A senior Aer Lingus manager has told a tribunal how his investigation report seemed to state he agreed with a demoted pilot’s reading of an airline manual because of a “spelling mistake on my part”. The pilot, Declan McCabe, was reduced in rank from training captain to flight officer in 2024 and told he would “never” be allowed to conduct training again. Hearings on his complaints under the Protected Disclosures Act, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act and the Payment of Wages Act are continuing at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).McCabe disputes the company’s view he was obliged to file a safety report after the Airbus he was flying into Dublin Airport on June 8th, 2023, failed to link up with a radio navigation beacon for the new north runway – and broke its trust and confidence by failing to make such a report in a timely fashion. He was in command of a flight on an Airbus A321neo jet, with a first officer under instruction, flying from Munich with 156 passengers and crew on board at the time.McCabe said what happened was “a non-event from a flying point of view” and that relevant Aer Lingus manual left it up to his judgment to decide whether to report it.The tribunal heard how a senior manager in flight operations, Colm Wynne, wrote to McCabe on June 14th that year about an inquiry from Air Nav Ireland, but McCabe wrote directly to the regulator without copying Wynne on the correspondence.McCabe said he was concerned about “retribution” from Wynne about filing safety reports arising from an earlier dispute with his employer years earlier. He filed the report on June 23rd after being asked to do so by Aer Lingus safety chief Conor Nolan – the only manager with the authority to ask him for a retrospective report, his legal team has argued. Another senior pilot, Padraig Higgins, along with another former colleague of McCabe’s, Tom O’Riordan, both said in evidence to the WRC in May they agreed with the complainant. The parties dispute the most likely reason for the event, which was ultimately determined to be a “low severity” occurrence. Conor Barrett, the airline’s chief technical pilot and the investigator assigned to the disciplinary case involving McCabe, gave evidence to the tribunal on Tuesday. He said there was a finding in his investigation report – quoted previously to the WRC – where he stated: “A review of the safety manual and the operating manual indicates a strong structure to believe this viewpoint.” This was in reference to McCabe’s view that the company safety manual left it up to his judgment to file a report on the June 8th flight, the tribunal was told. “There’s an error on that page,” Barrett said, directing the tribunal to the word “believe” in the passage. “That is a spelling mistake on my part, and it should have said ‘belie’,” he said. Tom Mallon, for Aer Lingus, said it meant the “very opposite” to how it appeared to read. Barrett said his view on the matter was “firm”. “There is absolutely no doubt that an ASR [air safety report] should have been submitted on the day,” he said.“Why do you say it’s mandatory?” Mallon asked him. “I’d need to pull out the manual, but effectively there are lines in there that state if there are issues with the approach or landing, or with crew performance that could have led to an unsafe situation, a report is warranted,” Barrett said. He said McCabe gave “a multitude of explanations”, including a problem with the aircraft, with the radio beacon transmitter and possible interference from similar radio beacons at Baldonnell. He said if any of these had been the case then they would have required a safety report. David Byrnes, for McCabe, said there was “an attempt to post-justify the situation” and present matters “as if Captain McCabe was armed with all that technical information coming out of the cockpit on June 8th”. The case has been adjourned overnight.