KLM may sack a captain after years of sexually transgressive behaviour, intimidation and threats. This has been determined by the court in Amsterdam. Between 2002 and 2022, the pilot is said to have repeatedly misbehaved against crew members, ground staff and passengers. Many of the complaints were referred to the realm of fables by the man. He demanded a severance payment of 1.5 million euros, but ultimately has to make do with just under two hundred thousand euros.
For KLM, the reports of sexually transgressive behavior were the reason to dismiss the captain. The man, who joined KLM as a pilot in 1995, is said to have been guilty of unwanted touching, threats, stalking and rape with colleagues. In addition, he would have shown them unsolicited pornographic material.
At one destination, he engages in a loud rant with a sex worker in his hotel room, while his colleagues lie in the next rooms. The pilot says he can’t remember anything about it, denies the allegations and claims that a flight attendant made them up out of revenge. According to him, she would have called on others to also make reports, with the aim of ‘hanging’ him.
Forced sex
The flight attendant had previously filed a complaint against the pilot, because he allegedly forced her to have sex with him and prevented her from leaving the hotel room. The captain was suspended for a week for this, but there was no prosecution. According to the Public Prosecution Service, no criminal offense was committed.
According to several crew members, the pilot makes unsolicited comments about sexual acts, such as a threesome he would have had with a mother and a daughter. He adopts an authoritarian attitude, scolds female colleagues and denigrates them with comments such as: “I’m done with you bunch of cunts” and “I’m going to a nightclub where I was yesterday. I fucked a chick there and I’m going tonight fuck again.”
Pastries
The pilot misbehaved at multiple destinations. In Moscow, he is taken out of a shop by the police after he took bites of several pastries in a drunken state. At Barcelona airport, he shouts at the ground staff and a loyal customer of KLM, who is in a wheelchair and, according to him, is delaying the flight.
Drugged
In Tel Aviv, he again rants against ground workers. At the Israeli airport, he shouts and aggressively insults the technical staff. Even all these allegations are not true according to the pilot or he has no recollection of them. In Moscow he may have been drugged, he claims as a defence.
Underpants
Things are also going wrong in Shanghai. There, according to a complaint from a purser, the fifty-year-old is screaming in his underpants in a hotel at a woman about an amount of money owed. According to the captain, it was not he, but a hotel masseuse who yelled at him.
Things go wrong in the hotel restaurant on Bonaire, where he finds the rosé undrinkable and has a lot to complain about the hotel in general. He belittles the staff and causes trouble at the reception. Talks, reprimands and coaching sessions are to no avail all these years after all reported incidents.
17,000 gross per month
The pilot unsuccessfully challenged his dismissal in court. He wanted a severance payment of 1.5 million euros from KLM. The judge did not agree. The man will be fired on May 1 and will receive a compensation of almost 190,000 euros. The captain was approaching retirement age, flew on KLM’s largest aircraft (the Boeing 777 and 787) and earned more than 17,000 euros gross per month.