Aer Lingus’s director of safety has said his department acted properly when it filed a safety report attached with the name of a veteran pilot who was in hospital in the wake of his alleged exposure to “toxic fumes” while in command of a jet.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) is continuing its hearings into complaints by sacked airline captain Tom O’Riordan under the Protected Disclosures Act, 2014, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act, 2005, and the Unfair Dismissals Act, 1977, against Aer Lingus Ltd – all of which are denied by the airline.
Mr O’Riordan told the WRC last year he was poisoned by “toxic fumes” in the flight deck of an Airbus A320 in an incident during an empty repositioning flight from London to Dublin on June 5th, 2023.
The tribunal has heard the veteran pilot, with 16 years’ command experience, spent five days in Beaumont Hospital and did not return to his duties before he was sacked by the airline last September.
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The airline’s lawyers say he had “defamed Aer Lingus” in online posts. Mr O’Riordan’s case is he was attempting to raise concerns of wrongdoing in relation to safety matters at the airline, had exhausted all his internal options and was entitled to go public.
Giving evidence on Thursday, Aer Lingus’s director of safety and security Conor Nolan said: “My understanding is the aircraft taxied to the gate and during its arrival to parking is when Mr O’Riordan felt unwell. Paramedics were summoned, that took a period of time, there was a process of triage at the aircraft,” he said.
The tribunal has heard Mr O’Riordan wrote to Aer Lingus CEO Lynne Embleton in the spring of 2024 stating he was “aghast” to discover his name had been attached to an air safety report on the incident, which was submitted to the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) on June 7th that year.
Mr O’Riordan had been contacted about the preparation of a safety report by staff at the airline in the immediate aftermath of the incident, who “seemed to stop looking for information” after he told them he was still in hospital, his legal team have submitted.
The following spring, Mr O’Riordan had claimed in the letter to Ms Embleton that the report had been “falsified”, the WRC heard.
Mr Nolan’s evidence was that staff in the airline’s safety office had access to create reports under the name of a member of the airline’s crew and the airline had a 72-hour window to inform the Irish Aviation Authority of such events.
“To be very clear, at the immediate time that all this was happening, in the days after the event, we had no reasonable foresight we were going to end up analysing what was done where we are today,” Mr Nolan said.
“The measures taken to fulfil the reporting obligations in line with custom and practice – convention is the word I heard used earlier – were done in the reasonable expectation that Mr O’Riordan would participate in the process later, and I stand over that process,” he said.
He added when Mr O’Riordan made an issue of it, a committee of senior managers “concluded there was nothing further to examine”.
“[We decided] if it was in any way helpful to Mr O’Riordan we would remove his name and revert to what could have been done in the first instance,” he said.
Mr Byrnes put it to him that this was an acceptance that his client’s name “shouldn’t have appeared”.
“It was an offer to help resolve what appeared to be an impasse some nine months after the event,” he said.
Mr Byrnes asked whether the witness could understand Mr O’Riordan’s concern about the authorship of the report.
“No, I still don’t appreciate the concern. Everything that was done was out of an abundance of reasonable care to and to ensure we could start an investigation without delay to fulfil our principal obligation of putting safety first. That was the only motivation,” the witness said.
Adjudicator Aideen Collard adjourned the case overnight.
Mr Byrnes said his client had average remuneration of €200,000 a year. “The maximum jurisdiction is a million euro,” he told Ms Collard. “This is a big case, and there’s no illusion to the contrary on that, and we will build our blocks as we see fit on this side of the house,” he said.
“What I’m showing, chair, is that by the time [my client] got on social media and protested with placards ... I’m exhausting this internal stuff to show that by the time he did what he did, he was entitled to,” he said.
