On March 9, John Barnett was found dead (of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound) in his vehicle in the parking lot of the hotel where he had been staying in Charleston, South Carolina. Barnett had literally been in the middle of blowing the whistle on Boeing, his former employer. Only after he failed to appear for the third day of his deposition about manufacturing failures at Boeing did attorneys alert authorities to his absence.
Whistleblower protection laws are meant to lessen the horrific consequences that workers often suffer for informing on their employers. Barnett’s death highlights how much these protections, both social and legal, still need to be strengthened.
Barnett had worked at Boeing for nearly three decades; since 2010, he had been a quality manager there. When encountering safety issues and what he called “shoddy manufacturing problems” at Boeing’s South Carolina 787 Dreamliner plant, he initially tried to follow internal quality control procedures. But in 2014, he was reprimanded for putting that information in emails rather than reporting them “F2F” (face to face); Barnett later said he felt this reprimand was issued to make him feel he “shouldn’t put problems in writing.” He again reported safety and manufacturing problems to his supervisor in 2016, and records show he filed a complaint with the company’s human resources department.
Barnett retired from Boeing in 2017, and that same year he filed a complaint against the company with the U.S. Labor Department through the AIR21 Whistleblower Protection Program (a law designed to protect plane manufacturing whistleblowers who report carrier safety violations).
In short, Barnett followed the rules for protected whistleblowing by first reporting problems internally and then registering a complaint with the Department of Labor. He only turned to the media after he retired in 2017. He was subsequently quoted in articles in The New York Times on Boeing’s quality control issues, and appeared in a Netflix documentary about the 2018 and 2019 Boeing Max crashes.
The legal protection most commonly relied on in whistleblower complaints in the aviation field is the Wendell H. Ford Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the Twenty-First Century, enacted in 2000. Known more commonly as the AIR21 Whistleblower Protection Program, it protects “employees of U.S. air carriers and U.S. aircraft/component manufacturers, their contractors, and their subcontractors” (according to the Federal Aviation Administration website).
This federal statute is meant specifically to protect airline employee whistleblowers from retaliation against them by their employers. It is viewed by legal experts as an “employee-friendly legal standard,” but that does not mean it is easy to use. If an employee is able to invoke the statute, it means they have already sounded the alarm about safety or other violations to their employer and have been retaliated against by their employer with demotion, discipline, dismissal, or other actions.
The statute of limitations for the act is relatively short: Those filing complaints using AIR21 must do so within ninety days of the retaliation. If such employees can then prove that they engaged in protected activity, that their employer knew about that activity, that the employer subjected them to an adverse employment action, and that “the protected activity contributed to the adverse action,” then, and only then, may they be offered remedies such as reinstatement or back pay.
Richard Renner, a whistleblower lawyer with the firm Tate & Renner in Silver Spring, Maryland, tells The Progressive that AIR21 also “falls short” of more recent whistleblower laws. In addition to the law’s short statute of limitations, it does not cover the entire airline industry but only, according to Renner, “FAA-certified airlines and their contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers”—leaving airport employees who report safety concerns without protection. It also limits employees to pursuing their claims through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Department of Labor, and does not provide a way for whistleblowers to take their cases to court for a jury trial.
Perhaps most alarmingly, Renner also notes that AIR21 “does not prohibit employers from using forced arbitration clauses to deny employees from using the OSHA/DOL process.”
Anyone who travels regularly by air has likely become concerned about the preponderance of negative news about Boeing (Comedian John Oliver recently dedicated an entire Last Week Tonight episode to the company). A few of the higher profile incidents include the 2018 and 2019 crashes, resulting in a total of 346 fatalities; the January 5, 2024 Alaska Airlines flight in which a Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft lost a plug door after takeoff; and the March 11 event when a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner experienced a drop of several hundred feet mid-flight and “dozens of people were injured.”
Understanding what Barnett went through before his death indicates what whistleblowers suffer before any lawsuits are filed or whistleblower protection statutes are invoked.
Although Barnett’s tragic death has set off a new wave of media attention about his legal case against Boeing, other whistleblowers have also made claims against the company that resulted in legal action. In September 2023, Boeing offered a settlement of $8.1 million to the U.S. government for violating the False Claims Act and failing “to comply with certain contractual manufacturing specifications” in the production of the V-22 Osprey, a military aircraft. That suit was brought against Boeing by former employees who worked in V-22 production, based on allegations made between 2007 and 2018. In 2021, a U.S. Senate committee concluded there are “fundamental problems with safety oversight in the aerospace industry.”
One of the whistleblowers who testified in front of that committee, Boeing engineer Martin Bickeboeller, had previously reported in a complaint to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that Boeing’s oversight of its suppliers’ work was “inadequate,” and that he had been trying to highlight the problem for years. In 2019, senior Boeing engineer Curtis Ewbank was also revealed to have made an internal ethics complaint against Dennis A. Muilenburg, Boeing’s CEO at the time, for “publicly misrepresenting” the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX. Another Boeing whistleblower, Ed Pierson, retired from Boeing in 2018, “partly because he was uncomfortable with the conditions in the 737 factory.”
There is finally some indication that Boeing and regulators understand the enormity of the issues in aircraft manufacturing. On March 22, the Department of Justice announced that it had opened a criminal investigation against Boeing regarding the January 5, 2024, door-plug panel blow-out. On March 25, Boeing’s CEO, Dave Calhoun, announced that he would step down at the end of 2024.
In the wake of Barnett’s death, the National Whistleblower Center, a whistleblower support and advocacy organization, is calling on individuals to reach out to their elected officials to support a full investigation of the safety claims that Barnett had made. Barnett’s lawyers also, on March 20, released more information about the retaliation he had faced at Boeing for simply trying to draw attention to safety and manufacturing issues.
Understanding what Barnett went through before his death—Boeing supervisors giving him low performance scores, separating him from his work team, criticizing him for documenting critical equipment malfunctions, and being treated with “scorn and contempt” by upper management—indicates what whistleblowers suffer even before any lawsuits are filed or whistleblower protection statutes are invoked.