I presume the Southwest pilot group has a grievance process so the whole story should come to light through the upcoming arbitration.
Most of the termination arbitration hearings I've known about seem to be kept quiet since they involve 'personnel matters' and 'privacy issues'. Which is fine, I understand. Often I'm not too interested who had the hearing, I just want to hear what happened so we all learn from the claimed mistake that lead to the firing.
Have standards for pilots been lowered to promote diversity? Should they be? Are they lowered for everyone or just diverse pilots? Questions like this are the elephant in the room when mishaps (e.g. the recent ones in LGA and BHM) reveal poor training performance and a troubling employment history.
Traditionally you had to have a pretty spotless track record to get a chance of an interview with a major U.S. carrier. If you got caught embellishing the truth, even years later, you could get fired (unless, of course, the V.P. of Flight Ops was your Naval Academy classmate in one case I remember
).
It's a dirty little secret that most airline training departments have a small group of pilots who seem to always require a lot of extra training or can only seem to pass checkrides when given by certain people. There were two ways of looking at this. One was that you would never have to worry about training failures as long as so and so still had a job. The other view was they these folks were in a special category and unless you had some similar demographic preference in your background, you'd be long gone if you couldn't do the job.
The story of someone who was fired at an airline coming back with a merger years later is familiar to many of us.
Decades ago Sam C. got hired by Pan Am and had problems with the six month initial training course. He was let go before completing probation. You know where this is going. He got on with National Airlines a couple of years later, came back with a merger as a check airman senior to his original classmates due to the Gill Award seniority list integration. Sam C. had a brief phone conversation with then Vice President George Bush Sr. that did not help Sam's career in Pan Am management but that's another story.
I'm sure similar tales of intertwined fate abound now that the younger folks who crossed the picket line during the Continental strike are senior card carrying United ALPA pilots.
