2024's Sleaziest Airline Award goes to...AMERICAN AIRLINES!

Wait until you hear what they did now.

Happy New Year! Today we’ll be revealing why American Airlines is taking home The Landing’s first-ever sleaziest airline trophy.

This post was ready to go at the end of December, but when it came time to hit the send button, I couldn’t. I figured that like me, you were receiving enough New Year’s content, from marketing emails to social media ads to pointless news stories ranking everything from 2024.

I’m still getting them—are you? They’ve swerved from motivational to scolding, even if their product doesn’t apply to me in the slightest: Quit smoking! Buy this weird bra if you want to look presentable! Lose 20 pounds! Gain 20 pounds! Give up alcohol and start microdosing mushrooms! Your wrinkles are out of control! The marketers know one thing: we’re not good enough, and they’re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Back to American Airlines. I felt this post needed to be sent, even if it’s suddenly 2025. The airline really pushed boundaries and went for the gold with their whole chest and damn it, they deserve to be singled out for it.

Don’t worry—it’s not all doom and gloom. As always, we’ll talk about what can be done to make things better for the most vulnerable employees of the airline industry, and…

…look out for an exclusive interview next month with a brave flight attendant who did everything she could to get her airline to do the right thing (spoiler alert: They didn’t). Stay tuned.

---

Alleged AMERICAN AIRLINES PREDATOR Estes Carter Thompson III after his arrest in Virginia.

Now—storytime:

Mary Doe, just 9 years old, is an unaccompanied minor buckled into her seat next to strangers on a big old American Airlines airplane bound for Los Angeles.

Along the way, she leaves her seat to use the bathroom. A friendly flight attendant, a man tasked with getting her to her destination safely, tells Mary he has to “clean up a mess” before he lets her in the first-class restroom, and soon enough, he does.

When she’s done in the lavatory, she makes her way back to her seat.

What happened after that is something that appalled a nation—but would not surprise regular readers of The Landing.

It turned out that an iPhone was hidden on the back of the toilet seat (an image of the rig can be found here) while Mary was using the lavatory. Months after her trip, the flight attendant, Estes Carter Thompson III, 37, was arrested for allegedly secretly filming Mary Doe and multiple other girls from the ages of 7 to 14 on different flights, federal prosecutors say. The 9-year-old’s family filed a lawsuit in February.

(You can read all about how a 14-year-old girl discovered the hidden device, photographed it, and helped nail the scumbag, who remains in federal custody).

Faced with lawsuits by the girls’ families, American Airlines turned to their go-to move, which is to take what any reasonable person would say—which is to say this is an abomination and the girls were victimized, plain and simple—discard any sense of decency, and come up with the most depraved defense possible.

And they would do this shamelessly because they’re used to getting away with it.

American Airlines’s lawyers blamed the victim. The court filing in May 2024 put the blame squarely on the 9-year-old child.

“Any injuries or illnesses alleged to have been sustained by Plaintiff, Mary Doe, were proximately caused by Plaintiff’s own fault and negligence, were proximately caused by Plaintiff’s use of the compromised lavatory, which she knew or should have known contained a visible and illuminated recording device,” court papers say.

You read that right. The 9-year-old little girl traveling alone was at fault for a 37-year-old predator allegedly stealing her innocence.

American was going along with that defense without a peep.

Until they got caught.

The world’s media went ballistic when the girl’s attorney spoke out. Wall-to-wall mainstream coverage of the filing put American Airlines in the firing line.

“To blame a 9 year old for being filmed while using the airplane bathroom is both shocking and outrageous,” said Paul Llewellyn of Lewis & Llewellyn LLP. “In my opinion this is a depraved legal strategy that sinks to a new low. American Airlines should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.”

“Instead of taking responsibility for this awful event, American Airlines is actually blaming our daughter for being filmed,” the girl’s mother added in a statement to news media. “How in good conscience could they even make such a suggestion? It both shocks and angers us. American Airlines has no shame.”

American tried to weasel out of it (with apologies to weasels) by blaming “outside counsel,” but like you and I, Llewellyn knows American thought they’d get away with this sleaze like they usually do.

"I believe the only way, the only reason they amended their answer to this defense is because of the backlash that they received," Llewellyn said. "Actions speak louder than words."

Like many lawyers before him, Llewellyn found out just how low American is willing to go to wriggle out of responsibility and cover up bad behavior by their employees.

The families say American Airlines never reached out to them and never apologized, according to news reports.

You don’t say?

They need to face backlash more often. Keep the pressure on.

Speak up. Silence benefits the offender, not the victim.

Has American Airlines done something outrageous to you? Drop me a line.

---

Don’t Worry, I Know About the Other Awful Airlines

We’ll get to them as time goes on. For now…

I have other reasons besides these poor girls’ treatment for bestowing American Airlines with the 2024 sleaziest airline award.

Unfortunately, there are things I can’t say due to privacy concerns, and believe me, I wish I could. Trust me when I say I’m getting new reports of things American has done that are as outrageous as what they did to this 9-year-old girl, and if the public knew, there would be backlash.

There’s a saying that what you read in the news is about 10 percent of what the journalist knows about the story.

This figure is about right. I wish I could say more. One day maybe I can.

Anyway, American Airlines also wins this year because of previous vile treatment of women who did nothing but serve valiantly in the skies—and dared to report their assaults, hoping for some support.

A few of them:

• Greta Anderson, American Airlines flight attendant, whose assault and retaliation case I wrote about in 2022. (She won!). Apparently she wrote a book about it that came out in May, and I’ve reached out to her about a Kindle or ebook version, but haven’t heard back yet.

  

• Kimberly Goesling, American Airlines flight attendant, who was sexually assaulted on a work trip by “celebrity chef” Mark Sargeant after male American Airlines employees allegedly egged on the drunk chef and provided Goesling’s room number to him, leading to the assault. In open court, some of American’s tactics included minimizing the effect sexual violence has on victims by questioning “whether Ms. Goesling suffered from PTSD and by contending that her portrayal of the trauma present in her life post-assault was exaggerated.”

• Mary, American Airlines flight attendant. She told Goesling’s lawyers her own story in a sworn affidavit: In 1977, the AA captain on the flight she was working on drugged her drink and raped her on a layover. She didn’t report the attack for fear of retaliation. “I did not tell American Airlines what (the captain) did to me because I believed that I would not be believed and that I would be fired,” she wrote in the affidavit. “American does not like snitches and I believe I would be blackballed by cockpit crew for reporting one of their own.” Turned out the pilot was a repeat offender who’d drugged and raped other flight attendants, Mary wrote in the affidavit for Goesling’s attorneys.

• All of First Officer Sten Molin’s victims.

• Leeane "Leela” Hansen, flight attendant and Jeanette Beckman, flight attendant. They were sexually assaulted and/or harassed by American Airlines F.O. Sigsbee Nelson, court papers say. A civil court recently found they did not prove these allegations and they lost their case. No word on an appeal yet. To this day, there has been no known investigation by American into their on-duty first officer Sigsbee Nelson looking for booze in the middle of a long-haul flight to Brazil in 2019, court papers say.

  Is your American Airlines pilot drunk? You’ll never know. Not unless people as brave as Hansen and Beckman report him. But look what happened to them when they did…

And Finally…

American Airlines wins 2024 for the totality of decades of allegations against them, including allegedly ignoring multiple reports their First Officer Sten Molin, who would go on to kill himself and 264 people, was an unhinged predator.

Many who knew him, crewed with him, dated him under coercive circumstances (such as telling very young girlfriends he was younger than he was or claiming to be a military hero), or were sexually assaulted/raped/groomed by Sten Molin, say that if American Airlines had taken their complaints seriously, he might not have been at the controls the day of the fateful crash that destroyed countless lives and families.

Some who are made uncomfortable by the ugliness of this story like to say let it go. That the Sten Molin story is done. I agree with that idea; I’d love to never see or hear his name again.

But the sentiment is wrong. The work is nowhere near done.

The job is to stop the next Sten Molin. The next Flight 587. The next tragedy that might be caused largely by an airline supporting and keeping on a pilot they know might be unfit, like a mediocre FO who never made captain, who was hopped up on stimulants including pure ephedrine as the pilot flying Flight 587, who was up nights sending bizarre, sexually violent fantasies in unwanted emails to young flight attendants, who yawned and babbled and sang before takeoff in what, by law, should’ve been a sterile flight deck on November 12, 2001, and whose aggressive use of the rudder ultimately contributed to bringing the plane down.

Flight 587 shortly before takeoff on that fateful day.

As long as there’s a system in place in the airline industry that discourages reporting, retaliates against victims and whistleblowers, and protects predators, we’re not safe in the skies. SPEAK UP. Support your colleagues who do. Be the change you want to see!

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

-Sara

---

About me

I’m an award-winning journalist and bestselling author with decades of international experience writing for magazines and newspapers including People, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the Sunday Times Magazine (UK), Glamour, Shape, Epicurious.com, and more.

My 2021 memoir/military history book The Strong Ones: How a Band of Civilian Women Made Their Mark on the Army was an overnight #1 bestseller on Amazon in 2021. Said former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, “The Strong Ones provides an inspirational message for our times.” My mystery novel The Underdogs (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was an Editors’ Pick on Amazon in 2016.

My crime reporting includes the most high-profile cases of the past decades. I’ve been sent to Italy to report on the Amanda Knox case, Portugal to cover Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, London to cover the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, L.A. for the death of Michael Jackson, and Sandy Hook, Conn. to cover the horrific school shooting, to name a few.

I was the first-ever recipient of the Jane Cunningham Croly Award for Excellence in Journalism Covering Issues of Concern to Women from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Winners after me included Marianne Pearl, and judges were legends in journalism like Judy Woodruff. I contributed to the feminist anthology Letters of Intent (Free Press/Simon & Schuster) alongside such icons as Gloria Steinem, Ntozake Shange and Judy Blume, receiving a review from the New York Times. I am the author of a total of 13 fiction and nonfiction books, some of them under a pen name.