Where Operational Cabin Safety Meets Clinical Reality

For 40 years, Helen Zienkievicz has held two careers that most experts spend a lifetime pursuing separately — and she has run them at the same time.

As a safety leader with United Airlines for 29 years, she worked inside the operational systems that govern cabin crew performance: safety investigation, emergency procedures training, and regulatory compliance under FAR Part 121 and Part 135. She has evaluated evacuations, reviewed crew response to inflight emergencies, and helped build the training standards crews are held to.

As a Board Certified Adult Nurse Practitioner for more than 40 years, she has practiced clinical medicine — diagnosing, treating, and assessing the physical consequences of trauma, including the kind of injuries that occur in a cabin: turbulence-related fractures and soft-tissue trauma, inflight cardiac and neurological events, and the causation questions that follow.

These were not sequential careers. They ran in parallel, each informing the other. That dual track is what allows Helen to do something few experts can: testify to whether a crew’s conduct met the operational standard of care, and independently assess whether that conduct — or its absence — caused the injury being litigated. Retaining counsel does not need to reconcile two experts’ opinions. There is one witness, one record, and one line of testimony from the cabin to the injury.