Delta Air Lines Inc. has been sued ($1 million) by one of its own pilots, who claims he developed a messaging app for flight crews and the airline stole it and used it as the basis for its own app.
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Pilot Craig Alexander sued Atlanta-based Delta for trade secret theft in a Georgia court on Monday. He claims he spent $100,000 of his own money to develop the QrewLive app, which he pitched to the airline as a way for crew to communicate during grounded flights. Delta rejected his app but launched a similar one, he claims.
Delta "stole" and defrauded its own loyal employee, said Keenan Nix, Alexander's attorney.
Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesperson, said on the matter: “While we take the allegations outlined in Mr. Alexander’s complaint seriously, they are not an accurate description of Delta’s internal messaging platform.”.
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A five-hour power outage that resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations in August 2016 cost Delta more than $150 million. The pilot said he emailed CEO Ed Bastian at the time saying he “had a solution for the problem.” Bastian reportedly responded immediately and referred Alexander to the company’s new IT manager.
Bastian and CIORahul Samant are named in the lawsuit, along with four other Delta executives. Alexander claims he had several positive meetings with the airline in 2015 and 2016, where executives made it clear they were interested in acquiring his app. But Delta ultimately stopped the discussions and then launched its own crew communication app in April 2018, called Flight Family Communications.
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The pilot noted in his lawsuit that Bastian and Samant doubted that the app would work properly. In describing the damages, Alexander said the value of the technology, “based solely on the operational cost savings to Delta, conservatively exceeds $1 billion.”.
Craig Alexander is also seeking compensation from Delta.
Source of information: bnnbloomberg.ca
