Alaska Airlines Pilot, Saying She Was Raped by Fellow Pilot, Sues Company

Alaska Airlines Pilot, Saying She Was Raped by Fellow Pilot, Sues Company




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Alaska Airlines said the pilot accused of rape had been placed on leave. He was not named as a defendant.CreditTed S. Warren/Associated Press



An Alaska Airlines pilot has sued the airline, alleging she was drugged and raped by another pilot during a layover last year. The lawsuit by Betty Pina, 39, was filed in King County Superior Court in Washington State on Wednesday, 20 days after it was presented to the airline on Feb. 13. A copy of the complaint was provided by her lawyer, Eric John Makus. It claims that Ms. Pina, an Army veteran who flew helicopter missions in Afghanistan, was the co-pilot on a June flight with the captain from Anchorage to Seattle to Minneapolis, where the two had a scheduled layover.

According to the complaint, the pilot asked Ms. Pina to join him for pizza and drinks in the hotel bar where flight crews spend time. Once there, Ms. Pina said she had one glass of wine, and then he brought her a second. Sitting on a stool, she had a “hard time keeping her head up” and “things appeared to be closing in,” the complaint says. It claims that he proceeded to “drug Ms. Pina and rape her during a state of involuntary intoxication.” The lawsuit was reported this week by The Seattle Times and other local news outlets.

In an interview late on Thursday, Ms. Pina, reached between flights, repeated many of the details in the lawsuit. It says she blacked out, and when she came to early the next morning, she was in his hotel room bed, naked from the waist down; her underwear was in her purse.


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Ms. Pina has been flying for 17 years, including seven years of active duty military service that included flying Chinook helicopters in Afghanistan, for which she was featured in a PBS documentary series “Kansas to Kandahar: Citizen Soldiers at War.” She started working for Alaska Airlines in 2016. She said that after years in the military, she was accustomed to reporting problems only to her superiors. That, she said, might explain why she did not report what happened to the police when she returned to the Seattle area.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/travel/alaska-air-pilot-rape.html