A Trauma Hawk pilot exposed air safety shortfalls. He was fired soon after.

After years spent training helicopter pilots, Simon Dean decided he wanted to get back into the field himself. So in 2021 he took a piloting job that promised plenty of action: flying for Trauma Hawk, Palm Beach County’s air ambulance service.

Dean had not been on duty long when he uncovered a problem: Some of his fellow Trauma Hawk pilots had not received all of their federally required safety testing.

Dean raised the issue with a supervisor at the Palm Beach County Health Care District, which runs the Trauma Hawk program. But, he alleges, he was rebuffed.

“He completely downplayed it and wouldn’t take anything I was saying seriously,” Dean recalled.

So he called the Federal Aviation Administration himself.

Eventually, records show, the district was required to acknowledge to federal regulators that it had failed to fully comply with testing requirements for three of its pilots.

But Dean says calling out a safety failing came at great personal cost.

After exposing the violation and becoming involved in a separate dispute over pilots’ work conditions, Dean was fired on what he called trumped-up grounds — for filing a timecard overstating his work hours by two hours and 45 minutes.

Dean is now suing, claiming that his termination violated Florida’s Whistle-blower’s Act, which protects government employees who report legal violations by their agencies.

The Health Care District, which fired Dean in December 2022, rejects his claim. District spokeswoman Robin Kish called Dean’s lawsuit “frivolous” and said in an email that the agency “complies with all laws and regulations including all FAA regulations.”

But by its own admission, the district was not in compliance with the FAA’s training requirements when Dean was hired in November 2021.

Correspondence from the district’s aviation director, Gerry Pagano, to an FAA official show that the district admitted in August 2022 to “apparent oral or written test timeline violations” involving three pilots.

In a letter admitting the violations, Pagano said the district had found eight cases in which testing of pilots “exceeded” federal time limits, meaning required tests on important aviation subjects, such as navigating during severe weather or weight limits for safe takeoffs, were not done within the required time frame.

In his letter, Pagano said that district officials “believe there was at no time a reduction in safety or training based on the events discussed.”

But the district nonetheless vowed that it had “developed solutions to eliminate the possibility of a reoccurrence of this violation.”

An FAA spokesman declined to comment. Pagano, who retired from the district last year, could not be reached.

Dean said the testing shortfalls were relatively technical compliance issues. Still, he said he believes calling attention to them eroded his standing at the organization.

It was not his only run-in with the district’s leadership. At the time he was raising the issue with the FAA, he says, the agency’s pilots were becoming increasingly unhappy with their compensation and work schedules.

The pilots are paid by the hour and were able in 2022 to earn large amounts of overtime because of staff shortages, Dean said, but their schedules were also erratic, making their compensation unpredictable.

“There was a lot of friction around PTO and overtime pay and when people were sent home,” he recalled.

Pilots couldn't fly or get paid when they reported a mechanical problem

In October 2022, he participated in a meeting about pilot pay with top district leaders, he said.

There, he recalled, he pointed out a concern of his: when pilots report a mechanical issue that requires a helicopter to be grounded, the pilots’ shifts end and they are sent home.

That means that reporting a problem can cost pilots substantial income — a conflict that could discourage pilots from reporting some problems.

“You cannot send pilots home without pay from a safety point of view,” he recalled telling Darcy Davis, the district’s chief executive officer.

Dean said he was emphatic in the meeting and pushed backed against his supervisors.

Afterward, he said he “immediately felt the wind shift.”

“I definitely felt like things were changing,” he recalled.

Later, a group of pilots sent a letter to Davis laying out several concerns, including low pay, erratic schedules and difficulties using their paid time off.

Dean did not sign the letter, which was dated Oct. 28. But he had discussed it with his fellow pilots beforehand, and it contained points that he had previously highlighted, including the fact that pilots lost work hours when aircraft are grounded.

Little more than two weeks after the meeting, on Nov. 11, Dean came into his office. It was not a regularly scheduled shift, but he had received permission from Pagano to clock in and catch up on work.

Pilot: I forgot to punch out

He came in plain clothes, not his uniform, and did not have his ID badge. Instead, he said, a colleague let him in.

Records show that he clocked in around 5 p.m. that day. He forgot to punch out as he left, he said, so he did so afterward, using a digital punch-clock he could access from his phone.

Records show he entered his clock-out time as shortly before 10 p.m., resulting in 4.75 hours of paid time for the day.

But, it turned out, he had ended his shift sooner than that.

His supervisors checked security camera footage, which showed him leaving his office around 7:15 p.m., more than two hours earlier.

In an interview Dean admitted he had made a mistake on his timecard. He said he had forgotten to punch out at the time and, when he digitally clocked out later, he erroneously entered the wrong time.

“I have a feeling that I just forgot to punch out when they swiped me out,” he recalled in an interview. “I punched out later, so instead of punching out at 7:15 I (mistakenly) punched out at 9 something.”

Pagano asked Dean three days later whether his timecard was accurate, and Dean said it was, according to a district memo. On Nov. 21, 10 days after the incident, Pagano and the district’s human resources director confronted him.

Fired for 'falsification of time records'

They asked him to resign. When he refused, they fired him, concluding that he had committed “falsification of time records,” records show.

In his lawsuit, Dean alleges his firing violated Florida’s whistleblower protection law, which aims to prevent “retaliatory action against any person who discloses information to an appropriate agency alleging improper use of governmental office, gross waste of funds, or any other abuse or gross neglect of duty on the part of an agency, public officer, or employee.”

Dean says timecard mistakes were not uncommon among pilots, who often worked unpredictable schedules. He had had to correct his timecard in the past, he said, and had never faced discipline or a reprimand for doing so, let alone termination.

Dean, who now works for a private company doing air ambulance service overseas, filed suit in May, seeking compensation for lost wages and to be reinstated. It remains pending.

Dean’s attorney, Barry Balmuth, said the fact that he was immediately fired for what he called an error without any sort of warning or reprimand was suspicious, given how soon it came after Dean’s confrontations with management.

“The timing is certainly suspect, and we are hoping that a jury will agree,” he said.

Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach him at amarra@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trauma Hawk pilot sues Palm Beach County Health Care District over firing