One of the largest regional airlines in the United States, which operates flights on behalf of American, Delta, and United Airlines, as well as Alaska Airlines, is suing two of its former pilots, alleging that they hacked into an internal computer system to steal the personal details of coworkers, including their home addresses and cell phone numbers.
Utah-based SkyWest Airlines filed the lawsuit in district court late last month, accusing pilots Daniel Moussaron and Vikaas Krithivas of computer fraud, breach of contract, and civil conspiracy.
The 26-page legal complaint alleges that Moussaron and Krithivas worked together to scrape the personal details of nearly 5,000 coworkers from an internal computer system known as SWOL.
Just months later, pilots at the airline started to receive unsolicited messages and phone calls to their personal cell phones. SkyWest began to investigate when a pilot was told by the cold caller that they “have some really smart people” who “found a backdoor to the company directory.”
SkyWest believes that Moussaron used his significant IT knowledge to find a way to circumvent the airline’s role-based protection measures built into its company directory.
For example, pilots can look up any SkyWest employee in the company directory, but they can only see business contact fields like the employee’s name, base location, and supervisor.
Meanwhile, managers are able to view a lot more information, including an employee’s home address and cellphone number.
IT experts were called in to investigate the allegations, and they allegedly discovered that Moussaron was using a web developer tool or specialist software to circumvent SkyWest’s role-based protections in its corporate directory to access the hidden fields.
The conspiracy allegedly started on August 29, 2025, when data logs show that Moussaron logged into the corporate directory during an overnight work layover. This is believed to have been an initial test in which Moussaron allegedly accessed certain pilot records multiple times.
The next day, Moussaron arrived at another overnight layover hotel and again accessed the SkyWest corporate directory, downloading confidential data belonging to another pilot.
“Over the next three months, Moussaron returned to SWOL on at least 8 more occasions to access and download data for a total of 365 pilots,” the complaint reads.
“This data included names, employee numbers, home addresses, and personal phone numbers. Moussaron would resume at the point in the pilot seniority list where he left off with each new login.”:
“His first four data pulls progressed slowly, which is consistent with manual input and retrieval of this data.”
Beginning in September 2025, Krithivas allegedly joined the conspiracy. IT data logs show that Krithivas would pull data from SWOL, and this would then be followed by Moussaron doing the same, but starting from where Krithivas had finished on the pilot seniority list.
Days later, the pair are believed to have employed a software tool to speed up the process, downloading the personal details of 4,970 pilots in little more than seven hours.
After this download, Moussaron allegedly carried out several more hacks to download the details of new hire pilots.
Shortly after the last download session on December 8, 2025, SkyWest pilots reported receiving messages sent to their personal cellphones en masse. Last month, one pilot said he received a phone call in which the caller admitted that someone had found a backdoor to obtaining pilot contact details from Skywest’s internal IT system.
The lawsuit alleges: “Defendants’ actions have caused and continue to cause harm to SkyWest, including loss of control over SkyWest’s Confidential Information, harm to employee privacy and trust, security risks with the unauthorized circulation of pilot contact and location information, disruption to business operations, and the diversion of substantial resources to investigate, contain, and remediate the incident.”
The complaint adds: “Absent immediate injunctive relief, SkyWest is suffering and will continue to suffer ongoing and irreparable harm.”
Along with asking for damages to be awarded, SkyWest also wants the court to order Moussaron and Krithivas to hand over their cellphones and laptops for forensic analysis.
In response to the lawsuit, Moussaron says he had been involved in trying to organize a pilot’s union at SkyWest affiliated with the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA).
In a recent court filing, Moussaron says he did, indeed, access the SkyWest corporate directory to obtain contact details for pilots at the airline, although the filing does not state how Moussaron obtained this information.
Moussaron also admits to sending one SMS message en masse to pilots to gauge their opinion of forming a union but denies sending any other messages. Late last month, Moussaron was questioned by SkyWest management and terminated from his job.
The same day, SkyWest chief executive Chip Childs sent an email to the airline’s pilot workforce, which said that the actions of two former aircrew “serve as an appalling reminder of the lengths to which certain organizations and interests will go to gain access to our people.”
The message continued: “In this case, they went as far as unethically and unlawfully stealing your information in the hopes of reaching and influencing you.”
Moussaron argues that the district court does not have the authority to hear the case brought by SkyWest because his union organizing activities make this a ‘labor dispute.’
The case has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah under case number: 4:26-cv-00015
Sounds like Skywest didn’t do a deep enough background check on these two bozo’s.