Airline Workers Lose COVID Vaccine Mandate Appeal—Their Lawyer Submitted Fake AI Cases, Then Did It Again

Atlas Air won its appeal against employees challenging its Covid-19 vaccine mandate and testing and mask policies. The Eleventh Circuit opinion is also striking for what the plaintiff’s lawyer did after Atlas caught him citing court decisions that did not exist.

His opening brief relied on at least eight fabricated authorities. His proposed reply then tried to withdraw eight different cases. Those did not match the original fakes. All eight of the replacements were fake too. If you’re going to use AI you need to use the latest frontier model at the highest settings, not just the free version! Otherwise you might hallucinate the law and then hallucinate the cleanup!

Credit: Eric Salard – N641GT, via Wikimedia Commons

Why The Airline’s Employees Sued

The federal government required airlines (and other businesses) with government contracts to mandate employee vaccination during the pandemic, unless they obtained a medical or religious exemption. At Atlas Air, exempt employees could keep working, but they had to wear a mask and test once a month.

Employees said their consciences barred them from taking what they viewed as an experimental substance. Some said they vaccinated under pressure, while others to an exemption and followed mask and testing rules, but argued testing was burdensome and that masks were useless political markers that identified dissenters. No one was fired, but plaintiffs said some employees were assigned less desirable, lower-paying flights.

This was much more generous than United Airlines, which gave out exemptions that came with indefinite unpaid leave.

The Lawsuit Had To Be Rewritten Several Times

In May 2022, ‘US Freedom Flyers’ and more than 150 Atlas, Flight Services International and related workers filed a 59-page complaint against the companies and several executives. They sought at least $159 million plus punitive damages and an injunction.

• They argued violations of required religious accommodation, retaliation for claiming the exemption, constitutional privacy and due process, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, collective bargaining violations, fraud and emotional distress theories, and that vaccine side effects in pilots could create a mass-casualty aviation risk.

• The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed that first case without prejudice in July 2022 and re-filed in October 2022 with narrower claims. That was dismissed in September 2023 but the district court allowed one more attempt.

• That next complaint added an emergency-use theory under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. On March 19, 2024, the district court entered final judgment for Atlas Air and the employees appealed.

A unanimous Eleventh Circuit panel rejected every claim. The airline granted exemptions to employees with sincere religious objections. The complaint linked opposition to vaccination to religion, but described objections to masks and tests as political and logistical. It didn’t explain what the religious problem even was, claim that religious exemption employees were treated worse than medical-exemption ones, or show any anti-religious bias.

The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act’s emergency-use provisions are enforced by the federal government and don’t even have a right to private damages against an airline. There is no constitutional case against a private airline, either. And while Atlas shared vaccination status internally so staff could assign crews and schedules, there’s no privacy violation without actual broad publicity. Wearing a mask by itself also didn’t announce why an employee was wearing it (that they were required to because of a religious exemption to vaccine mandates).

It’s striking with over five years of hindsight how much vaccines didn’t cause medical issues beyond expected background effects, how they actually saved lives (even as vaccines waned in their effectiveness over time as the virus mutated and as vaccine formulations didn’t keep up). And it’s striking how the FDA’s delay in approval until after the 2020 elections, to avoid handing President Trump a ‘win’, therefore actually cost lives.

The Court Was Not Happy About Fake AI Briefs

The court said attorney Anthony F. Sabatini’s opening brief cited at least eight nonexistent decisions, including a supposed Eleventh Circuit case. After Atlas identified the problem, Sabatini filed an untimely proposed reply acknowledging bad citations and purporting to withdraw eight authorities.

Except he named the wrong cases. None matched the original eight, and the second set was also fabricated. One supposed Delta Air Lines decision appeared in both filings but migrated from one court to another.

Sabatini is a Lake County, Florida commissioner and former state representative. The court said he had violated duties to both clients and judges by putting his name on machine-generated work he did not verify. The chief judge will separately refer him to the Eleventh Circuit’s lawyer-conduct committee, “Whatever the merits of artificial intelligence, it is no substitute for actual intelligence.”

The case against vaccinate mandates at the airline is effectively over, though the plaintiffs can ask for a rehearing or seek Supreme Court review (which is always an exceptional long shot).

Other Airline Vaccine Cases Are Still Alive

Sambrano v. United Airlines is still active. Back in March, the Fifth Circuit upheld class action certification for employees placed on unpaid leave.

Nelson v. Hawaiian Airlines also continues after a Hawaii federal judge dismissed some failure-to-accommodate claims because resolving them would require interpreting collective bargaining agreements under the Railway Labor Act. Disparate treatment claims are still active.

The Bottom Line

Atlas offered a religious exemption and kept exempt employees working. That’s a much harder case than unpaid leave at United. And the lawyer made things worse by submitting fictions twice, although that’s not why they lost.