The finding said no misconduct - then a customer complained and the outcome flipped
An aircraft engineer has won his unfair dismissal case after the Fair Work Commission found his employer reversed a clean internal report to justify sacking him.
The Commission ruled on July 31, 2026 that the aircraft maintenance company had dismissed a licensed engineer without a valid reason and without a fair process. It ordered the employer to pay $41,203.65 in compensation, plus superannuation, within 14 days.
The case turned on a single maintenance decision. Facing a recurring fault on an aircraft, the engineer powered the plane down and back up to clear it - a step he likened to restarting a phone. It worked, but it delayed the departure by 17 minutes. The customer airline complained and asked that he be removed from working on its aircraft.
What happened next is the lesson for HR.
The company's own investigator assessed the incident using a "Just Culture Decision Tree," a standard framework for deciding whether an error reflects genuine misconduct or an honest mistake. Her report recorded "nil findings and nil observations." It did not recommend dismissal and did not find the engineer had acted maliciously. The head of quality and safety at the time agreed with it. The chief executive signed it. It was sent to the airline.
Then the airline objected to the report. A newly appointed head of quality and safety reviewed it again and reclassified the engineer's conduct as a "reckless violation." He did so without interviewing the engineer. He said he had checked with other engineers about whether they would have done the same thing, but accepted he had no documentation of those conversations. The Commission preferred the original investigator's evidence and found no basis for the change.
The process failures ran deep. The engineer was never issued a show-cause letter - a formal notice giving an employee the chance to explain why they should not be dismissed. He was not told the meeting on December 5, 2025 concerned possible dismissal, which left him no real opportunity to arrange a support person. He believed the meeting was about restoring his authorisation. Instead, he was handed a termination letter that had already been prepared.
The human resource business partner who prepared and signed that letter accepted she had not read the investigation report. She agreed the decision to terminate had been made before the meeting began, and that anything the engineer said would most likely not have changed it.
Not everything favoured the engineer. He had worked casual shifts for a competitor airline without the written approval his contract required, which the Commission accepted breached a conflict-of-interest term. It held the employer was entitled to question him about it and to consider disciplinary action. But it found this, on its own, was not a valid reason for summary dismissal - particularly as he had never been warned his job was at risk.
The Commission also rejected the suggestion that the engineer had defied a direction by not attending an earlier meeting. He was on rostered days off, had offered to meet that Friday, and was already working overtime shifts to help the employer.
The Commission found the dismissal unjust, unreasonable and harsh, noting the employer had a range of alternatives it never used. It declined to order reinstatement, finding that trust between the parties had broken down - in part because of the undisclosed secondary work - and ordered compensation instead.
For HR teams, the decision is a plain reminder: a defensible outcome cannot rescue a broken process. Reopening a completed investigation after a client complains, skipping a show-cause step, and walking into a meeting with the termination letter already written are the kinds of shortcuts that turn a manageable issue into a lost case.
