Sacked pilot loses bid to get airborne

Sacked Air New Zealand captain Grant Craigie has lost the second round in a legal bid to regain his cockpit controls, but intends taking his fight to the Employment Court.

The Employment Relations Authority in Auckland has ruled the airline was entitled to dismiss the Boeing 737 captain after an investigation prompted by its discovery of assault and aviation convictions against him.

Mr Craigie, who was aged 46 and had flown with the airline for 16 years before losing his job in September, accused managers of using incidents in his private life unreasonably to get rid of him.

This was despite the fact that the Civil Aviation Authority had, after suspending him from flying for two months in 2003, cleared him as "a fit and proper person" to hold a pilot's licence.

Employment authority member Alastair Dumbleton noted that the CAA review was not into Mr Craigie's fitness to be an employee, and the airline was entitled to inquire into his conduct from a different perspective.

The airline said at an employment hearing that cases in 1996 and 2001 of assaults on men his estranged wife had been seeing, and unrelated wilful breaches of aviation regulations, cast doubt on Mr Craigie's ability to make sound judgments consistently under pressure.

It also accused him of not being "open and honest" about convictions for the second assault and for three off-duty flights in his private aircraft without an airworthiness certificate.

The pilot escaped conviction on five charges in the 1996 case, including those of assaulting a male and a female and of possessing a weapon, after admitting these in a plea-bargain.

Mr Dumbleton, who late last year rejected a bid by Mr Craigie for interim reinstatement, decided this week it was not open to Air NZ as a fair and reasonable employer to dismiss him over offending it did not learn about for at least five years.

Neither did he accept the airline could have reasonably overruled the professional finding of a psychologist who cast no doubt over Mr Craigie's judgment and self-control for aviation purposes in light of the second assault.

He also considered it unreasonable for the airline to conclude that bystanders who saw Mr Craigie "suddenly throw himself on another man during a barbecue" might have thought less of his employer as a result.

But Mr Dumbleton ruled Air NZ was justified in its concerns about its reputation from the aviation convictions, given Mr Craigie's responsibility for maintaining flight safety.

Mr Dumbleton noted a senior Air NZ captain's evidence that it was basic airmanship for a pilot to ensure his craft had airworthiness certification before any flight, and the airline's view that Mr Craigie misled it over circumstances in which he flew his plane.

Mr Craigie's lawyer, Ray Parmenter, said yesterday that his client would challenge the decision in the Employment Court.