NYPD Pilots Sue Former Aviation Unit Chief
Three NYPD pilots, including those who trained military Black Hawk pilots, have accused their former commander of workplace discrimination and unsafe practices.
Joseph Medina, Vlad Ravich, and David Ebright filed a lawsuit against Winston Fezon in Manhattan Supreme Court, seeking unspecified damages. They allege retaliation for raising safety concerns and believe they faced discrimination impacting their promotions and earnings.
Medina, 39, who served in the Army National Guard, returned from a deployment in the Middle East to find he had been taken off the promotional list, replaced by a less experienced pilot. This change, he believes, was due to his ethnicity.
Ravich, 40, claims he faced retaliation for voicing safety issues, as he was reportedly grounded after raising concerns. Ebright, 44, accused Fezon of attempting to cover up damage to choppers during training exercises.
The lawsuit states that without proper oversight of the damaged equipment, lives could be endangered—”the pilot could crash and die,” it warns.
Fezon was relieved of his duties in July after a training exercise left a helicopter needing $40,000 in repairs, reportedly while trying to obstruct an FAA investigation into the incident. Following this, Fezon retired from the NYPD.
Medina, who is of Hispanic descent, joined the aviation unit in 2015 and was in line for a promotion before his deployment. Upon returning, he found Fezon in charge.
“He told me he had to remove me from the leadership role because I hadn’t been coaching recently,” Medina recalled, chuckling at the absurdity of it all.
The lawsuit also mentions that another pilot, Brian Worthington, was promoted over Medina during his absence.
Medina eventually left the NYPD for a different law enforcement agency last year.
Ebright joined the unit after two decades of flying private planes. Just a week following his assignment to NYPD spy planes targeting radiation detection, he alleged he was ordered back to headquarters because a black pilot had taken his place—a move he sees as discriminatory.
Following an incident on July 4, where Fezon allegedly damaged a training helicopter without reporting it, Ebright decided he could not continue. “That scared me,” he said, explaining how it impacted his family as a father of three girls.
Ravich, who is Jewish and originally from Russia, transferred to the unit in 2022. He mentioned that safety standards seemed to be compromised, saying, “It felt like personnel decisions were driven by race rather than skill.”
According to Scola, the attorney for the pilots, the NYPD is endangering officers by lowering aviation standards and prioritizing race over merit in promotions.
The NYPD declined to comment on the allegations, and Fezon has not responded when contacted for his side of the story.
