The FAA chief helped Delta retaliate against the whistleblower, rules of the administrative judge

The decision supported Petitt’s claims that she was chosen for special scrutiny to try to keep her silent about security issues. Scott Morris, the judge who presided over the long litigation, determined that Delta punished and discriminated against a federally protected whistleblower without any evidence indicating that his “performance as a pilot was deficient in any way”. According to the decision, “not a single witness questioned his perspicacity to fly”.

The decision says that “in this case, the squeaky wheel did not receive the grease”. Instead, “it was illegally discriminated against in the form of a career-defining mental health assessment.” Ms. Petitt has four decades of flying experience and a doctorate in aviation security. Many within Delta viewed her safety concerns and warnings as valid and told her to inform managers about them, according to the decision, but at the same time other company employees identified her as a candidate for psychiatric evaluation.

Published before Christmas, the ruling contains strong criticisms of Delta’s safety culture and, more broadly, warns against the use of mandatory psychological assessment management “with the aim of achieving blind compliance by its pilots”.

A spokesman for Delta said the carrier plans to appeal. In an email, the company also said that it denies that Petitt was retaliated for raising security concerns, adding that “we take your security concerns seriously and investigate them carefully.” Without going into details in the decision, Delta said it “has zero tolerance for retaliation in any form”, encourages voluntary safety reporting by employees and provides “various ways for employees to do this”.

Dickson’s involvement with Petitt and his case emerged as a major controversy during his confirmation in July 2019. He was not personally cited as the target of the dispute.

Speaking on behalf of the FAA administrator, an agency spokesman said Dickson had only one meeting with Petitt while he was at Delta and instead allowed other employees of the company to handle his complaints and subsequent referral for evaluation. The spokesman pointed to what Dickson said to the Senate Commerce Committee during his 2019 confirmation hearings, including that there were “legitimate questions about his ability to fly” and that Delta’s confidence in psychiatric assessments was non-punitive and not discriminatory.

During his ten-year tenure as head of Delta flight operations before retiring and moving to the FAA, Mr. Dickson told lawmakers that individual pilots’ issues were handled by an experienced team, “and I had very little involvement in individual cases ”. He also told the panel that he had provided guidance “that the appropriate follow-up actions have been completed and that the contractual processes have been followed”.

The psychiatrist who gave the initial diagnosis, which Delta paid for, years later was forced by Illinois regulators to stop practicing medicine in part due to improprieties involving commercial pilot screening for the carrier. According to the terms of the contract between Delta and its pilots’ union, Ms. Petitt was referred to doctors at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere for subsequent evaluations. She and Delta shared the cost of these follow-up reviews, both of which repudiated the original findings.

Upon reaching the diagnosis, the first psychiatrist made no reference to any letter of support to Mrs. Petitt and, according to the decision, did not interview anyone about Mrs. Petitt, not even the doctor who over the years approved her to retain commercial pilot license. This initial diagnosis also revealed her experiences years ago – going to night school while helping with her husband’s business and also raising three children under the age of three – suggested mania.

Mrs. Petitt has been restored to flying status after almost two years and is currently the first officer on wide-body Airbus A330 jets. But the judge agreed that the episode had a “strong emotional impact” on the pilot. Ms. Petitt filed a lawsuit under the aviation whistleblower status, claiming that she suffered financial damage and a blow to her professional reputation. The judge awarded her $ 500,000 in compensatory damages, along with arrears and other financial benefits. The decision also requires Delta to send each of its pilots a copy of the final order to deter similar management violations, according to the judge, who rated the disclosure of his order “possibly embarrassing, but not costly”.

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

In his testimony in the litigation, Mr. Dickson said that Delta “sought the help of an external auditor” to investigate what he remembered to be Petitt’s legitimate safety concerns before the company sent her in for a psychiatric assessment. .

The decision considers Dickson’s testimony in the case vague, evasive and “less than reliable”. The judge wrote that internal emails from Dickson’s company highlighted that Delta’s “much-touted ‘open door policy’” for security complaints “was not as open as portrayed” by the company. The FAA spokesman declined to comment on this point.

Petitt’s lawyer, Lee Seham, said his client declined to comment because he feared possible reprisals by the company. Seham said the case record shows that senior security officials and former Delta employees, including Dickson, did not specify how they examined Petitt’s security concerns.

Write to Andy Pasztor at [email protected]