British Airways fired a veteran flight attendant with 26 years of unblemished service after a coworker accused him of masturbating in front of her in a dimly lit rest area within the airline’s crew report center at its Heathrow Airport hub.
The terminated crew member has, however, just won an employment tribunal, which found British Airways guilty of unfair dismissal following a botched internal investigation.
The incident occurred back in August 2023 when the veteran crew member was resting in between flights in a dedicated rest facility, which has beds separated by partitions in an otherwise open room.
One of the crew members’ coworkers, who was in the bed next to him, says that when she rolled over to try to get some sleep, she noticed the male flight attendant staring at her.
She turned away, but around 15 minutes later, she heard a loud ‘clapping sound’ coming from his direction. She looked to see what was happening and noticed that he appeared to be masturbating with a blanket covering his legs, but his genitalia were otherwise exposed.
The female crew member froze before pretending to look for something in her bag and then hurriedly left the room. At the same time, another crew member left the room, and she confided in him what she had seen.
The pair went for a cigarette and then returned to the room where they found the suspect sleeping. She then sent an SMS message to her friend explaining what she had seen.
The next day, the female crew member informed her manager of the incident, and an investigation was launched. The police were called in, and around two weeks later, the suspect was arrested as he was getting off a plane from a flight he had just worked.
He was charged with indecent exposure with intent to cause alarm or distress and was bailed to appear at court in November 2023.
British Airways didn’t attend the trial to hear the Magistrate dismiss the case. If they had done so, they would have heard that after taking into account just how dark the room was and the fact that blankets had been used to cover any gaps in the partitions that separated the beds, they couldn’t be sure the incident happened at all.
Despite the flight attendant being found not guilty, British Airways launched disciplinary proceedings against him, which dragged on for many months.
The flight attendant’s defense during this investigation wasn’t that the female crew member had fabricated the story or misidentified him, but simply that she was mistaken… yes, she believed what she saw, but the act of masturbation never actually occurred.
The British Airways investigator, however, misunderstood the flight attendant’s defense, taking it to mean that the female crew member had misidentified him.
The female crew member, identified as ‘X’ in the employment tribunal, was genuinely upset about the incident, and it had affected her mental health, which British Airways took to mean that she should be believed more than the male crew member.
In its ruling, tribunal judge Cowen wrote of the BA investigator: “She relied on the fact that X seemed to be upset about it. She believed this indicated credibility. This is not sufficient to reason on its own to find that X should be believed.”
British Airways told the tribunal that its disciplinary proceedings were based on the civil standard of proof, which is one of a balance of probabilities. Whereas the Magistrates’ Court was required to judge whether the suspect was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The airline did not, however, seek out the reasons why the Magistrates’ Court had dismissed the case. If they had done so, they would have found that the judge questioned whether the incident occurred at all and that X had not been believed.
The Tribunal was also critical of BA’s decision to fire the flight attendant for causing it reputation damage – based on the fact that he had been arrested at the airport and in uniform.
Notwithstanding the fact that the police would only have known the suspect’s location because British Airways told them, the tribunal found that the arrest took place after passengers had deplaned, and that no other customers were around.
“The evidence which was available, which the Respondent had, showed that X had been inconsistent about a number of points and that she had not been believed by the Magistrates,” the tribunal ruling continued.
“Not just to the extent of not satisfying the standard of proof to a criminal level, but to the point where the Magistrates commented that they didn’t consider the incident had happened. This ought to have been at least a flag to the investigators and disciplinary officers of the Respondent, but instead they chose to believe X because she was upset.”
In making a finding of unfair dismissal, the tribunal concluded that BA’s disciplinary officer “was not reasonable and her decision was unsafe.”
British Airways has been ordered to try to reach a mutual agreement on compensation with the male flight attendant.
