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."

FMI: www.flyseal.com