Whistle-Blower Suit Filed Against Hughes : Litigation: Ex-supervisor in Newport Beach plant alleges that her complaints about faulty missile parts caused her firing.
A former supervisor at Hughes Aircraft Co. in Newport Beach has filed a $7-million whistle-blower lawsuit against the aerospace company, contending that she was laid off because she told government investigators that Hughes was manufacturing substandard components for the guidance systems of its advanced medium-range, air-to-air missile.
Margaret Goodearl, 40, of Huntington Beach said in a Superior Court lawsuit in Santa Ana that the only reason she was let go in March, 1989, was because she refused to obey supervisors who ordered her to cover up defects in parts called hybrids, which help guide the Amraam missile.
“They basically said, ‘Shut up and do your job and approve the parts or you’ll be fired,’ ” she alleged in a telephone interview.
Hughes officials could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday and became public late Friday afternoon. But James Temple, a defendant in the lawsuit and a supervisor in Goodearl’s department until he retired in November, defended the hybrids.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those parts,” he said. “I don’t see how there can be, with that rigorous inspection system.”
Two weeks ago, the Air Force said it had ordered Hughes and Raytheon, another defense contractor, to suspend deliveries of the 12-foot-long Amraam missile because they had failed in recent tests. The Air Force and Navy are conducting a program in which they plan to buy 24,000 of the Amraam missiles for about $9 billion.
Goodearl said she was told to approve the hybrids even though they showed leaks when subjected to pressure tests. When she reported the allegedly substandard hybrids to the Defense Department in October, 1986, Goodearl said, she was stripped of her supervisorial authority and put on the night shift.
Goodearl said she remained in the hybrid department for about two more years, then was laid off. But she claims that she was harassed during those two years.
“She was actively and continuously harassed by means of racial and sexual slurs and verbal comments, in addition to physical gestures and threatening and menacing postures,” the lawsuit said. Goodearl is a native of Ireland.
On one occasion, Goodearl said, she left work to go to her car and found a butchered pig’s head in a brown paper bag on the hood. Temple dismissed that story, saying: “No one else ever saw that pig’s head, and news like that would go through the plant like gang-busters.”
Goodearl seeks $2 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. She said in the lawsuit that she has been unable to find work since her layoff and that she has suffered emotional distress.
Earlier this month, Patrick M. Kelley, former chief of the Pentagon’s contracts division of the Defense Contract Administration Service, filed a whistle-blower suit against the company. In the suit, Kelley alleged that the Hughes Ground Systems Group in Fullerton fraudulently overcharged the government by $70 million between 1983 and 1989. Kelley’s suit alleged that Hughes improperly used a labor-pricing rate on its Fullerton contracts that had been specifically disapproved.
Hughes said the allegations were “unfounded.”
In a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana filed in June, former Hughes engineer Michael Denlinger charged that Hughes Aircraft covered up flaws in 4.75 million microchips installed in defense systems. The suit sought $9.6 billion in damages. Hughes characterized Denlinger’s allegations as erroneous, saying it was unaware of any system failures that had occurred as a result of defective chips described by the former engineer.
