The FAA chief had helped Delta retaliate against the administrative judge’s rules

The ruling supported Ms. Petitt’s claims that a special examination was chosen to try to keep her quiet about security issues. Scott Morris, the judge who presided over the lengthy lawsuit, determined Delta punished and discriminated against a federally protected whistleblower without any evidence to indicate that “his performance as a pilot was deficient in any way.” According to the ruling, “not a single witness questioned his insight into the flight.”

The sentence says that “in this case, the crunchy wheel did not get fat.” In contrast, “illegally discriminated in the form of career defining” mental health assessment. Petitt has four decades of flight experience and a PhD in aviation safety. Many inside Delta saw 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 officials identified her as a candidate for psychiatric evaluation.

Issued before Christmas, the ruling contains strong criticism of Delta’s safety culture and warns more broadly against management’s use of mandatory psychological assessments “with the goal of obtaining blind compliance from its pilots. “.

A Delta spokesman said the company plans to appeal. In an email, the company also said it denies Ms. Petitt has been retaliated against for raising security issues, adding that “we took her security concerns seriously and investigated them carefully.” Without delving into the details of the decision, Delta said it “has zero tolerance for retaliation in any form,” encourages voluntary safety notification by employees, and provides “several ways to do so.”

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

Speaking to the FAA administrator, an agency spokesman said Mr. Dickson only had a meeting with Ms. Petitt while in Delta and instead allowed other company officials to manage. their complaints and subsequent referral for evaluation. The spokesman noted what Mr. Dickson told the Senate Trade Committee during his 2019 confirmation hearings, including that there were “legitimate questions about his ability to fly” and that Delta’s reliance on the psychiatric assessments were non-punitive and non-discriminatory.

During his ten-month tenure as head of Delta flight operations before retiring and moving to the FAA, Dickson told lawmakers that individual pilot issues were handled by an experienced team. , “and I had very little involvement in individual cases.” He also told the group that he had instructed “that the appropriate follow-up actions were completed and that the contractual processes were 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 because of the inadequacies involved in detecting commercial pilots for the carrier. Under the contractual arrangements between Delta and her pilots’ union, Ms. Petitt was referred to doctors at the Mayo Clinic and other locations for further evaluations. She and Delta shared the cost of these follow-up reviews, which repudiated the original findings.

Upon reaching her diagnosis, the first psychiatrist did not refer to any letter of support for Ms. Petitt and, according to the ruling, did not interview anyone about Ms. Petitt, not even the doctor who over the years approve to retain it. a commercial pilot license. This initial diagnosis also found that 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 regained her flying condition after nearly two years and is currently the first officer on the wide-body Airbus A330 aircraft. But the judge agreed that the episode caused a “severe emotional toll” on the pilot. Ms. Petitt filed a lawsuit under a statute of aviation whistleblowers, alleging that she suffered financial damages and affected her professional reputation. The judge awarded him $ 500,000 in compensatory damages, along with compensation and other economic benefits. The decision also requires Delta to send each of its pilots a copy of the final order to deter similar transgressions in management, according to the judge, who described the publicity of his order as “possibly embarrassing, but not onerous.”

The ruling 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 lack of confidence on the part of some pilots. to manually fly some highly automated airline models.

In his deposition in the litigation, Mr. Dickson said Delta “requested the assistance of an external auditor” to examine what he recalled were Ms. Petitt’s legitimate security concerns, before the company sent him to do a psychiatric evaluation.

The sentence says Dickson’s testimony in the case is vague, evasive and “less than credible.” The judge wrote that Dickson’s internal company emails highlighted that Delta’s “widespread” open door policy for security complaints “was not as open as portrayed” by the company. an FAA spokesman declined to comment on the matter.

Mrs Petitt’s lawyer, Lee Seham, said her client refused to comment for fear of possible retaliation from the company. Mr Seham said the case record shows that Delta’s current and former senior security officials, including Mr Dickson, did not specify how they examined Ms Petitt’s underlying security concerns.

Write to Andy Pasztor to [email protected]