I have some experience as a neutral party during discipline issues. I have never seen an innocent party treated as a scape goat. What I have seen is the union empowering a pilot to act like a petulant child after they have done something wrong (told a clearly racist joke in public, physically intimidated a gate agent, lied about expenses, etc). The pilot will plead the fifth, act as though it’s not a big deal or generally act as though they are a defendant in a criminal case and the burden is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. What they don’t understand is that if the company is bringing you in for an interview, they already know what happened and are assessing how you FEEL about the situation, not if you actually did it. The pilots also fail to realize that the union reps have ego/pride involved in the hearing and may not always give you advice that will get you back on line with the minimum consequence.

Long story short, I have never seen a pilot who came in and said: “I don’t know where my head was, that will never happen again” have the book thrown at them. But I definitely have seen pilots who fought things, despite being in the wrong, receive an unreasonable consequence that they then had to appeal and try and reduce. And very rarely do the months of bureaucratic appeal time end up being paid.

YMMV