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An off-duty pilot aboard an American Airlines flight claims he suffered permanent hearing loss, and now has a “constant ringing” in his ears, after the crew asked him to help fix a potentially catastrophic door-seal failure that occurred nearly six miles up in the sky.
Once he volunteered to assist on the Denver-Miami flight last year, Capt. Wayne Hoefler, a Colorado Springs resident who flies long-haul 747s to global destinations, was “continually subjected to the constant deafening scream of the seal failure only inches from his ears,” according to a federal lawsuit filed Monday.
This, Hoefler’s complaint contends, left him partially deaf and with a distressing case of tinnitus - a constant ringing, buzzing, or hissing in the ears, with no known cure - from the intense shriek of high-pressure air escaping through the narrow gap between the door and the plane’s i
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