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A Jetstar engineer who played a practical joke on apprentices, causing a ‘potential safety risk’, has had his unfair dismissal case dropped after the Fair Work Commission found that his conduct warranted dismissal.
After Jarrod Mcrae left two apprentices stranded six metres in the air underneath a 787’s wing, the commission ruled that his engagement in “horseplay, skylarking or practical jokes” was a breach of his employer’s cardinal rules, determining that his misconduct was a valid reason for dismissal.
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The engineer pleaded to his employer on the day he was dismissed for misconduct, saying: “I was hoping someone could see through all the lies and make a judgment call to give me another chance.”
Having a total of 23 years of experience, and two years working for Jetstar, Mcrae was found by the commission to have felt an impulse to repeatedly inject himself into an apprentice aircraft maintenance engineer’s orbit.
The commission found that when Mcrae did this, the apprentice reported that he came across as overbearing and antagonistic.
Despite this, the commission found that Mcrae held the firm view that as a senior to the apprentice, “it was his prerogative and right to ride [the apprentice] hard”.
It noted that there is an “ever-decreasing minority that still thinks apprentice hazing is funny and something that should just be accepted”.
Due to Mcrae’s conduct against the apprentice, he submitted: “[Mcrae] made me feel like coming to work was unsafe for me and that I should not voice my concerns in fear of being negatively perceived by him and others. I fear/feared [sic] that he may take physical action against me for speaking up against him.”
“You are all p**sies now, it’s ridiculous, back when I was an apprentice, we used to cop all sorts of abuse,” the commission found Mcrae told the apprentices.
The incident
In the incident, two Jetstar apprentice aircraft maintenance engineers were doing greasing work on a Boeing 787 while elevated on a platform six metres above ground.
As the senior engineer supervising the apprentices, Mcrae asked them to lower the platform to allow him to get off; after which the apprentices re-raised the platform, and noticed that Mcrae “disappeared for a period of time”.
Mcrae allegedly reappeared and laughed at the pair as he walked towards the raised platform, before walking off to lunch, leaving the apprentices alone in the hangar.
Shortly after, the apprentices discovered that the platform’s power supply had been switched off and could not lower the platform to return to the ground.
They called for help and waited approximately 10 minutes before another apprentice came and helped them off the platform. They were informed that the emergency stop had been pressed, which cut the platform’s power supply.
The apprentice said that he did not call Mcrae or another non-apprentice employee to help because he did not want to “add fuel to the fire”.
“There was no operational reason to do so, there was no safety-related reason to do so, it was unauthorised; [the apprentices] were ‘stuck’ as a result and unable to get down independently, he knew, or ought to have known that his actions were a potential safety risk and, yet, laughed,” the commission determined.
Mcrae denied the apprentice’s version of events, giving evidence that he pressed the emergency button to communicate with the apprentices about his operational concerns, stating that he would not have been able to hear him over the noise emitted by the elevated platform’s motor.
The commission rejected his evidence, finding that a recreation of the scenario revealed that clear communication was possible with the platform motor switched on.
The commissioner ruled that Mcrae’s actions in the incident constituted misconduct that warranted termination, dismissing the engineer’s unfair dismissal application.
The case citation: Jarrod Mcrae v Jetstar Airways Pty Limited (U2025/13509).
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