A senior Ryanair executive has described the mood at the airline as wounded, miserable and adversarial, and has pledged to try to turn around the staffing crisis that has forced the company to recognise unions, and triggered the cancellation of thousands of flights.

At a meeting with pilots in Stansted last Thursday, before the airline's shock announcement that it was recognising unions, new Chief Operating Officer Peter Bellew acknowledged that there was a very basic lack of trust between the company and pilots, which management will have to work very hard to restore.

Ryanair will meet today with a union for the first time in its 32-year history, in a bid to avert threatened industrial action by pilots.

Mr Bellew worked for Ryanair for ten years before joining Malaysia Airlines, but returned some weeks ago to address the pilot crisis.

According to a surreptitiously-made recording of the meeting, he criticised the way pilots had been managed in recent years, but said most of those responsible were no longer with the airline.

He told the Stansted pilots he was shocked to find that the airline had more pilots than at any time since he had worked there - but was even more shocked to find that in lots of places pilots were doing as few as 650 hours per year, well below the 900 maximum permitted hours.

He said there had been no attempt to manage people's hours, and that was a major cause of the roster collapse that triggered the cancellation of over 20,000 flights.

He said it did not take a genius to see that a strategy of setting up superbases with large numbers of pilots, while not crewing smaller bases, was never going to work.

He said that in the past, pilots were rarely sent away from their home base, but nowadays when they were, there were frequently no hotels organised for them, and those that were were of poor quality.

Mr Bellew admitted that around 750 of the airline’s 4,000 pilots are currently seeking transfers to other bases.

He said there seemed to be a culture that people who knew about problems were either not listened to or actively discouraged from raising issues further.

He acknowledged that there was "great angst" at the airline, and that people were very upset, but said he thought things could be fixed.

He said he did not believe the problems were primarily about money and criticised senior management for failing to make a serious effort to retain departing pilots by addressing their concerns.

Mr Bellew said it would take at least six months to get basic administration back in place and to reinstate the culture that had worked in the past.

He admitted it would be difficult to implement radical change in the pilots’ leave system in 2018 - but pledged to commence a programme of reforming the way leave is managed, acknowledging that the current system is driving people out the door.

He said they had requests from contractor First Officers to be Ryanair employees and some contracts are being offered.

He pleaded with pilots to give management time to fix the problems.

He said the airline from the very top including the board and CEO Michael O'Leary were sincere about fixing the situation for the long term.