Exclusive: The Boeing whistleblower testified for 12 hours before his suicide. Here’s what he saw at the planemaker that alarmed him
The warnings on Boeing’s production practices that John Barnett delivered in his two last days alive are resonating beyond the grave.
At 10 AM on Saturday, March 9, the famed whistleblower who’d been conducting a seven-year campaign against his former employer, was scheduled to give a third consecutive day of depositions at the offices of Boeing’s trial attorneys, Ogletree Deakens, in downtown Charleston, SC. By around 10:30 as lightning pierced the dark skies and torrential rains flooded the historic city’s streets, Barnett still hadn’t shown. So Barnett's attorney Robert Turkewitz and co-counsel Brian Knowles called the Holiday Inn where Barnett was staying, asking staff to check on their client’s room and car. Barnett, 62, was found dead in his “Clemson orange” Dodge Ram truck, his hand holding a silver pistol. The Charleston County Coroner ruled the cause of death “what appears to be 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.
On the two previous days, Barnett had testified for roughly 12 hours in the medium-sized conference room where the four lawyers, a group that included Boeing’s in-house counsel and trial lawyer from Ogletree, waited for him that morning. According to Turkewitz, Barnett‚ a burly six-footer sporting a shoulder length coif framing a walrus mustache and adjoining goatee—sat at the head of the table flanked on either side by the two pairs of opposing attorneys, a videographer posted at the opposite end. “Until I saw the video, I didn’t realize how going through the documents during the deposition may have acted like a trigger that put him deeper into a dark place,” says Turkewitz. “You could see him turning white as the tension built. He didn’t feel that Boeing had adequately addressed the concerns he'd raised. He’d put his career on the line for that. He felt that Boeing’s practices still posed a risk to the flying public. And that really, really bothered him.”
At one point in his testimony, Barnett acknowledges that “I’m emotional…I kind of get off-track with the emotion.” Still, one gets the overriding impression from reading Barnett’s testimony that this witness is anything but a zealot. He’s passionate in expressing his bedrock view that Boeing made a wrong turn in emphasizing speed over quality. But in criticizing individual practices, he’s extremely specific, always citing dates, names and numbers. He also displays deep technical knowledge on the intricacies of Boeing’s assembly-line processes, its internal rules, and the FAA’s regulations. Barnett throws in some ‘y’alls,” but seldom such placeholders as “I mean,” “you know,” or “It’s like’.” Put simply, Barnett’s persona as a Louisiana “good ole boy” who went by the nickname “Swampy” and relished racing hotrods and collecting real alligator heads masks an impressive intellect and a mastery of detail.
It's also important to recognize that Barnett's statements represent only his own interpretation of his treatment at Boeing. He clearly felt victimized and took things extremely personally. In the depositions, Boeing's lawyers do refer to emails from his managers that show a different picture. For example, he's asked to improve his "soft skills" by addressing his co-workers face to face, and praised for his role in investigations that, his managers claim, were thoroughly carried out. On the other hand, managers were spreading rumors that he didn't get along with people in an effort to gaslight him.
Boeing provided Fortune with the following statement: “We are saddened by Mr. Barnett’s passing and our thoughts continue to be with his family and friends. Boeing reviewed and addressed quality issues that Mr. Barnett raised before he retired in 2017, as well as other quality issues referred to in the complaint. Engineering analysis determined the issues he raised did not affect airplane safety. We will refer you to OSHA related to their assessment in 2020 that Boeing did not violate Mr. Barnett’s whistleblower protections. We encourage all employees to speak up when issues arise. Retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”
What Barnett saw at Boeing
On April 18, Barnett’s lawyers for the first time released the transcripts of the whistleblower’s testimony given during the final two days of his life. Barnett sat for the depositions in his whistleblower’s case before the Department of Labor Administrative Law Judges seeking damages from Boeing for harassment, lost pay, and emotional distress. Boeing attorneys conducted their cross-examination on March 7, challenging Barnett’s allegations in his complaint, which was first filed in 2022, and made public only a few weeks ago. The following day, Barnett's counsel Knowles questioned his client. Barnett’s account centers on the period between late 2010 and the start of 2017 when he served as a quality assurance manager at the plant in North Charleston, SC, know as BSC for “Boeing South Carolina,” that assembled the best-selling, widebody 787 Dreamliner.
The 141 pages of testimony make crucial reading for anyone interested in grasping the deep-seated problems underlying the legendary planemaker’s current crisis.
During the cross-examination on March 7, the Boeing attorneys questioned Barnett about his education, pre-Boeing jobs, and positions at the planemaker before moving to the North Charleston facility. Barnett stated that after graduating from high school, he drove a cab in his hometown of Alexandria, La. (Alexandria is an industrial center known as the crossroads of the Pelican state.) “Wasn’t much opportunity down there,” he noted. In the mid-1980s, Barnett stated, he took a job in Palmdale, California, at Rockwell international. For his first two-and-a-half years at Rockwell, Barnett labored on the new version of the space shuttle. His job: The artisanal task of making the plastic patterns for the tiles covering the heat shields attached to the shuttle’s skin. After the shuttle was completed, Barnett switched Rockwell’s B1 bomber program as electrician, running wiring and performing soldering and splicing.
In 1988, Barnett, then married with two stepsons, moved to the Puget Sound area to work on Boeing’s 747-400 production at its plant in Everett, Washington. According to Barnett, he advanced from a position job inspecting parts arriving from suppliers to serving as a lead auditor, a position that required him to develop an 11-course curriculum for training other auditors on the skills required for reviewing adherence to Boeing’s processes and procedures, to heading a parts-receiving area where he oversaw a $10 million annual budget.
While in Washington, Barnett disclosed, he took extensive night courses at Seattle University, studying inventory and supply chain management, and materials billing. For the first three years, he achieved a 4.0 grade point average. But what he calls his “12-hours a day, seven days a week” work schedule at Everett forced him to abandon his studies before graduating.
The way Barnett describes it, Boeing sent him to North Charleston in November of 2010 on a crucial mission: Develop the overall template for the quality control at the new plant. The 787 was a mega-hit that was outracing its top competitor, the Airbus A380. In Barnett's words, his role at Boeing was ensuring "the health of the airplane." To meet burgeoning orders, Boeing wanted to ramp production in North Charleston, the second facility after Everett for assembling the Dreamliner.
The plant still wasn’t finished when Barnett arrived. “It was considered a green site,” he testified. “So it was a brand-new site, brand-new employees. I was responsible to figure out the type of training we would need to provide our inspectors…for developing metrics and measures and data to show that we’re meeting compliance and process concerns that were brought forward…for making sure the product met Boeing specifications and requirements and FAA requirements. If I had an employee who wasn’t performing, it was my responsibility to take appropriate corrective action.”
Barnett contrasts the then-quality first culture in Everett with the get-it-done-fast ethic at BSC
The gulf in attention to quality between Everett and BSC, Barnett asserts, was astounding. “Quality is the chairman of the board,” he said. “[As inspectors] we should have the last say. And in Puget Sound, quality had the final say. I can't tell you how many times I would push back and say, no, this isn’t right, and management would support me. The leadership there knew the procedures and they supported me because they knew I was right. The leadership here [in South Carolina] didn't know the procedures and didn't support me because they were trying to support manufacturing. It was night and day."
The problem, as he saw it, was a culture where production had free rein. He states that in Everett, the mission concentrated on making the aircraft "safe and airworthy." But in Charleston, "The focus was on schedule and speed of production. I was told to let manufacturing do what they want. It was constant pressure to keep the line moving. [The mindset was] 'We don’t have time to follow processes, we’re building airplanes.'" The workers, he said, called each individual job a "bean." They'd pressure the inspectors to sign off on "beans" that weren't completed—just to keep planes advancing on the assembly line. "A manufacturing manager came to me at the end of his shift," Barnett recalls. "And he's like, John, man, I need you to buy off this job and let me finish it tomorrow. I need this bean. [I'd say] finish your work, then we'll inspect it.' Manufacturing was so pressured to get their bean count."
Quality managers, he adds, "would just wing it." And the rewards went to the brass and inspectors who didn't fight the system. "The yes men or yes women, they're just the bobble heads shaking their heads," remarked Barnett. "Those are the ones that excelled at Boeing."
Barnett asserts that the FAA required documentation for all work performed to be registered on a software platform called Velocity. That included anything that went awry in the production process, and the tracing of all defective parts. But according to Barnett, managers regularly avoided recording defective work and components on Velocity to avoid delays that would slow the flow of new Dreamliners.
In a management meeting, Barnett recounts, he declared that "paperwork" showing everything that’s done or not completed is documented, including the “build records” enshrined on Velocity, was as important as production. "When I said the paperwork is just as important as the hardware, pretty much the whole room started laughing at me," Barnett remembers. In pursuit of speed, he says, BSC management made quality inspectors scarce. “In Puget Sound, we had one inspector for nine mechanics. The first thing they did in Charleston was get rid of the ratio. At times it was 1 to 50 or 100. Just run flat out over quality and let manufacturing do what they want.”
Barnett clashes with his managers early on by resisting self-inspections
According to Barnett, as soon as he arrived at BSC, management started pushing a program called multifunction process performer, or MFPP. The system allowed Boeing to do away with inspectors for certain types of work, and allow their mechanics to sign off instead, sans oversight. “These were brand new employees who never built an airplane,” he testified. “They didn’t have experience or knowledge or training. Make sure they’re doing it right before handing over the reins to them.” For Barnett, MFPP was antithesis of that prudent approach. In his view, “It would put the flying public at risk.”
eBarnett claims that management authorized mechanics under MFPP to inspect and approve the performance of fasteners under different torque conditions. He doesn't specify the locations of the fastener, but he was presumably referring to those used to secure the wing to the fuselage, as other areas where proper torque is critical. He testified that it reminded him of rule-bending that led to the cataclysm over Portland. When the Boeing attorney stated that “It’s my understanding that the quality inspectors were inspecting all work that impacted safety on the airplane," Barnett fired back: “That’s as assumption. Because one of the things we really pushed back on was removing inspection requirements for, like, torque verification for fasteners. And when I see I saw the [7]37 door plug blow out, and that the fasteners aren’t installed, it’s like that’s exactly what we were talking about.”
It's true that Boeing failed by not properly reinstalling and inspecting the door plug in the 737. But the disaster wasn't the result of a self-inspection gone wrong, of the type described by Barnett. Boeing asserts that it ended the practice at Charleston after Barnett departed, and self-inspection is only allowed on a limited basis in the 737 program and then exclusively with FAA approval.
Barnett's complaints about MFPP in around 2012 triggered the first of many disputes that unleashed the ire of his managers. But another battle soon followed, this one over missing parts. “Parts were being taken from one [finished] plane and installed in another under construction,” he charged. “A mechanic would come to work and find that parts that he/she installed the day before were gone. Upper management ignored the issue and demanded that I stop documenting them in emails.” Barnett contends that the MFPP system was not approved by the FAA, and that the failure to log defective parts and those “stolen” from one plane and put in another violated the production certificate awarded by the federal agency.
Barnett gets asked by his boss to operate in “the gray area” and runs afoul of his managers by flagging the threat of loose titanium slivers
Barnett’s fate was pretty much sealed by 2014. That year, he got a new boss who despised him even more than his former senior manager. “He continued where the last manager left off,” the whistleblower relates. “He instructed me to not to document defects, not to put quality concerns in writing, it was constant, every day, every day, every day. I was pushing back to follow the quality system and he didn’t like that and pretty much wanted me out. He told me to work in ‘the gray area,’ which I don’t care how you spin it, means work outside the process. There are no gray areas in quality management.”
On the first day of depositions, however, Boeing's attorney's produced an performance review from his manager stating, "John has operational knowledge but still challenges changes before investigating or understanding the reason for the change. John needs to learn the art of working in gray areas, while maintaining compliance or intent of the procedure." It appears that in the view of the Boeing attorneys, the use of "in the gray areas" referred to deploying interpersonal skills to solve problems, not working outside the rules––the route that Barnett insists his managers were demanding.
Barnett filed an ethics complaint against his manager for demanding that he ignore the stolen parts problem, as well as the “gray area” command. His boss, says his underling, reposted by giving Barnett, who’d always received top grades in annual performance reviews, a failing mark on his 2014 card.
The conflict only deepened later that year, In the summer of 2015, Barnett claims that he flagged a potentially dangerous manufacturing gaffe to his superiors. When workers screwed bolt called titanium E-nuts to secure the surface above the one supporting the electronic gear that controlled the Dreamliner’s power systems on the fly-by-wire planes, razor-sharp, three inch slivers fell from the E-nuts onto the bundle of wires. Barnett, he says, warned his superiors that the slivers could cause potentially disastrous short-circuits. He recommended that workers remove the upper panels and clean out the slivers. But in his account, management refused, arguing that the disassembly and cleanup work would be just too expensive. In Barnett’s telling, his livid boss banned him from the E-nut, titanium slivers investigation.
But on the first day of depositions, Boeing lawyers produced an email that appears to show that Barnett had a lead and valuable role in handling the slivers issue. A manager the following to Barnett: "Thanks, John, for working through this complicated and confusing issue with operations to find a way forward." Barnett counters that the manager referred only to the inspector's role in expediting the paperwork, and that he wasn't called on for any work on actually cleaning out the slivers, the task that he insisted was so crucial, and that his bosses resisted.
The FAA performed audits that found slivers in all 10 planes inspected. Boeing conducted an investigation showing that the slivers were not a safety threat. It has stated that it subsequently made changes to ensure that newly-produced planes were free of the slivers.
Barnett’s put in exile managing non-conforming parts
In February of 2015, Barnett’s senior manager reassigned him from overseeing work on the assembly line to running what was effectively a faulty parts storage area labeled "materials review segregation area," or MRSA. “Being transferred to MRSA was absolutely retaliation,” Barnett argued. “If you file an ethics complaint against your boss and the manager turns around and moves you, that would be considered retaliation in the Boeing Company’s code of conduct.” Suddenly, Barnett found himself exiled far from the big action on the assembly line. “You want to be touching the airplane, that’s a great job,” he said. “Going to be the manager of a parts store, that’s pretty humiliating.”
Even in this early role, Barnett found what he calls more shenanigans, and courted more controversy. He claims that the FAA rules required Boeing to document what happened to each and every airplane part, whether defective or usable. When he took over MRSA, he bridled at learning that management had “pencil whipped,” or written an internal report that effectively wiped almost 200 lost, non-conforming parts from its books without informing the FAA. In addition, his boss demanded that Barnett sign off on a similar report that would erase responsibility to account for another 400 defective components. Barnett refused.
In still another battle in his tenure at MRSA, Barnett—according to his account—discovered that the “squibs” or firing mechanisms on many of the cylinders that deliver oxygen to the face masks that fall from the plane’s ceiling in the event of an accident weren’t working. Of the sample of 300 that he tested, one-quarter failed. Barnett claims his bosses scorned him for raising the problem, and quickly removed him from all authority over what he deemed the faulty squibs issue. Boeing later disclosed that its own investigation revealed that some of the oxygen masks weren't working, and fixed the problem so that all cylinders were operating properly.
At times, he argues, the alleged harassment reached almost the comic proportions of fraternity hazing. His boss, says Barnett, called him no less than 19 times one day, and 21 times the next, “asking if I was keeping tabs on a specific part, because I’m complaining about defective parts being closed out,” or pencil whipped. “I’ve never been called 21 times in a day," quipped Barnett. "Even by a girlfriend.”
When Barnett sought to escape this state of exile and ridicule by taking another job, he asserts, his BSC bosses blackballed him. Barnett claims that he had a great in-person interview at the NASA Michoud assembly facility in New Orleans, where Boeing makes portions of the rockets. But somehow, he didn’t get the position, despite what he calls a rave review from the NASA rep. What blocked him, in his view, was his boss’ obsession for getting even for his ethics complaints against them. A internal email from BSC manager––not the direct boss who reviled him––encapsulates the frustration that his superiors must have felt for Barnett. ”Most people would give high fives and hugs if he left,” the exec wrote. “Technically, he’s one of the best, but lacks people skills.”
Even after Barnett’s death, his family may bring his case forward
On leaving his home on January 18, 2017, Barnett suffered what he calls “chest pains, shortness of breath, dizziness…I thought I was having a heart attack.” He went to a Charleston doctor who told him that “the job is going to kill you with what you’ve been going through. Continue in that environment and you’ll be dead of a heart attack.” (In the depositions, Boeing’s lawyers assert that the doctor did not make that dire diagnosis.) Barnett went on medical leave, and left Boeing in March. The Boeing lawyers asked about his life back home in Louisiana, and Barnett’s description makes for painful reading. “For the first five years after leaving Boeing, I was not able to work because of anxiety and pain," he revealed. "I tried filling out forms for jobs including as an inspector for rail car production, but I broke out into an anxiety attack just thinking about reporting to someone else.” At the time of his death, this one-time hawk at spotting the smallest hiccups in the process of making wondrous flying machines was hoping to find work as a self-employed handyman fixing cars and doing small construction.
Barnett’s family, including his oldest bother Rodney and mom Vicky Stokes, are working with Turkewitz and Barnett to replace John Barnett as plaintiffs in his lawsuit. They clearly don’t want the cause to die with their beloved brother and son. In a coda to the tragedy, Barnett was planning to start the two-day drive back to Louisiana right after the second deposition ended around 5:20 PM on March 8. He’d told his mom that he’d be seeing her on Monday. But in the interests of moving the case forward, Barnett readily agreed to continue his testimony the next day, stating “Let’s just get it done, I’ve been waiting for seven years.”
In an interview with Fortune after her son’s death, Vicky Stokes told me, “I was worried about his health, he’d lost weight, he was my baby, but he looked older than my youngest son. But one thing didn’t stress him out. He told me, ‘Momma, I’ve never said anything but the truth." Now, his family is taking the torch for the haunted whistleblower who hours before his tragic death, closed out his final testament.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
