FAA chief had helped Delta retaliate against whistleblowers, administrative court rules

The ruling supported Ms. Petitt’s claim that she was selected for special investigation to try to keep her quiet on security issues. Scott Morris, the judge presiding over the long-running lawsuit, found that Delta was punishing and discriminating against a federally protected whistleblower without any evidence that her “performance as a pilot was lacking in any way.” According to the decision, “no witness has questioned her flying insight”.

The ruling says that “in this case, the squeaky wheel hasn’t gotten the grease.” Instead, it “was unlawfully discriminated against in the form of a career-defining” mental health assessment. Mrs. Petitt has four decades of flying experience and a PhD in aviation safety. Many within Delta saw her safety concerns and warnings as valid and told her to notify managers about this, according to the decision, but at the same time, other company officials identified her as a candidate for psychiatric evaluation.

The ruling, issued before Christmas, strongly criticizes Delta’s safety culture and more generally warns against management’s use of mandatory psychological assessments “for the purpose of obtaining blind compliance by its pilots.”

A Delta spokesperson said the carrier plans to appeal. In an email, the company also said it denies retaliation against Ms. Petitt for raising security concerns, adding “we took her security concerns seriously and investigated them carefully.” Without going into details in the decision, Delta said, “it does not tolerate retaliation of any kind,” encourages voluntary worker safety reporting, and offers workers “multiple ways to do this.”

Mr. Dickson’s involvement with Ms. Petitt and her case emerged as a major controversy during his July 2019 confirmation. He was not personally identified as a target of the lawsuit.

On behalf of the FAA administrator, a spokesman for the agency said that Mr. Dickson had only one meeting with Mrs. Petitt while at Delta, and instead allowed other company officials to handle her complaints and then refer them for evaluation. The spokesman pointed out what Mr. Dickson told the Senate Commerce Committee at its 2019 confirmation hearings, including that there were “legitimate questions about her fitness to fly” and that Delta’s reliance on psychiatric evaluations was non-punitive and non-discriminatory.

During his more than a decade in office as head of Delta’s flight operations before retiring and moving to the FAA, Mr. Dickson told lawmakers that individual pilot cases were handled by an experienced team, “and I had very little involvement in individual cases.” He also told the panel that he had directed “that appropriate follow-up actions were completed and contractual processes followed.”

The psychiatrist who gave the initial diagnosis, which Delta paid for, was forced to stop practicing drugs years later by Illinois regulatory agencies, in part because of inaccuracies regarding commercial pilot screening for the carrier. Under contract terms between Delta and her pilot union, Ms. Petitt was referred to physicians at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere for later evaluations. She and Delta shared the costs of those follow-up assessments, both of which rejected the original findings.

Upon reaching his diagnosis, the first psychiatrist did not refer to letters of support for Ms. Petitt, and according to the ruling, he did not interview anyone about Ms. Petitt, not even the doctor who approved her over the years to maintain a commercial pilot’s license. That initial diagnosis also revealed her experiences years earlier – going to night school while helping her husband’s business and also raising three children under the age of three – suggested mania.

Ms. Petitt was granted flight status after nearly two years and she is currently first officer on wide-body Airbus A330 jets. But the judge agreed that the episode took a “heavy emotional toll” on the pilot. Ms. Petitt has filed a lawsuit under aviation whistleblower status, alleging that she suffered financial damage and tarnished her professional reputation. The judge awarded her $ 500,000 in damages, along with back wages and other financial benefits. The decision also requires Delta to send each of its pilots a copy of the final warrant to deter similar management violations, the judge said, who called publishing his warrant “ potentially embarrassing, but not incriminating. ”

The ruling described Ms Petitt’s safety concerns as “cautious and reasonable,” including allegations such as chronic pilot fatigue, inadequate pilot training, falsification of training records and lack of confidence in some pilots to manually fly certain highly automated jetliner models.

In his statement in the lawsuit, Mr. Dickson that Delta “sought the help of an outside auditor” to look at what he remembered was Ms. Petitt’s legitimate safety concerns before the company sent her for a psychiatric evaluation.

The ruling calls Mr. Dickson’s testimony in the case vague, evasive and “less than credible”. The judge wrote that the internal company emails from Mr. Dickson stressed that Delta’s “acclaimed” open door policy “” for security concerns “was not” as open as suggested “by the company. The FAA spokesman declined to comment on that point.

Ms. Petitt’s attorney, Lee Seham, said his client declined to comment for fear of possible retaliation from the company. Mr. Seham said the file shows that senior current and former Delta security officials, including Mr. Dickson, have not indicated how they viewed Ms. Petitt’s underlying security concerns.

Write to Andy Pasztor at [email protected]