Delta Pilot Andrea Ratfield: Case Closed

Plus, coming soon: The Landing List (get ready), and a secret book by a commercial pilot

Delta Air Lines Captain Andrea Ratfield’s sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit against the airline is apparently done and dusted.

Photo by Trac Vu on Unsplash

I’m late on this news after covering the case closely, and I’m sorry about that. As some of you know, I spent much of 2024 worrying about cancer surgery, getting second opinions across state lines, and deciding how much of what body part to get cut out. I got the surgery in early September. It turned out to be precancer, and I’m OK, though when I look in the mirror now I see an unsettling purple slash across my throat like I’ve been mugged. I’m told this isn’t uncommon, and I’ll get used to it.

Anyway, this is about Delta Captain Andrea Ratfield, who took her airline to the cleaners.

Well, that’s what it looks like to me, anyway. I haven’t heard back from her legal team, and the one news article out there is behind a paywall. So this is where we’re very careful with our language when we don’t hold all the facts.

I hope to bring you some exclusive details soon, though with airlines generally expecting nondisclosure agreements when they settle, I’m guessing there won’t be much new information coming my way. That said, we don’t know if Andrea signed an NDA or not. It appears she’s still flying for Delta, per her LinkedIn profile.

According to Bloomberg Law, here’s how the case was put to rest in August of 2024:

A female Delta Air Lines pilot has agreed to dismiss her retaliation and sexual harassment suit Thursday against the airline with prejudice.

Andrea Ratfield plausibly alleged that she had been subjected to “a sexually hostile work environment emblematic of ‘the good ol’ boys club,’” Judge Katherine Menendez, of the US District Court for the District of Minnesota, ruled in previously denying in part Delta’s motion to dismiss…

(This is where the paywall runs out. Hook me up with the rest of the text if you have a subscription).

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What Andrea Did

By pushing back against alleged retaliation, sexual harassment and sexual assault (a male pilot allegedly grabbed her breasts) by her own employer, she exposed systemic rot. Her case is closed, but all the court filings remain.

The original longform piece I wrote remains the most-read story on The Landing. By standing up for herself, Andrea also stood up for others.

More victims and survivors of retaliation and sexual abuse/harassment at their airlines have told me they found these stories and realized they weren’t alone; some of them have hired lawyers.

I’ve included a brief recap of Andrea’s case below, but to get the full narrative and context, I recommend reading the original stories.

The lawsuit was filed after Andrea sought help from her employer to cope after she was raped at an aviation event, at which point her suit says Delta retaliated against her. Per her amended complaint:

On September 26, 2017, Plaintiff Ratfield was repeatedly raped during a female aviation event in New York City. In October 2017, she reported the rapes to Captain Scott Monjeau and asked for his assistance dealing with the stress caused by the rapes, the constant sexual harassment, and repeated gender discrimination.

Ratfield also advised Captain Monjeau that she was drinking to deal with the rapes and he encouraged her, without explanation, to enter into the Human Intervention Motivation Study (“HIMS”) program and claimed she would get the help that she needed, that it would be a quick 5-weeks “Pilot Program” and that she would be “in-and-out.”

Ratfield sued Delta for gender discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliation. The amended complaint filed in August 2023 (embedded in my earlier story) reads like a thriller film script with twists and turns, eye-popping this-can’t-be-real moments, and allegations of shocking abuses of power. To wit: “Delta did not require Plaintiff Ratfield to undergo alcohol treatment prior to her complaints of sexual harassment and gender discrimination,” the suit says.

Among her allegations in the suit:

• During a layover in Washington D.C. in 2015, First Officer Aubrey Venable told Ratfield she needed a “nipple to suck down [her] drink.” She asked him to quit making offensive comments. Venable came up behind her, reached around, grabbed her breasts, and exclaimed “I found your nipples!” Ratfield reported him to her captain John Sollinger the next day, but nothing was done.

• In April 2016, Captain Cardis, Captain Baltera, and other male pilots commented that the fit of Ratfield’s uniform created a “camel toe.”

Yet instead of disciplining the perpetrators in any of these incidents, Delta turned on Ratfield—one of its few female captains—and instigated a bizarre campaign of attrition that left her navigating a Kafkaesque fog of gaslighting and retaliation, according to the explosive lawsuit filed by her attorneys in a Minnesota court.

One of the central horrors of what Delta put her through was to submit her to a PEth test—which can identify biomarkers for alcohol consumption—that was administered incorrectly, according to Andrea’s methodical documentation of the event. That incorrectly done test produced a false positive, court papers say.

Her suit says male pilots are routinely offered second-chance tests to confirm questionable results, but Andrea was not offered a second chance even though she immediately had her own test done and passed with flying colors—no alcohol detected. The airline simply refused to accept the results of the second test.

Once again, Andrea was not given the recourse male pilots routinely are.

Back when I originally contacted Delta for comment about Andrea’s lawsuit, a spokesperson sent this statement:

“Delta is aware of the complaints and allegations. While we do not comment on pending litigation, Delta has zero tolerance for sexual misconduct, retaliation or discrimination in any form by its employees and takes seriously any allegations of this nature. Nothing is more important than the safety, health and well-being of our employees, and we continually invest to ensure our employees have the resources they need, including tripling our investment in mental health resources in recent years.”

Delta women and minorities, is this true? Judging by the amount of messages and advice-seeking queries I’ve received from you over the past couple of years, I’m voting for…no? It seems like Delta management—hey there, Ed Bastian—says one thing and does another.

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Get ready for THE LANDING LIST

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I’ve been working on a list that will name and categorize airlines and employees featured in The Landing’s many stories over the years.

The idea is to provide an at-a-glance view of institutional dysfunction and illegal actions across the airline industry.

Sten Molin of American Airlines and Michael Haak of Southwest Airlines are some of the names on the list. These men are two examples of why we do this work: The problem wasn’t simply that there were two rotten apples among many fine aviators at their respective airlines, but that the airlines protected, supported, covered up for and allowed them to continue their alleged sexual harassment and/or assault until they killed people (in Molin’s case) or put a plane full of passengers in danger as he got naked and allegedly jerked off all over the flight deck, probably traumatizing his co-pilot (in Haak’s case).

THE LANDING LIST will be a living, breathing document with additions and subtractions as needed.

Here’s my LinkedIn post about the upcoming list, which takes a depressingly long time to complete because there are so many cases.

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Voices in Aviation on DEI

A succession of insightful and informative pieces have been cycling through my feeds and popping into my inbox in recent days.

I still wanted to highlight the below articles, which I had already written about before the D.C. crash, so keep in mind the authors put them out before this tragedy.

I urge you to read their full stories beyond my cherry-picked passages to get the full picture each writer meant to convey.

Liz Booker, Literary Aviatrix

Liz Booker, aka Literary Aviatrix, “is a retired U.S. Coast Guard helicopter pilot and foreign diplomat,” her website says. She’s also a writer for young adults crafting fiction to inspire the next generation of women in aviation, and she created a community of readers and writers for women in aviation as Literary Aviatrix and with the Aviatrix Book Club.

I follow her on LinkedIn and saw her blog post about her experiences as a woman in aviation and in the military. She writes,

No pilot, regardless of gender or race, wants to believe their license, certification, qualification, or employment was awarded by systemic or personal favoritism. This is true of many avocations to be sure, but we’re a particularly proud bunch. To quote a beloved pilot-mentor of mine, “We’re not cocky. We’re appropriately arrogant.”

Why? Because we know what it takes, especially in this modern era of aviation, to earn those certifications. The standards are clear, and if we earned the little card with the picture of Wilbur and Orville in our pocket, we met those standards. We understand the stakes of not meeting those standards, even after we’ve earned the license. Gravity is indisputable.

Booker adds,

I personally experienced the limitations of gender bias (if not outright misogyny) at several junctures in my own career, but none more clearly illustrative than being eliminated from a candidate pool, despite being the best qualified, based solely on my gender. (Click the link to read more).

William McGee

A Senior Fellow for Aviation & Travel at American Economic Liberties Project, this FAA-licensed aircraft dispatcher spent seven years in airline flight operations management.

In his piece for Frommers, The Big Lie of Aviation DEI: The White House claims diversity threatened airline safety. Here’s proof it hasn't, he writes:

It's unclear yet how some corporations will respond, but already, American Airlines has reportedly “abandoned its DEI hiring practices.”

To say that DEI has been an obsession in certain aviation circles is an understatement. For years, airline blogs have been rife with unfounded claims about incompetent hires.

Many airline executives who have been loudest about the brain drains in the aviation industry have also been silent on supporting DEI recruitment that would directly help remedy those shortages.

To date, there have been no public accusations of inflight incidents or accidents tied directly to employees that were unqualified for their jobs as pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers, dispatchers, engineers, or any other FAA-licensed personnel.

Kathryn Creedy

This veteran aviation journalist is a TOP 100 Women in Aerospace & Aviation Nominee to follow on LinkedIn 2025. She writes on LinkedIn while sharing William McGee’s latest piece:

Are you telling me, American Airlines, all the people of color and women you hired to command your aircraft, craft your agenda, run your company, manage your maintenance and strategy departments are unqualified?????? That is what you are saying when you pull back on #diversity, #equity and #inclusion. You are saying that all the hiring you've done is because of someone's race, gender, orientation or whatever is because they met DEI quotas.

In my experience with #airlines, they don't hire on DEI, they hire on qualifications which is what McGee points out in this column. That's the big lie you have swallowed hook, line and sinker so you can survive the political winds.

And finally, as promised in the subhed…

There is a secret book coming out soon from a commercial pilot. When it’s ready, I’ll be featuring it here.

Thanks for reading. Hit me up any time with tips, comments, or news.

-Sara