EXCLUSIVE: Southwest Pilots' Behavior More Heinous Than You Ever Imagined
Part I: Racist death threats for turning down sexual advances & reports of a 'KKK ring' operating at the airline
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Once upon a time, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant was working on a jetliner piloted by a married man.
This pilot decided this trip would be a great time to make sexual advances toward the hard-working flight attendant. He went for it, but it didn’t work out so well for him, because she had the audacity to turn him down.
He didn’t like that. To show his extreme displeasure over a Black woman telling him no, he left a racially charged death threat in her work mailbox. The note read, “All [racial slur] should hang from trees. You’d better hope you’re never on any of my flights.”
An FBI investigation matched the handwriting to the pilot—and the saliva on the envelope to the pilot’s flight attendant wife, who was the daughter of a well-known Texas politician. Was the pilot fired for this? Of course not—this is a U.S. commercial airline we’re talking about.
He wasn’t even disciplined.
All this is according to court papers I just got my hands on from a lawsuit filed against Southwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) and select individuals. These papers contain the sinister claim that the airline settled with the flight attendant “to avoid discovery of a Ku Klux Klan ring operating at Southwest.”
Yep, you read that right.
Judging from this sheaf of documents I’ve just obtained, Southwest Airlines’ Greatest Hits Collection has some shocking titles lying around in the old vault, including…
“Racist Death Threats Won’t get you Fired” and “BJs in the Cockpit Are (Allegedly) Alright by us.”
You know this album. It features such gems as “We Falsified Flight Logs,” “Our Chief Pilot Sent a Religious Mormon Email to 800 Pilots” and “Check out our Captain Trapping an F.O. and M***b*ting at 40,000 Feet.”
This newly obtained filing is from 2004, but it’s as relevant as ever. I know this because I hear from women in the airline industry being attacked and then retaliated against for reporting it in the year 2024, which you’ll understand if you scan the stories on The Landing.
Indeed, the case of Captain Christine Janning v. Southwest Airlines, SWAPA, pervert pilot Michael Haak and others has dragged out for 18 months, and in the process turned the spotlight on a dangerous cover-up culture where male pilots are allegedly protected at all costs—and those who know where the proverbial bodies are buried are starting to dig.
There is a pattern of outrageous behavior that does untold harm to women and minorities and shows no sign of abating. The mainstream media is doing a dire job—or no job at all—of covering airline safety, which is part and parcel of this disgusting workplace behavior.
The “Egregious” Acts That go Unpunished
Today’s icky anecdotes stem from the case of James Austin, a pilot who was fired for getting naked alongside his co-pilot while flying. And then he got his job back. And then he was terminated again in 2004 for allegedly making threatening phone calls. So he sued in federal court in the Southern District of Texas for claims including breach of contract, defamation and invasion of privacy.
The filing lists a bunch of “egregious acts” by SWA employees that “never led to termination.”
Reading between the lines, it sure looks like Austin’s telling his old employer, You’re going to fire my ass for getting naked, but these (alleged) dirtbags are still employed?
Some other allegations from the suit (which appears to have been settled not long after the filing):
“A Southwest pilot committed acts of domestic violence on a Southwest a flight attendant. The couple were not married. The flight attendant reported these acts of physical abuse to her supervisor. Southwest did nothing and later used the pilot in a nationally televised commercial.”
Two SWA pilots got in a fist fight in an employee parking lot in Phoenix. They were allegedly fighting over a flight attendant, and one made death threats to the other; the offender was “not terminated for making a death threat while on airport property.”
At least two SWA chief pilots were known to have received oral sex from flight attendants while piloting aircraft, according to testimony attached to this lawsuit. There is no mention of whether the incidents were consensual by the FAs on any level, and the power imbalance in the workplace renders consent a sticky issue. The pilots were not disciplined.
This one is a bit inside baseball, as we say, but it has echoes of what Christine Janning went through. A pilot was subjected at work to written death threats of “hiring a hit man to kill” him. He reported the matter to the FBI, Dallas Police Department and the Department of Labor, who suggested he also report the matter to Southwest. He did, and his bosses were furious—at him. “Southwest did nothing to investigate” the claim even though they had hand writing samples and SWA received a warning from the FBI.
Meanwhile, at Delta Air Lines…someone dropped a dime on retired Delta Captain Karlene Petitt’s blog, saying “Delta chief pilots played pornos in flight on their company issued computers. 100s of videos to choose from. His callsign, which he was quite proud of, was “Uncle AL”. According to him they all shared the same library of videos. It was reported to the third party hotline and to the HR staff in person. Nothing was done. The reporter was retaliated against months later.”
All of this relates to safety in the skies. As these guys are raging or thinking about their next Klan meeting or getting blown in the cockpit, passengers are hurtling through the sky in an aluminum tube with a disengaged, distracted pilot. I just can’t anymore. Thank goodness for the many good ones. What if Sully had been enjoying these perks when the birds hit? What if the captain of the Alaska Air flight was pantsless when the door blew off? They weren’t, and lives were saved.
There is much more to be revealed, so keep your eyes peeled for a post in the coming days or weeks. Pro tip: Keep an eye on Karlene’s blog.
The Janning Case Is Set to Finally Kick into Gear
The March 6 hearing in the Christine Janning/Michael Haak/SWA/SWAPA mess was the first I’ve attended in her case.
Even before legal arguments began, the proceedings took a strange turn. I’ve been a working journalist for 30 years, and covered my first open-court hearing back in my newspaper days in Massachusetts around 1994. I’ve covered big cases and little cases in a few different cities and countries.
I have never had one of the parties in the case ask to know who was observing from the gallery and for observers with no standing to be told to state their names “for the record.”
During the October hearing I wasn’t able to cover, SWAPA’s attorney Ellen Belfer, according to Karlene’s Petitt’s report, asked for a roll call.
Belfer “…stated that not everyone at the hearing had stated their appearance. She said, ‘I see there is George G a Karlene Petitt and a B.’ This reminded me of my first day of my trial when Ira Rosenstein, Delta's attorney, said, ‘Your honor, who are all these people. We don't know who they are.’ Judge Morris told him that this was a public trial and it was not necessary to know.
Well, this, too, was a public hearing, but Judge Netcher said he was fine with that…then he told us he got notification that B left the meeting, and couldn't tell us who B was. He said, ‘They left after learning that they were going to be identified, so we have somebody monitoring us apparently.’ I’m curious what monitoring means, if you are watching a public hearing.” (Taken from Karlene’s blog).
It concerns me that singling people out to identify themselves made some so uncomfortable that they felt they had to leave a public hearing. I checked in with a journalist group I belong to, and they’d never seen this either.
You’re asked to give a name when you join the call, and it feels like that should be sufficient.
In the context of this case happening within the insular aviation industry, where airlines and unions have immense power over individuals and aren’t averse to bad faith, dirty tricks and retaliation, combined with the extreme sensitivity of sexual assault cases, people have their reasons for wanting to observe proceedings without being put on the spot.
Read Karlene’s post to find out how she handled it. I went into this week’s hearing braced, but not truly believing they’d try to put observers in this very sensitive case on the spot again. But they did. Anyway.
No one’s Denying SWA Capt. Michael Haak Assaulted Other Women
I’m not naive, but I still found it interesting that at the hearing, neither SWA or SWAPA said Haak didn’t commit prior alleged assaults before he allegedly assaulted Janning in the cockpit in 2020. From her court filings:
Prior to his interactions with Ms. Janning, Cpt. Haak had been sent to the Charm School at least once in his career following an incident in 2008 during which Cpt. Haak sexually assaulted a Southwest flight attendant after forcing himself into her hotel room.…
…Cpt. Haak had been reported for exposing himself to flight attendants and other pilots in a hotel following a flight, and for disseminating nude photographs of his wife to flight attendants in a misguided effort to convince them to have sex with him.
…Cpt. Haak performed several other instances of sexual assaults and sexual harassment, and the complaints by other employees to Southwest were routinely ignored by Southwest.
Janning’s suit says SWA should have done more to prevent Haak from continuing to allegedly offend, because if they had, she wouldn’t have had to suffer the trauma of being in the cockpit with him that day.
The defense seemed to be arguing this week that they couldn’t have known Haak would allegedly imprison and sexually assault a female first officer in the cockpit because…to their knowledge he had never done that exact thing before.
Janning’s attorney, Frank Podesta, said SWA’s assertion there wasn’t “any indication that Captain Haak would conduct himself in the matter of committing false imprisonment” is “untrue.”
Knowing Haak as “someone who is capable of and has in the past sexually assaulted women and sexually battered women,” Podesta said, “should be sufficient.”
It was pointed out that Haak being reported for blocking an FA in her hotel room is indeed false imprisonment. And then the judge made an observation:
“False imprisonment can be a sexual assault,” he said. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”
They also talked about defamation, and SWA’s attorney, if I heard this correctly, said that these below statements, from an earlier story I wrote, are “opinions”—not defamation.
In April of 2021, SWA Cpt. Mike Bleau told then-former SWA and SWAPA executive Jeff Hefner that Christine Janning was “a terrible pilot,” a “slut” and a “whore,” and that with regard to the Incident, Ms. Janning had “instigated that, she caused this problem; you know ... that’s the kind of person she is; she’ll fuck anybody for attention.”
Who talks like this about a woman and fellow pilot?
Further, the complaint alleges that Bleau said similar things to Janning’s bosses, Southwest Captains Michael Hawkes and David Newton, who you’ve read about before.
Then-Orlando Chief Pilot Michael Hawkes and, above him, then-Headquarters Chief Pilot for Southwest Operations David Newton, Janning’s suit says, were also telling various people that she was a “slut” and a “whore.”
Due to their dislike for Ms. Janning, both Cpt. Newton and Cpt. Hawkes had openly discussed, with several Southwest personnel and other individuals, the claim that Ms. Janning was a “slut” and a “whore.”
Yuck. That’s all for now.
I know, it was a long one today, and we talked about some hard truths.
Thank you for reading. I’d be interested in your thoughts…comment below.
-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 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.
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.”
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, 1999) alongside such icons as Gloria Steinem, Ntozake Shange and Judy Blume, receiving a noted review from the New York Times. I am the author of a total of 13 fiction and nonfiction books.
Thank you Sara for reporting on this, and thank you Christine for putting up the fight. I agree with Sara's comments that once something happens to you you are screwed if you say something and screwed if you don't. Both are miserable for us, but the more people who speak up and shine the light on the perpetrators, the more chance we have to turn the tide against them. Hang in there. You are most definitely not alone. I hope good things come to you from the trial. That A/H must still be shaking his head wondering how someone had the audacity to call him out.
This turns my stomach. Christine, I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you. Thankyou from the bottom of my heart for having the courage to take a stand. A big thankyou to Sara for continuing to expose the terrible truth about our industry.