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 AM, Rob Turkewitz was sitting in a tony lawyers’ office downtown, waiting for his client John Barnett to testify—and further his crusade for safety in the skies. “My co-counsel Brian Knowles and I were gathered around a conference table alongside Boeing’s in-house counsel, and its trial lawyer from Ogletree, Deakens. It was in Ogletree’s offices, much fancier than ours, what you’d call a ‘grand door.’”
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 AM 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’d allegedly witnessed up-close on the Boeing factory floor, a dramatic narrative that he’d started the previous day. Barnett, 62, had worked from 2011 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’d 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 attributed the catastrophe to the types of sloppy practices he said that he’d 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 ten 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 co-counsel 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.”
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