Did Delta Lie in Karlene Petitt Court Papers?; Non-Drunk United Pilot Michael Tallon Railroaded?
Newest battles inside the weirdly retaliatory and sometimes sleazy airlines
Before we dive into Airlines Retaliating Badly, a note about how to support whistleblowers and/or airline employees engaged in financially and emotionally brutal legal battles.
One easy way is to buy their books.*
Karlene Petitt’s catalogue includes thrillers, children’s books, and non-fiction. In her latest, the #1 bestselling AIR21: Delta’s Debacle, she details her battle with the airline and provides a guide to anyone who’s being abused at work. Buy it here. If you purchase it from her website, you could win a car!
This series is by whistleblower Mike Simkins, who was fired for refusing to fly tired when he was a senior captain for Thomas Cook Airlines. His newest book’s jacket copy: “The second book in the Pulling Wings From Butterflies trilogy blows the cockpit door wide open on an industry built on silence, fear—and deadly compromise.”
I’ll soon be featuring Michelle Huntington’s excellent forthcoming book, Lady MacGyver: Unbelievable Stories With Altitude, which drops August 1. I read it on vacation and loved it. Preorder it here or here. (There’s no eBook version yet).
Pilot Forced Into Rehab for Non-Existent Addiction: Sound Familiar?
This new case—this time at United—is another example of the literally unbelievable behavior of airline management.
Like, unbelievable in that regular people would find it hard to believe a major corporation would force a pilot who clearly doesn’t have an alcohol abuse problem to complete rehab.
No matter what he did or said to protest the false claim he was an alcoholic, new court papers allege, they kept him on that track. Just weird behavior.
From the Independent:
A senior United Airlines pilot who was disoriented and slurring his speech following a head injury claims he was instead accused of being an alcoholic, forced into inpatient rehab and threatened with grounding unless he admitted to an allegedly nonexistent addiction.
When Capt. Michael Tallon denied he had troubles with alcohol, he was informed by higher-ups that “if he did not confess to having a drinking problem, he would ‘never fly a United plane again,’” according to a bombshell federal lawsuit obtained by The Independent.
Once he begrudgingly checked into residential treatment, Tallon, 56, was “subjected to repetitive and intrusive group therapies focused exclusively on alcohol use, abuse and dependence,” his complaint states, adding, “None of these were appropriate given [Tallon’s] actual medical condition—a head injury.”
We all know some of those United Airlines pilots like a drink…a drink…a drink…and more drinks. Just look at First Officer Paul Grebenc, First Officer Carlos Roberto Licona, pilot Glendon Gulliver, and pilot “Henry W.” (convicted in France).
The airline didn’t stop those guys, who were presumably not on their first benders when they were caught.
Yet they hammered Capt. Michael Tallon, who, based on court papers, does not appear to have a drinking problem, nor has he brought any such problem into the flight deck.
Reading this one was like entering an alternate universe with its eerie parallels to the case of Andrea Ratfield at Delta.
It’s the same kind of inexplicable determination to railroad a pilot using methods that would never stand up to scrutiny. My assumption is they’re so used to not being held accountable—so used to secrecy and using threats to keep crew silent—that they grow more and more brazen with each case.
You know all about Delta Air Lines pilot Karlene Petitt’s nightmare fight to improve safety and protect her reputation as they tried to sideline her with a false psychiatric diagnosis.
She’s in another legal battle with the airline now. At issue, she alleges, is:
The reason I filed this AIR21 complaint in the first place was because Delta is trying to blacklist me from being an aviation safety consultant and threatening me with a lawsuit because I reported substandard training as a result of the Endeavor crash. They already threatened my buddy passes because I wrote about their decision to overfly Salt Lake City with a fire on board violating federal regulations and placing passengers lives in danger.
Read her blog for the ins and outs of this new, ongoing case. There’s some WILD legal “trash talk,” as she puts it, and a huge dose of what she alleges is blatant lying.
She singles out “Delta’s star attorney” Lincoln Bisbee from Morgan Lewis & Bockius.
“Delta is at it again, falsifying the record by filing documents with untruths. July 9th, 2025, Delta filed their latest and greatest: RESPONDENT DELTA AIR LINES, INC.’S REPLY MEMORANDUM IN SUPPORT OF MOTION FOR STAY AND PROTECTIVE ORDER.”
At the first trial, Karlene writes of Bisbee in one of her posts,
“During trial he told the judge we never disclosed the intention to have Aviation Safety Expert, John Nance, testify. I have the legally submitted document that proves we did. He also yells. And only because Lee [Seham, her attorney] asked him not to yell, and then he yelled, ‘I’m not yelling!!!!’ did we decide to video future depositions. The first was Jim Graham. I told Lee that if Bisbee showed up and behaved properly, his attitude was an act. If he had no emotional control, he would not be there. Bisbee no-showed.”
HELP REQUESTED
I have never done a Go-fund me. I’m not going to start now. But I am going to ask everyone to buy a book. Join me on this legal fight against Airline Management who believe they can strong arm employees and former employees into blind and silent compliance. Help me to improve aviation safety. —Karlene Petitt
Why is Delta trying her again?
The airline lost to Karlene spectacularly last time. Not least because she’s a fighter and wasn’t going to be intimidated or bullied.
So…they want more bad press, or what? They want not only a new case full of their shenanigans, but also their previous lying and slimy tactics to be rehashed?
Because that’s what’s happening. SMH.
As Karlene points out in her post, “With a lawsuit, I can legally subpoena the CVR, FDR, depose both pilots, depose all Delta’s instructors, request names and records of all those who flowed up to Delta and were sent back, and can even request all training documents. This might be the only way there will be any transparency as to why this accident happened. Therefore, for those few who said they hoped I would get sued, this might be the only way for full transparency to improve aviation safety.”
Why are they so afraid of facing safety concerns head on? Is it drift toward failure? Is it boiling a frog? In the case of the airlines, maybe both?
Did you watch either or both of the OceanGate Titan submersible documentaries on Discovery and Netflix?
How do you think certain people came out of it? How did you feel listening to the people who warned Stockton Rush and others on his team over, and over and over, but were pushed out, ignored, threatened and sued for pointing out the obvious?
I know I’m not the only one putting myself in the position of the people cheering and popping champagne on the deck knowing the sub was piloted by a video game joystick and had serious hull issues. The sound of the cracking—which Rush euphemistically called “seasoning,” something carbon fiber experts say is not a thing—stuck with me after watching both documentaries. I like to think I’d be one of those pushed out for speaking up, rather than one of those popping the corks and sinking into Rush’s cult-like embrace.
One conclusion by someone who knew him was that Stockton Rush—who owed people money, was running out of funds, and couldn’t face that his experiment was not what he’d promised his investors—preferred death to the humiliation of failure.
Problem is, he got both.
Narcissists are terrifying, aren’t they?
I try to eradicate them from my life as much as possible. What about you? Do you have any you can’t shake or eliminate from your life?
There are so many featured on this platform it’s depressing.
Next up on The Landing, the penultimate chapter in the Stalking Series.
*I do not receive compensation for highlighting other authors’ books, nor do I use affiliate links. I occasionally feature select books that are relevant to the subject matter I cover.
American Airlines were allegedly happy to keep alleged alcoholic pervert Sigsbee John Nelson at the controls. Make it make sense. Shocking. I will definitely be buying Mike’s book. Commercial aviation is rife with cutting safety corners, but if you want the real cowboys gambling with people’s lives look no further than flying cargo planes. Interesting that according to MenTour Pilot the Air India crash looks to be possibly deliberate. The pilot crashed the plane by turning off the fuel to the engines. I wonder what that pilot has in his past? Another Molin, Falitz or Al-Batouti?