The last days of the Boeing whistleblower

Turkewitz wasn’t totally surprised that Barnett was late for this round of depositions. “Downtown Charleston was flooded by one of the worst rainstorms I’ve ever seen,” he recalls. “I’d called John’s 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’t answer.”

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 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’d 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.

Barnett’s 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’s 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.

In the action that brought Barnett across the table from Boeing’s 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’s 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.

The previous day, Barnett had been on a roll as a video camera recorded the event. “John testified for four hours in questioning by my cocounsel Brian,” says Turkewitz. “This was following seven hours of cross-examination by Boeing’s 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’m sitting there, I’m thinking, ‘This is the best witness I’ve ever seen.’” 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, “I know these documents inside out. I’ve had to live it.”

That Friday, Barnett’s testimony ended at around 5 p.m., and the parties reconvened an hour later. “John was really tired and didn’t want to testify any more that day,” says Turkewitz. “He wanted to drive home to Louisiana starting that evening, as he had planned. He had told his mom that he’d 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’t think the judge would stand for that restriction. “We 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’s testimony that he was subjected to a hostile work environment.” (Boeing did not respond to a request to comment for this story.)

For Barnett, passion for the cause surmounted the fatigue from two days of intense questioning. According to Turkewitz, he told the lawyers, ‘Let’s just get it done. I’ve already been waiting for seven years.’”  

Tragedy in the Holiday Inn parking lot as the Boeing whistleblower is found dead

Shortly after 10 a.m., Turkewitz called the Holiday Inn. “I asked if he’d checked out, and they said no,” he recounts. “I 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, ‘His stuff’s packed up, but he’s not there.’” Turkewitz asked that they look for his car, a “Clemson Orange” Dodge Ram truck. “The manager came back and told me, ‘His truck is still there, and we called EMS. I can’t tell you anything more.’” At that point, the lawyers around the conference table feared that Barnett could have suffered a heart attack.

Turkewitz then called the manager back, and she said that she couldn’t 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. “The officer asked who I was, and how many times I’d called John that morning,” says Turkewitz. “I asked her, ‘Is John okay? Can you at least tell us if he’s alive?’” The officer replied, “I’m sorry, but I can’t provide that information to you.” Recalls Turkewitz, “That’s when I knew that this is not good.”

At that point, all four attorneys drove to the Holiday Inn to witness a parking lot crowded with volunteer emergency vehicles and police cars. “John’s truck was blocked from view by emergency vehicles. I was asked to keep a distance,” 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 “a self-inflicted wound,” and a police report disclosed that “a white piece of paper resembling a note” lay in plain view on the passenger seat. Its contents haven’t been disclosed.

To Turkewitz and Knowles, Barnett’s lawyers and friends for seven years, the tragedy was incomprehensible. “He was in a good mood the evening before, so looking forward to testifying on Saturday,” says Turkewitz. “Although he was tired, I saw no sign he was in distress.” Turkewitz and Knowles said in a statement, “We didn’t 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.” Two detectives from the City of Charleston police department are currently conducting an investigation into Barnett’s death.

The Barnett family, which includes his older brother Rodney, issued a statement reading, “He 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.”

Boeing released the following statement: “We are saddened by Mr. Barnett’s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.” Boeing didn’t provide further comment on Barnett or the issues he raised beyond referring Fortune to that statement.

Barnett displayed a fun, fuselage-size personality and sharp skills as a quality manager

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 “Southern hospitality abounds.” 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.

Nicknamed “Swamp Dawg” 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 “Funcle,”’ short for “fun uncle.” Barnett wed for the second time after moving to Pineville. “He married Diane Johnson, his best friend,” says Turkewitz. “She died of brain cancer 18 months ago.” 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.

According to Turkewitz, Barnett was “the most decent person you could imagine. He was constantly doing things for people. He never met a stranger.”

During his years in Everett, Barnett was impressed by Boeing’s attention to quality and safety. “When 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,” Barnett stated for a 2019 story in Corporate Crime Reporter. 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.

Swikar Patel—The New York Times/Redux

In North Charleston, Barnett sees shockingly broken safeguards and culture, and tries to fix it

In the Corporate Crime Reporter 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. “The entire team came down…from the military side,” he said, referring to the company’s defense business. “Their motto was, we’re 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.” Emblematic of the blowsy mindset, he noted in a later interview, “was that the whole place smelled of french fries.”

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).

The second issue involved the emergency oxygen equipment. Barnett’s team found that 25% of the systems didn’t 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.

Third, Barnett states that Boeing wasn’t keeping proper track of parts shipped from suppliers that it found defective. “Many of them were lost or shown to have been installed on the airplane without being repaired,” he says in the Corporate Crime piece. “We didn’t know where a lot of them went. Some of them were significant structural components…such as on the aft pressure bulkheads.” 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.

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. “They isolated me from the other quality managers,” he says. “I was basically by myself. They were constantly denigrating me. I could do nothing right. My complaints seemed to go into a black hole.”

Barnett’s managers, in his words, also “reprimanded” him for “documenting process violations,” and told him that the company didn’t want him putting problems in writing.

“I was going through health issues and having anxiety attacks,” he explains. “I had gone as far as I could go inside the company. I had to go outside.” 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’s 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. “His doctor told him that if he didn’t quit his job at Boeing, he could die of a heart attack,” says Turkewitz.

The final interview

As it turned out, OSHA found the facts presented in Barnett’s case insufficient to rule against Boeing. “OSHA is handicapped because they don’t have the authority to subpoena documents,” says Turkewitz. In 2021, Boeing issued a statement that read, “Boeing has in no way negatively impacted Mr. Barnett’s ability to continue whatever chosen profession he chooses.” 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.

It’s 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. “This is not a 737 problem, this is a Boeing problem,” he intoned. “I know the FAA has done due diligence and inspections. My concern is for the condition of the rest of the plane. What I’ve seen with the door plug is what I’ve 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.”

For Turkewitz, Barnett’s death is a huge loss in the fight for protecting airborne passengers and crew, as well as a tragedy for his friends and family. “On that last day, John was looking so forward to getting the case behind him and living a life dedicated to promoting airline safety,” says Turkewitz. As for the case against Boeing, Turkewitz insists that Barnett’s tragic passing may not mark the death of his late client’s heroic campaign. “We’re planning to substitute John’s estate, his family, for John,” says Turkewitz. The “Funcle” 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.