A sacked pilot has said he felt “like a criminal” when gardaí saw him out of Aer Lingus’s headquarters after he vowed go on hunger strike, accusing the airline of failing to act on alleged fume leaks into the cabins of its jets.
The pilot, former Airbus A320 captain Tom O’Riordan, was continuing his primary evidence to the Workplace Relations Commission in in his whistleblower penalisation action against Aer Lingus yesterday.
Aer Lingus strongly denies that any crew or passengers have been put at risk and says it dealt with Mr O’Riordan and his concerns properly.
The pilot was sacked in 2024 after 14 months off sick after he said he was “poisoned” by oil contaminating the cabin air aboard an Airbus A320 he was flying empty to Dublin on 5 June 2023, having twice reported odours or fumes in the aircraft the day before.
On 14 February 2024, Gardaí were called to Shamrock House, Aer Lingus’s headquarters at Dublin Airport, after Mr O’Riordan made demands during a grievance process meeting with two managers, Seamus Cooke and Carmel Byrne.
Mr Cooke, the former base captain in Cork, and Ms Byrne, a HR legal case manager with the airline, were conducting a grievance process after Mr O’Riordan wrote to the Aer Lingus CEO Lynn Embleton in November 2023 about his situation and concerns, the WRC has heard.
Mr O’Riordan had told Ms Embleton the airline had knowingly endangered his life by directing him to fly a jet he said was “unfit and dangerous for service”.
“I read a statement. I said that I was going to perform a sit-in and hunger strike at that time,” Mr O’Riordan said of how he addressed the meeting.
“I believed there was a manifest danger to the health and safety of the general public and crew in Aer Lingus,” Mr O’Riordan said.
“I realised from correspondence and documents I’d uncovered that Aer Lingus was fully aware of what was going on with fumes on aircraft and were doing nothing about it,” he said.
He wanted Aer Lingus to engage with staff on the matter, the tribunal has heard.
Carmel Byrne, the airline’s HR legal case manager, told the tribunal earlier this year that Mr O’Riordan also sought an undertaking at the meeting that the airline pay his salary until retirement at 65, with pension contributions, along with a “gratuity in lieu of damages”.
It would have cost €3m, she said.
Mr O’Riordan said he was never told who in Aer Lingus sent for the gardaí on the day.
“I was put to sit in a room on my own. Conor O’Dwyer came to the room and said that if I didn’t leave, I would be subject to mental health removal,” Mr O’Riordan said, referring to a senior managing pilot at the airline.
Mr O’Riordan said he walked out a corridor through the lobby to the door with two uniformed gardaí, “one either side of me”, accompanied by Mark Tighe, the ex-president of pilots’ union IALPA.
“Would people have seen you being escorted out?” his barrister, David Byrnes BL, asked.
“Yes,” Mr O’Riordan said.
“How did that make you feel?” counsel said.
“Like a criminal,” Mr O’Riordan said.
12 days later, Mr O’Riordan said he returned to Shamrock House and mounted an “awareness march” on the street outside, in uniform and holding a placard.
In March 2024, he started posting on social media about his campaign under the username “ToxicAer”, the WRC heard.
He was dismissed that August when a senior manager, Captain Colm O’Dwyer, concluded in a disciplinary process that Mr O’Riordan set out to “damage” his colleagues and committed serious gross misconduct with the social media posts.
Aer Lingus’s barrister, Tom Mallon BL, has argued the posts cannot be shielded by whistleblower law.
He said at the opening of the case two years ago that it was “absolutely disputed, unreservedly disputed, that Captain O’Riordan or anybody else, and in particular passengers, were put at any risk”.
The hearings are due to resume this afternoon.
“Unfit and dangerous”
The WRC heard yesterday that in a November 2023 email to the airline’s CEO Lynne Embleton, Mr O’Riordan wrote: “Aer Lingus knowingly endangered my life and left me with life-altering injuries that leave me unfit to work.”
“I was instructed to operate an aircraft from London to Dublin on 5 June 2023 which was unfit and dangerous for service,” he added.
He then proceeded to take issue with his salary being cut “because of operating an aircraft with oil in the engines/air conditioning from which I was poisoned”.
Mr O’Riordan said he “couldn’t have any trust or confidence” in Aer Lingus when he was meeting with Ms Byrne and Captain Cooke in February 2024.
His evidence was that the grievance process was limited in scope, with any consideration of the 5 June 2023 flight itself ruled out on the basis that it was investigated as an air safety matter.
He said a “narrative” also emerged in the course of the grievance process that he had been “noncompliant” by not using the internal Aer Lingus system to make an air safety report about the flight.
His barrister said in a legal submission that the duty to make the report fell to the first officer while Captain O’Riordan was indisposed.
However, the grievance outcome delivered on 26 May that year included a finding that Mr O’Riordan “did not provide information on what happened on 5 June 2023 as requested”, Mr Byrnes noted.
Counsel said the airline’s director of safety and security, Captain Conor Nolan, had earlier in the case accepted Mr O’Riordan was relieved of the duty to report in the circumstances.
Mr O’Riordan said he felt he was being “harassed” and placed “under duress” by repeat contact from Captain Conor Barrett about making a safety report while in hospital.
“It wasn’t about my safety, my life, it was about an ASR; [that] I was doing something wrong by not reporting,” Mr O’Riordan said in evidence.
He said he met another Aer Lingus pilot, Declan McCabe, during his picket outside Shamrock House. Mr McCabe told him he had been subject to disciplinary action for failure to file an air safety report at the request of a manager, Mr O’Riordan said.
“I found out my fear was grounded,” he added. .
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