- SkyWest wants a major lawsuit thrown out entirely — and its lawyers say one of the flight attendants at the center of the case deliberately destroyed evidence that could sink her own claim.
- What she allegedly deleted, and why SkyWest says it blows apart the flight attendants’ “innocent whistleblower” defense.
- How a security flaw in a members-only voting site led to two veteran crew members losing their jobs.
- The counter-lawsuit accusing the flight attendants of a much bigger scheme than simply exposing a bug.
- What SkyWest’s lawyers are asking the judge to do next — and why the union is fighting back on two fronts at once.
A major regional airline which operates flights on behalf Alaska Airlines, Delta, and United Airlines has asked a court to throw out a lawsuit brought against by the biggest flight attendant union in the United States over allegations that a key witness deliberately deleted WhatsApp messages which could be key evidence in the case.
The lawsuit has been ongoing since the fall of 2023 when the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) sued Utah-based SkyWest over allegations that the regional carrier had violated labor law over how it funded a non-unionized association for flight attendants known as the SkyWest Inflight Association, or SIA for short.
SIA has been in existence since 1994 but the AFA has long wanted to have the association disbanded so that it can replaced with a unionized branch of the Association of Flight Attendants. In 2023, SkyWest terminated two veteran flight attendants, Shane Price and Tresa Grange, who had been campagining on behalf of AFA.
The flight attendants were fired after one of them discovered that a supposedly secure website used by SIA wasn’t nearly as protected as first thought. Simply by changing the end of the URL, the flight attendants were able to access confidential information like crew member names, their ID numbers, and voting credentials for SIA elections.
The flight attendant shared this information with their coworker as well as a representative from the AFA but didn’t immediately report the vulnerability to either SIA or SkyWest. In August 2023, the flight attendants made the vulnerability public, producing a video to show just how easily information could be downloaded from the website.
The video’s release coincided with internal SIA elections. There were concerns that ballots could be cast on behalf of other crew members by accessing their details from the website, so the vote had to be abandoned until the vulnerability could be patched.
SkyWest fired the two crew members who discovered and then exposed the flaw, which led to the AFA suing the airline. In response, SkyWest counter sued, alleging the crew members and a representative from the union had violated computer fraud laws.
Now, however, SkyWest is asking a Utah district court to dismiss the AFA’s claims, alleging that one of the flight attendants “deliberately and intentionally deleted evidence” in the form of WhatsApp messages.
“This is one of those extraordinary situations where the Court should impose the most serious of sanctions because the litigants’ conduct flies in the face of the Rules of Civil Procedure, due process and the integrity of the courts and our judicial system,” the motion filed by SkyWest’s attorneys reads.
“This is not a phone falling in a pond, a file disappearing out of a cabinet, or a box of documents accidentally put through the shredder. Grange identified messages that were damaging and decided they should be deleted,” the motion continues.
The motion further claims that the messages were deleted ‘amost entirely’ after the lawsuit was filed and after SkyWest’s lawyers instructed the flight attendants to retain any potential evidence.
“I was thinking last night – I bet they use some of our WhatsApp threads against me and Shane in our appeals… I’m not thinking there is much else they can really use to prove we had any bad intention,” Grange wrote in one message.
Grange then wrote in response to another message: “I thought they were encrypted and protected – but probably not.”
Another witness tells Grange that encrypted messages can still be subpoened but that there is a facility to autodelete messages within WhatsApp. Grange replies: “Yes I have set mine to auto delete a few times.”
SkyWest claims Grange’s actions “leaves the Court (and Defendants) to guess the content of what was deleted, SkyWest deprived of vindicating evidence, and the jury bereft of essential facts.”
SkyWest claims other witnesses also deleted WhatsApp messages – evidence that could have been retained by simply turning off the autodelete feature or keeping screenshots.
The motion adds: “Plaintiffs have destroyed evidence that goes to the heart of SkyWest’s case; deleting communications that undermine Plaintiffs’ narrative that they are merely innocent whistleblowers attempting to engage in protected union activity. The deleted evidence destroys this narrative and likely revealed the obvious: that they set out to sabotage SIA – the flight attendant association chosen by SkyWest flight attendants – by undermining their fellow employees’ confidence in SIA and win support for their chosen union, the AFA.”
“To accomplish this plot, they hacked into confidential website data and published a video on Facebook showing other people how to run the hack. They even impersonated the SIA President and logged into Vote-Now as her, to humiliate SIA and blow up its leadership election.”
The AFA has yet to respond to the motion, and has asked the court for more permission to prepare its reply. The union has also asked for permission to provide a more detailed response than would ordinarily be allowed. SkyWest is opposing the AFA’s request. The case continues.
