An Aer Lingus pilot pursuing a claim for whistleblower penalisation has said he and his first officer were placed “under duress” during a safety investigation to attribute a navigation incident to human error instead of a “technical difficulty with the aircraft”.

It was after an air traffic control manager formed the view that the Airbus A321neo jet, flying from Munich with 156 passengers and crew on board, was on course to land at the wrong runway at Dublin Airport on June 8th, 2023.

Aer Lingus is contesting statutory complaints brought by the pilot, 53-year-old Declan McCabe, under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, and the Payment of Wages Act 1997 at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), following his demotion from captain to first officer.

Airline management concluded Mr McCabe had failed to submit a timely air safety report and gave “inaccurate information” to the national air traffic control authority, AirNav Ireland, after his aircraft initially failed to pick up a “localiser” beacon on approach to the airport. Mr McCabe’s stance is that the incident was a “non-event” and he decided no report was warranted.

Cross-examining the complainant on Tuesday, Tom Mallon BL, appearing instructed by Arthur Cox, put it to him that an air traffic control station manager had reported: “‘On playback it appears the aircraft was establishing [an approach to] runway 10-R,’” Mr Mallon said – Dublin Airport’s south runway.

The plane was meant to land at the north runway, the tribunal heard.

“Would you not accept if someone was established on the wrong runway, that would be a safety issue?” counsel asked.

“That’s a very broad question, but not necessarily,” Mr McCabe said.

Mr Mallon said the complainant later took the stance that the safety investigator, Capt Conor Nolan, had “more plausible causes” for the incident to pursue apart from mis-selection, the question of whether the flight crew put in the wrong runway beacon frequency.

[ ‘A direct attack on my wife, my family, my career and my reputation’Opens in new window ]

“Evidence available to Capt Nolan was not provided to me at that meeting. It was withheld,” he said. He said this related to “issues” with a subsystem of the plane’s navigation system involved in capturing the signal.

Mr Mallon put it to him he had “agreed that the likely cause of this problem was human error” in the safety investigation.

“We felt we were under duress to drive the investigation down the route of pilot mis-selection and not a technical difficulty with the aircraft,” Mr McCabe said.

Counsel for the complainant David Byrnes BL, instructed by Setanta Solicitors, took issue with his client being questioned on a “bare assertion” in the disciplinary investigator’s report that Mr McCabe’s jet “went through the localiser for 19 seconds before the course correction”.

“That point was put to me, but not backed up by any evidence,” Mr McCabe said. “Aer Lingus are very much pushing the idea that air traffic control intervened. We had turned the aircraft before [they] had given us the heading 030.”

“I was there, I know that, because I was flying the aircraft,” he added.

Adjudicator John Harraghy adjourned the hearing overnight.