The union representing Southwest Airlines pilots can move forward with its lawsuit against Boeing claiming the company misled pilots about the safety of its 737 MAX model after a pair of deadly crashes led to the plane being grounded, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The court rejected Boeing’s argument that the Railway Labor Act — a federal law governing airline and railroad labor relations — prevented the union from making their claims in state court because it unlawfully requires the interpretation of collective bargaining agreements, or CBAs, with Southwest.
Justices sided with the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, ruling that addressing the union’s claims in the lawsuit does not require interpreting CBAs and therefore doesn’t interfere with the Railway Labor Act.
“We need not and do not decide here whether SWAPA’s contentions are true,” Justice Jeff Boyd wrote for the court, quoting case law. “Those are factual issues regarding SWAPA’s and its members’ mindsets and motives that are yet to be decided. But such ‘purely factual questions’ do not ’require a court to interpret any term of a collective-bargaining agreement.’”
Representatives for Boeing and SWAPA did not respond to requests for comment.
When the 737 MAX launched in 2011, SWAPA was operating under a CBA settled in 2006. Southwest purchased the new 737 MAX models, but union members refused to fly the new planes as they said it wasn’t required under their CBA.
Later, SWAPA’s 2016 CBA with Southwest specifically stated pilots would fly the newer model before Boeing grounded those planes.
Federal investigators found Boeing knowingly hid from the Federal Aviation Administration that a mechanism of the new 737 MAX could make the nose of the plane dip during low speeds, like during takeoff or landing, to ensure Boeing didn’t have to spend more money on pilot training for the new model.
The FAA found the mechanism likely contributed to two fatal plane crashes shortly after takeoff — first a Lion Air flight that killed 189 people in 2018 after crashing into the Java Sea, then an Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people five months later.
After the wrecks, SWAPA sued, accusing Boeing of misrepresenting and omitting facts about the safety of the 737 MAX to pilots and interfering with the union’s business relationship with Southwest. SWAPA claims as a result, pilots with Southwest — which was the largest operator of that model — lost millions of dollars in compensation after the plane was grounded and pilots lost flights.
“Had SWAPA known the truth about the 737 MAX aircraft in 2016, it never would have approved the inclusion of the 737 MAX aircraft as a term in its CBA, and agreed to operate the aircraft for Southwest,” SWAPA wrote in its suit in Dallas County district court.
Justices Jane Bland and Rebeca Huddle dissented over a dispute concerning whether SWAPA had the right to file the lawsuit on behalf of more than 8,000 union members.
The case now returns to a lower trial court.
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