training. They're paying us an average about €30,000 and they will flow through over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said, adding that the airline would announce the opening of the new Dublin training centre shortly.

“The challenge for us is to have enough pilots and cabin crew now to operate 90pc of our pre-Covid air capacities through July and August. But it's tight,” he said.

In the UK there was a particular issue with staff “getting pinged [by the government’s Covid tracking app] and told to go to isolate for 10 days, which is a nonsense where you're doubly vaccinated, but it is what it is”.

“There is a huge challenge of recruitment for us though into the next 12 months.

"We will be recruiting huge numbers of pilots and cabin crew this winter, just to crew up the 60 new aircraft we have for next year and also to handle the normal attrition,” he said.

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