{"id":32467,"date":"2024-03-25T12:07:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T19:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=32467"},"modified":"2024-03-25T12:07:04","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T19:07:04","slug":"the-last-days-of-the-boeing-whistleblower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/03\/25\/the-last-days-of-the-boeing-whistleblower\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Days of the Boeing Whistleblower"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Shawn Tully\/Fortune<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"TheJohn Barnett, a former quality manager at Boeing who became a prominent whistleblower in 2019, was found dead in early March. (photo: Swikar Patel\/The New Your Times)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

24 march 24<\/strong> (RNS.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saturday, March 9, dawned as a gusty gray morning in Charleston, S.C., with thunderstorms rolling across the historic city and daggers of lightning lighting up the skies. Just after 10 a.m., Rob Turkewitz was sitting in a tony lawyers\u2019 office downtown, waiting for his client John Barnett to testify\u2014and further his crusade for safety in the skies. \u201cMy cocounsel Brian Knowles and I were gathered around a conference table alongside Boeing\u2019s in-house counsel and its trial lawyer from Ogletree Deakins. It was in Ogletree\u2019s offices, much fancier than ours, what you\u2019d call opulent digs by legal standards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turkewitz wasn\u2019t totally surprised that Barnett was late for this round of depositions. \u201cDowntown Charleston was flooded by one of the worst rainstorms I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI\u2019d called John\u2019s room at the Holiday Inn where he was staying at 9 a.m. to see if he wanted me to pick him up, but he didn\u2019t answer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turkewitz was especially buzzed about this session because Barnett was slated to continue the account of the production gaffes he had allegedly witnessed up close on the Boeing<\/a> factory floor, a dramatic narrative that he had started the previous day. Barnett, 62, had worked from late 2010 to 2017 as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant that assembles the 787 Dreamliner. In that role, he\u2019d alerted senior managers to what he called violations of legally required processes and procedures, and maintained that his warnings were being ignored. In the years following his departure, Barnett emerged as arguably the most renowned Boeing whistleblower, recounting the quality abuses he claimed to have witnessed to multiple media outlets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barnett\u2019s charges had drawn fresh attention in the wake of the January 737 Max door-plug blowout on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 just after takeoff from Portland, Ore., followed by a string of other mishaps on Boeing aircraft. In interviews after the big bang over Portland, Barnett had been scathing in his criticism of Boeing\u2019s safety lapses, and he attributed the catastrophe to the types of sloppy practices he said that he had witnessed and flagged years earlier at the North Charleston plant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the action that brought Barnett across the table from Boeing\u2019s attorneys in Charleston, he was suing the planemaker in a so-called AIR21 case. His charge: Boeing had violated U.S. Department of Labor statutes stipulating that it\u2019s unlawful to retaliate against a whistleblower. Barnett was seeking compensation for allegedly being forced to retire 10 years before he planned to leave Boeing, getting blackballed from the promotions he deserved because of what he argued were justified warnings that his bosses failed to heed, and undergoing harassment on the job that left him suffering from PTSD and panic attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The previous day, Barnett had been on a roll as a video camera recorded the event. \u201cJohn testified for four hours in questioning by my cocounsel Brian,\u201d says Turkewitz. \u201cThis was following seven hours of cross-examination by Boeing\u2019s lawyers on Thursday. He was really happy to be telling his side of the story, excited to be fielding our questions, doing a great job. It was explosive stuff. As I\u2019m sitting there, I\u2019m thinking, \u2018This is the best witness I\u2019ve ever seen.\u2019\u201d At one point, says Turkewitz, the Boeing lawyer protested that Barnett was reciting the details of incidents from a decade ago, and specific dates, without looking at documents. As Turkevitz recalls the exchange, Barnett fired back, \u201cI know these documents inside out. I\u2019ve had to live it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Friday, Barnett\u2019s testimony ended at around 5 p.m., and the parties reconvened an hour later. \u201cJohn was really tired and didn\u2019t want to testify any more that day,\u201d says Turkewitz. \u201cHe wanted to drive home to Louisiana starting that evening, as he had planned. He had told his mom that he\u2019d be home on Sunday, and it took him two days to drive home. I suggested that we break for a week or two. But the Boeing lawyers took the position that no more depositions could be taken until Barnett completed his testimony. Turkewitz didn\u2019t think the judge would stand for that restriction. \u201cWe had a March 30 deadline for completing the depositions; there was a list of 20 witnesses from both sides. On our list were around eight witnesses who had worked with John and backed his eyewitness version of events at the plant. We knew Boeing would file a motion for summary judgment, and we wanted to lay out through John\u2019s testimony that he was subjected to a hostile work environment.\u201d (Boeing did not respond to a request to comment for this story.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Barnett, passion for the cause surmounted the fatigue from two days of intense questioning. According to Turkewitz, he told the lawyers, \u2018Let\u2019s just get it done. I\u2019ve already been waiting for seven years.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tragedy in the Holiday Inn parking lot as the Boeing whistleblower is found dead<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after 10 a.m., Turkewitz called the Holiday Inn. \u201cI asked if he\u2019d checked out, and they said no,\u201d he recounts. \u201cI asked to be put through to the room, and the phone just kept ringing, so I then asked that they check the room. The Holiday Inn folks said, \u2018His stuff\u2019s packed up, but he\u2019s not there.\u2019\u201d Turkewitz asked that they look for his car, a \u201cClemson Orange\u201d Dodge Ram truck. \u201cThe manager came back and told me, \u2018His truck is still there, and we called EMS. I can\u2019t tell you anything more.\u2019\u201d At that point, the lawyers around the conference table feared that Barnett could have suffered a heart attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turkewitz then called the manager back, and she said that she couldn\u2019t provide any additional information, and that a police officer would give him a call. Around 20 minutes later, at exactly 11:11, he got the call. \u201cThe officer asked who I was, and how many times I\u2019d called John that morning,\u201d says Turkewitz. \u201cI asked her, \u2018Is John okay? Can you at least tell us if he\u2019s alive?\u2019\u201d The officer replied, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, but I can\u2019t provide that information to you.\u201d Recalls Turkewitz, \u201cThat\u2019s when I knew that this is not good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that point, all four attorneys drove to the Holiday Inn to witness a parking lot crowded with volunteer emergency vehicles and police cars. \u201cJohn\u2019s truck was blocked from view by emergency vehicles. I was asked to keep a distance,\u201d says Turkewitz. According to press reports, Barnett was found in the Ram with a silver pistol still in his hand, his finger on the trigger. The Charleston County coroner ruled the cause of death as \u201ca self-inflicted wound,\u201d and a police report disclosed that \u201ca white piece of paper resembling a note\u201d lay in plain view on the passenger seat. Its contents haven\u2019t been disclosed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Turkewitz and Knowles, Barnett\u2019s lawyers and friends for seven years, the tragedy was incomprehensible. \u201cHe was in a good mood the evening before, so looking forward to testifying on Saturday,\u201d says Turkewitz. \u201cAlthough he was tired, I saw no sign he was in distress.\u201d Turkewitz and Knowles said in a statement, \u201cWe didn\u2019t see any indication that he would take his own life. No one can believe it. The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public. No detail can be left unturned.\u201d Two detectives from the City of Charleston police department are currently conducting an investigation into Barnett\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Barnett family, which includes his older brother Rodney, issued a statement reading, \u201cHe was looking forward to having his day in court and hoping it would force Boeing to change its culture. He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to a hostile work environment at Boeing, which we believe led to his death.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boeing released the following statement: \u201cWe are saddened by Mr. Barnett\u2019s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.\u201d Boeing didn\u2019t provide further comment on Barnett or the issues he raised beyond referring Fortune<\/em> to that statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barnett displayed a fun, fuselage-size personality and sharp skills as a quality manager<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barnett grew up the youngest of four brothers raised by a loving and firm mother in the Crossroads region of Louisiana. He lived near Seattle for 25 years of his 32-year Boeing career while working at the Everett plant that produced the 747, 767, and 777. After leaving Boeing, he settled back home alongside an extended family that included his brother Rodney and cherished nieces in Pineville, La., a hamlet northwest of Baton Rouge that bills itself as a haven where \u201cSouthern hospitality abounds.\u201d While in Washington, Barnett relished racing stock cars at the Evergreen Speedway. The lead photo on the funeral home tribute page displays Barnett posing before a lime-green roadster, helmet tucked under one arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicknamed \u201cSwamp Dawg\u201d by his racing buddies, Barnett sported an alligator-jaws tattoo on his right upper torso, shoulder-length brown hair, and an adjoining walrus mustache and goatee. A photo posted online shows him joyfully piloting a speedboat in a nylon formfitting cutoff T-shirt, sporting aviator shades. Friends and family recall his infectious, boisterous laugh, and on the tribute site, his nieces wrote that they had tagged him as \u201cFuncle,\u201d\u2019 short for \u201cfun uncle.\u201d Barnett wed for the second time after moving to Pineville. \u201cHe married Diane Johnson, his best friend,\u201d says Turkewitz. \u201cShe died of brain cancer 18 months ago.\u201d They met at Boeing, where Diane worked at both the Everett and later the North Charleston plant as a top liaison with the FAA. According to friends, she and John loved donning overalls and getting messy tuning the engine on his hot rods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Turkewitz, Barnett was \u201cthe most decent person you could imagine. He was constantly doing things for people. He never met a stranger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During his years in Everett, Barnett was impressed by Boeing\u2019s attention to quality and safety. \u201cWhen I worked on the 747, 767, and 777 in Everett, those are beautiful planes, and the people there fully understood what it took to build a safe and airworthy aircraft,\u201d Barnett stated for a 2019 story in Corporate Crime Reporter.<\/em> In 2011, according to Turkewitz, a senior Boeing quality manager specifically recruited Barnett as a prime force in imposing the same types of processes and procedures at the giant new 787 plant in North Charleston that had been so successful in Everett.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In North Charleston, Barnett sees shockingly broken safeguards and culture, and tries to fix it<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Corporate Crime Reporter<\/em> interview, Barnett discussed both the vast gulf in culture between North Charleston and Everett, and three major safety issues that he uncovered, and that in his telling, management not only ignored, but punished him for reporting. \u201cThe entire team came down\u2026from the military side,\u201d he said, referring to the company\u2019s defense business. \u201cTheir motto was, we\u2019re in Charleston and we can do anything we want. They started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They just wanted to push planes out the door and make the cash register ring.\u201d Emblematic of the blowsy mindset, he noted in a later interview, \u201cwas that the whole place smelled of french fries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first problem, he related, involved clusters of razor-sharp titanium slivers that fell onto the surface that supported the electronic equipment controlling power to the airplane. These more or less three-inch shards peeled off titanium threads when workers installed the titanium bolts that secured the floor board above the surface supporting the power gear in these fly-by-wire planes. Barnett filed a complaint with management. The FAA then performed multiple audits and found the slivers in all 10 planes inspected. The FAA blocked Boeing from delivering planes with shards, but according to Barnett did not consider that the scraps posed a safety issue on the 800 planes already delivered (Barnett claimed that the issue could have triggered a catastrophic event).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second issue involved the emergency oxygen equipment. Barnett\u2019s team found that 25% of the systems didn\u2019t work properly, so that when the masks fell from the ceiling in the event of an accident that caused decompression, the cylinders would fail to send oxygen to the passengers. According to Barnett, management stonewalled on his report. He also alerted the FAA. Boeing later disclosed that its own investigation revealed that some of the oxygen masks were not working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, Barnett states that Boeing wasn\u2019t keeping proper track of parts shipped from suppliers that it found defective. \u201cMany of them were lost or shown to have been installed on the airplane without being repaired,\u201d he says in the Corporate Crime<\/em> piece. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know where a lot of them went. Some of them were significant structural components\u2026such as on the aft pressure bulkheads.\u201d Barnett says that he filed a whole series of internal warnings on the defective parts problem, first by discussing it with managers, then going to HR, and finally lodging a complaint to the ethics group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After filing his complaints, Barnett was reassigned to a kind of exile to a section called material review segregation area, or MRSA, ironically the storage site for those nonconforming parts. Barnett claims that he fought a rear-guard battle to prevent workers from accessing those defective components (when shipments of new parts were slow, for example) and installing them in the planes. \u201cThey isolated me from the other quality managers,\u201d he says. \u201cI was basically by myself. They were constantly denigrating me. I could do nothing right. My complaints seemed to go into a black hole.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barnett\u2019s managers, in his words, also \u201creprimanded\u201d him for \u201cdocumenting process violations,\u201d and told him that the company didn\u2019t want him putting problems in writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was going through health issues and having anxiety attacks,\u201d he explains. \u201cI had gone as far as I could go inside the company. I had to go outside.\u201d In early 2017 while in the wilderness of MRSA, Barnett filed an AIR21 whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He cited the ignored safety complaints as well as Boeing\u2019s alleged hostility resulting from his drumbeat of warnings. He also charge that Boeing blocked him from being transferred from the North Charleston plant. Weeks later, his health had deteriorated to the point where he resigned. \u201cHis doctor told him that if he didn\u2019t quit his job at Boeing, he could die of a heart attack,\u201d says Turkewitz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final interview<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it turned out, OSHA found the facts presented in Barnett\u2019s case insufficient to rule against Boeing. \u201cOSHA is handicapped because they don\u2019t have the authority to subpoena documents,\u201d says Turkewitz. In 2021, Boeing issued a statement that read, \u201cBoeing has in no way negatively impacted Mr. Barnett\u2019s ability to continue whatever chosen profession he chooses.\u201d Barnett and his legal team filed an amended complaint to the Department of Labor, still under the AIR21 whistleblower retaliation statute, seeking more than $1 million in damages for lost income from his claim of being effectively forced from his job and denied promotion, and additional compensation for emotional distress, the case in which he had testified in the days before his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s important to emphasize that the two fatal 737 crashes that killed 346 passengers and crew in 2018 and 2019, and the Portland accident all happened on 737s, not on the 787, the aircraft Barnett worked on in North Charleston. Still, Barnett viewed the 737 program as suffering from precisely the same ills as he says he witnessed on the 787 production. During his last media interview with TMZ in late January, Barnett discussed the quality regime that led to the disaster on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. \u201cThis is not a 737 problem, this is a Boeing problem,\u201d he intoned. \u201cI know the FAA has done due diligence and inspections. My concern is for the condition of the rest of the plane. What I\u2019ve seen with the door plug is what I\u2019ve seen with the rest of the plane in terms of jobs not being completed properly, inspection steps removed, issues being ignored. The 737 and 787 programs have really embraced the theory that quality is overhead and non-value-added.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Turkewitz, Barnett\u2019s death is a huge loss in the fight for protecting airborne passengers and crew, as well as a tragedy for his friends and family. \u201cOn that last day, John was looking so forward to getting the case behind him and living a life dedicated to promoting airline safety,\u201d says Turkewitz. As for the case against Boeing, Turkewitz insists that Barnett\u2019s tragic passing may not mark the death of his late client\u2019s heroic campaign. \u201cWe\u2019re planning to substitute John\u2019s estate, his family, for John,\u201d says Turkewitz. The \u201cFuncle\u201d whose elan seemed to fill the pool where he splashed happily with his nieces is gone. But with every new mishap at Boeing, the legacy of this maverick whistleblower rises in stature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shawn Tully\/Fortune John Barnett, a former quality manager at Boeing who became a prominent whistleblower in 2019, was found dead in early March. (photo: Swikar Patel\/The New Your Times) 24 march 24 (RNS.org) Saturday, March 9, dawned as a gusty gray morning in Charleston, S.C., with thunderstorms rolling across the… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32468,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32467\/revisions\/32468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}