THEY’LL be handing out “Oscars” at Ryanair tomorrow night, but the staff won’t be rushing up to accept them. As Channel 4’s Dispatches broadcasts “a major undercover investigation” into operating practices at Europe’s biggest low-cost carrier, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary will be responding the way he knows best — by ridiculing the airline’s critics.

Ryanair staff have been invited to watch the programme at the company’s Stansted headquarters tomorrow at 8pm. As the hour-long programme unwinds, O’Leary will present awards to staff members captured on camera by Dispatches.

The prizes include a weekend for two in Barcelona with £300 (€441) spending money for the Ryanair staff member who tells the biggest whopper on air. There is also the promise of a £200 (€294) contribution towards the cost of divorce proceedings for the staffer who delivered the best chat-up line to one of Dispatches “undercover investigative dollies”, as O’Leary has dubbed the Channel 4 reporters.

A behind-the-scenes dispute about Ryanair: Caught Napping has been raging for over a month. On January 12, Steve Boulton Productions, producer of the Dispatches programme, contacted O’Leary for a response to the findings of its two undercover reporters, who worked as Ryanair cabin crew between July and November last year. During their employment they used hidden cameras to film the airline’s training programme and on board flights.

In a letter to the airline, Karen Edwards said the programme had investigated cabin crew training, safety and security procedures, crew and pilot fatigue, and passenger welfare. She then outlined 20 specific areas of concern, sparking an increasingly bad-tempered correspondence with O’Leary.

Channel 4’s website says the Dispatches reporters will “reveal what really takes place behind the scenes: inadequate safety and security checks, dirty planes, exhausted cabin crew and pilots complaining about the number of hours they have to fly. And watch Ryanair staff speaking frankly about their experiences and attitudes towards passengers”.

Dispatches claims that cabin crew must pay £1,400 for a training course; that £25 is deducted from their salaries every month to cover uniform costs; that many cabin crew are flying on temporary identification passes; the company’s 25-minute turnaround time does not provide sufficient time to clean planes; an aircraft on a flight from Italy had a faulty GPS system; and that cabin crew work very long hours.

The programme also claims that the reporters, Charlotte Smith and Mary Nash, “encountered a staff culture with a somewhat dismissive attitude towards customers, which seemed to be based on the premise that if a customers pays next to nothing for a ticket, they should expect nothing”.

Ryanair, which has grown from 4m to 40m passengers over the past 10 years, responded 11 days later with a 28-page document that dismissed all the claims. It promised to make O’Leary available to the producers, but insisted that his interview be run in full on the evening of the programme and “not finish up on the editor’s floor”.

In a response on January 31, Edwards denied the issues in her first letter were “entirely spurious . . . or factually untrue”. She refused to carry an O’Leary interview in full, but promised to “edit it fairly”.

After further exchanges, Edwards wrote to O’Leary on February 7, saying: “There appears little point in continuing this exchange as we would simply be repeating points made in earlier correspondence.”

O’Leary said all the letters have been seen by the Irish Aviation Authority and the British-based Civil Aviation Authority and that both have confirmed “they can find no substance” in the allegations. He said that unless there is further evidence in the programme that is not disclosed in Dispatches’ correspondence, “then neither safety authority proposed taking further action on these issues”.

The Ryanair boss, who is sitting on €274m worth of shares having previously cashed in hundreds of millions more, published full details of the correspondence on the airline’s website on Friday. He denied that this was an attempt to take the sting out of the Dispatches programme. “There’s no sting in the first place,” he said. “It sounds like something out of Air Babylon” — a reference to a book by Imogen Edwards-Jones that claims to be “a trawl through the highs, the lows, and the rapid descents” of the travel industry.

Ryanair’s own flight records for the period of their employment show that Smith clocked up an average of 37 duty hours a week while Nash’s totalled 30 hours. These figures have not been disputed by Dispatches.

“If that’s the best they can do after five months, then they should give up filming. Channel 4 can shove this programme up its jacksie,” said O’Leary. “There’s nothing in it.”

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