On Christmas Eve 2016, Karlene Petitt, an international long-haul pilot for Delta Air Lines, received a devastating letter that threatened to end her career.
She had been grounded since March pending an evaluation by a company-appointed doctor. Her letter informed him of her diagnosis: she was mentally unfit for duty and would not be allowed to fly again.
Petitt had flown commercial airliners for 35 years. He had raised three children, earned a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees, and written a number of books, all while performing flawlessly as a pilot.
In early November of the previous year, he had sent emails to his superiors criticizing Delta’s safety culture, starting a series of interactions with them on safety issues.
Just six days later, Capt. Jim Graham, then Delta’s vice president of flight operations, in an email to a pilot manager below him, clearly indicated his intention to end Petitt’s criticism and do so using a Kafkaesque process. called “Section 15”, which would label her as too mentally unstable to be a pilot.
“We should consider whether a Section 15 is appropriate,” Graham wrote. “If she can’t accept and understand the reasons behind our actions, it stands to reason that she can’t make the right decisions for the safe operation of a flight.”
Hired by Delta for $74,000, Dr. David Altman produced the necessary diagnosis: In 2016, he evaluated Petitt as having bipolar disorder.
Altman later testified that his diagnosis was prompted in part by Petitt’s accomplishments. The books, the titles, the piloting work, all while she was raising the children, was “way beyond what any woman she’s ever known could do” and thus she suggested that she was manic.
This extraordinary process brought the full weight of a large corporation onto Petitt. She was grounded. Her career was overlooked.
However, she defended herself. She resisted. and she won
A “Soviet-style” psychiatric evaluation
On Friday, a final settlement of Petitt’s case after a six-and-a-half-year legal battle sealed a comprehensive loss for Delta and a rare case of complete vindication for a whistleblower.
Administrative Law Judge Scott Morris upheld his earlier order characterizing Delta’s use of psychiatric diagnosis as an abuse of an established mental evaluation system for cases of last resort.
Morris ruled it “unsuitable for [Delta] to put together this process in order to get blind compliance from their pilots.”
Delta must pay Petitt $500,000 in compensation plus years of legal fees.
Meanwhile, Altman in 2020 lost his medical license rather than face charges for his conduct.
Previously, after Altman’s diagnosis fell apart, Delta was forced to reinstate Petitt.
Petitt’s attorney, Lee Seham, has represented 50 or 60 aviation industry whistleblowers in his career, but said he’s “never been in a war of attrition as ugly as with Delta before.”
“They lost to an administrative law judge, they lost to the appellate body, they were thrown out by the 11th Circuit,” he said. “They were willing to litigate to the death.”
Yet even after Altman’s discredit and the loss of the case, Delta did not discipline any employees for implementing what Seham calls a “Soviet-style psychiatric exam” to try to silence Petitt.
In response to a request for comment, Delta provided a statement in which it did not apologize and did not admit any wrongdoing.
“We made a business decision to resolve the matter rather than appeal a decision we disagreed with,” spokeswoman Catherine Morrow wrote in an email. “Delta’s eligibility for service testing process for pilots was put in place to ensure safety and it works.”
Seham finds that worrying.
“I don’t know if the message to Delta pilots is anything other than to keep your mouth shut,” he said.
“It is worrying that an airline could act with that level of impunity,” added Seham. “Because you can’t have a safe airline if the pilots are scared.”
Still, Petitt, who never bowed to pressure, has returned to flying international routes for Delta from Seattle.
Petitt Report on Delta’s Safety Culture
Reached by phone Friday, Petitt said she was unable to comment because of the company’s ban on speaking to the media without permission while identifying herself as a Delta employee.
Legal filings, including internal Delta management emails revealed in discovery, tell the story.
Petitt, 60, has a doctorate in aviation safety from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. In late 2015, she heard then-Delta CEO Richard Anderson in a keynote address say that all employees had a duty to speak up if they were aware of safety issues. Such concerns were the subject of the Ph.D. thesis she was working on at the time.
Petitt began requesting meetings with his supervisors at Delta, including Graham and his boss, Senior Vice President of Flight Operations Steve Dickson, who was later named head of the Federal Aviation Administration.
In early 2016, Petitt submitted a report to Dickson and Graham that listed a number of failures and included an analysis of some near-catastrophic incidents.
That March, Graham pulled the trigger on Section 15 and referred Petitt for a mental health evaluation to Altman, with whom the company had a longstanding relationship. Petitt learned of the diagnosis in the mail that Christmas Eve.
The Section 15 process then allows the accused pilot to select an independent medical examiner. If that doctor disagrees with the company doctor, they have to agree on a third neutral examiner to decide the case.
Petitt involved a panel of nine physicians from the Department of Aerospace Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. They unanimously concluded that she did not suffer from bipolar disorder, nor any psychiatric disorder.
Dr. Lawrence Steinkraus of the Mayo Clinic testified that Altman’s diagnosis was “a puzzle for our group.”
“The evidence does not support the presence of a psychiatric diagnosis, but does support an organizational/corporate effort to delist this pilot,” Steinkraus testified.
When the neutral doctor backed the Mayo Clinic doctors, Petitt had to be reinstated.
Meanwhile, Petitt had filed a whistleblower complaint.
To greatly help his case, Chicago-based Altman relinquished his medical license in 2020 rather than face charges from the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation for his conduct of psychiatric examinations in the cases of two Delta pilots, one of whom was Petitt.
In December 2020, Judge Morris issued a scathing ruling that accused Delta of “weaponizing” the Section 15 process to silence internal dissent. In it, he noted of Petitt’s skill as a pilot that “not a single witness questioned his flying acumen.”
He called Graham’s testimony “of questionable credibility.”
Morris awarded Petitt the $500,000 in compensation after considering “not only the damage to her reputation, the embarrassment and emotional hardship she has endured over an extended period, but also… the realistic loss of future promotional opportunities.”
He ordered Delta to post copies of its decision prominently at each pilot base, so its more than 13,000 pilots would be aware.
Morris also ordered that Petitt be reinstated at the highest salaries of any Delta first officer and make up for lost flight time.
Delta appealed but lost again. Friday’s settlement ended the case.
I keep flying
In 2019, the case sparked political uproar when President Donald Trump nominated Steve Dickson as FAA administrator.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, met with Petitt in person and found her credible, she said in an interview.
In a speech on the Senate floor at the confirmation hearing, Cantwell urged his Democratic colleagues to oppose Dickson’s appointment expressly because of Petitt’s treatment.
“I ask my colleagues to reject this nomination today and to help us create an environment where whistleblowers are heard,” Cantwell said then.
However, Dickson was confirmed in office, but with only 52 votes in the Senate.
The resigned as FAA administrator in Februarylittle more than half of his term.
In October 2020, Graham was promoted to CEO of Endeavor, Delta’s regional airline subsidiary, and senior vice president of Delta Connection, the airline’s partnership with regional carriers Skywest and Republic Airways.
Petitt has returned to flying for Delta since independent doctors finally debunked Altman’s diagnosis in 2017. In her current assignment, if you’re flying Delta from Seattle to London or Paris on an Airbus A330, she can be your pilot.
