American Airlines Paid Military Leave Class Undone by Judge

American Airlines Group Inc. scored a court order decertifying a class of hundreds of pilots seeking paid military leave from the airline, leaving it on the hook for defending the claims of just two individual pilots.

The class as certified included pilots whose periods of military leave ranged between one and 16 days, Judge Harvey Bartle III said in an opinion docketed Thursday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. This is too big of a disparity to allow for a class-wide decision on the key question of whether military leave is comparable to leave taken ...