Former Western Pilots Sue Delta : Airlines’ Merger Cost Them Their Seniority, Suit Charges

A group of 239 former Western Airlines pilots has brought suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, charging that they unfairly lost seniority after the Los Angeles-based carrier merged with much-larger Delta Air Lines earlier this year.

Raymond C. Fay, a Washington attorney representing the Western pilots, said some of the Delta pilots on the seniority list had not even been formally qualified to fly Delta planes, yet “they were put higher on the list than Western people who had been hired seven or eight years previously.”

Pressured Pilots

Seniority is important to pilots because it helps determine their vacations, schedules and their rank in the cockpit. Ultimately, those qualified as captains in the biggest aircraft are rewarded with higher pay and more lucrative pensions.

A pilots union panel, which included representatives from both Western and Delta, approved the seniority proposal shortly after the merger.

The suit claims, however, that Delta’s management “threatened, intimidated and unduly pressured” the pilots at an unusual meeting at Delta’s Atlanta headquarters before their approval of the seniority proposal.

According to the suit, which was filed Friday, David C. Garrett Jr., then Delta’s chairman, said that if the plan were not accepted promptly, Delta would lay off Western pilots.

Patrick A. Herring Jr., a pilot hired by Western in 1979, said the seniority list placed him behind a pilot recently hired by Delta who had not even completed his training. Herring said that shortly after he and two other pilots complained to Delta about the situation last June, he was demoted from his supervisory role and assigned to flights between Salt Lake City and Honolulu. “This is such a serious, devastating-type issue that it’s imperative for us to exhaust all legal remedies to resolve the problem,” Herring said from his home in Bozeman, Mont.

Delta spokesman Richard E. Jones said Thursday that the company had no comment to make about the suit. “I think it would be totally inappropriate for us to shoot from the hip and make any allegations--or statements about allegations--at this time,” he said.

Seeking Compensation

He also said, “The fact that some of the members of a labor group are not particularly happy with the way their elected representatives handled an agreement is between them and their representatives, and I question the validity of trying it in the pages of the Los Angeles Times.”

The Western pilots are asking, among other things, that the controversy over the seniority list be settled through arbitration. They also are seeking unspecified monetary compensation for wages they say have been lost in the seniority dispute.

Delta announced last September that it was purchasing Western for nearly $900 million. The merger took effect at the beginning of April.