Fired Southeast Airlines Pilot Sues Over Safety Issues
Flying overweight. Flying too many hours. Spotty record-keeping.
Those are some of the allegations in two separate lawsuits against
five-year old Southeast Airlines.
Southeast managers insist their supplemental carrier is safe.
Pilots, however, disagree.
Take the case of former Southeast pilot Richard Hirst. In
September, 2002, he was scheduled to fly a DC-9 from Orlando (FL)
to Newark (NJ). The aircraft that day weighed in at 108,000 pounds.
According to the flight manual, that was 3,000 pounds over maximum
weight. In his lawsuit, Hirst says Operations Manager Steve Malone
told him to fly it anyway. Hirst asked Malone for documentation
that flying 3,000 pounds over weight wasn't a safety risk, Malone
shouted at him, saying, "I can't get you a copy of that. It's none
of your g--d--- business." What Malone didn't know was that Hirst
was secretly recording the conversation.
Hirst refused to fly the overweight DC-9 and was fired the next
day. His lawsuit has unleashed a flurry of accusations from pilots.
Some say their training was conducted under substandard conditions
with substandard materials. Others say they, along with their
flight attendants, were forced to fly more hours than allowed by
the FAA and were forced to fly even when sick.
The St. Petersburg Times reports James Ford also has a gripe
with Southeast. Signing on with the airline in 1999, after it rose
from the ashes of SunJet Airlines, Ford tells of an incident back
when he was a first officer.
He was on a flight from San Juan to Orlando in July, 2002. "We
got a... nose-gear-unsafe light that came on, which basically means
you don't know the status of that nose gear, whether it's going to
drop out of the bay or, upon landing, it might retract," he told
the Times. Upon safely arriving in Orlando, Ford's captain, Leroy
Wunderlich, notified maintenance that he wanted the problem checked
out before returning to Puerto Rico and that he would write it up
on the logbook.
"The mechanic at Southeast over in St. Pete responded, 'Do not
write it up in the maintenance log.... Do your (turnaround) in
Orlando, pick up the people, fly them down to San Juan (and) the
work will be conducted in San Juan. That way, you're keeping the
integrity of the schedule.'"
Wunderlich refused. A Delta mechanic was called in, but said the
repair was going to take quite awhile. Southeast refused to allow
that. Instead, the flight was canceled and Wunderlich, along with
Ford, were told to fly the aircraft gear-down to St.
Petersburg.
A day later, Wunderlich phone Ford to say he was forced to
resign.
"When we got back to St. Pete, Malone called me and told me to
come in and bring my ID," he said. "He handed me the letter of
resignation and told me to sign it."
Southeast denies the allegation. The airline's vice president
for administration and legal affairs, Terence Haglund, told the St.
Petersburg newspaper, "I can tell you that no one has been or ever
will be fired from Southeast Airlines for reporting a safety
issue," Haglund said. "The concept is so foreign to me."
Then why are so many allegations of safety and administrative
violations coming to light? "They're all friends," Haglund said of
the pilots. "What's their motivation for perjury? I don't know....
They're disgruntled former employees."
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