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U.S. engineer faces arrest for exposing Airbus safety danger
VIENNA â Ever since the Mangans gave up their comfortable house in Kansas City, Kan., and moved here a year ago, the family has been living in a kind of suspended animation.... Mangan was chief engineer for TTTech Computertechnik, a Viennese company that supplies the computer chips and software to control the cabin-pressurization system for the A380, which is being assembled at the Airbus plant in France. In October, TTTech fired Mangan and filed civil and criminal charges against him for revealing company documents. The company said the information was proprietary and he had no right to disclose it to anyone. Mangan countersued, saying he had been wrongly terminated for raising legitimate safety concerns. Unlike U.S. laws that shield whistle-blowers from corporate retaliation, Austrian laws offer no such protection. Last year an Austrian judge imposed an unusual gag order on Mangan, seeking to stop him from talking about the case. Mangan posted details about the case anyway in his own Internet blog. The Austrian court fined him $185,000 for violating the injunction. And the Vienna police, who are conducting a criminal investigation into the matter, searched the family's apartment for four hours, downloading files from Mangan's computer as his children watched. Posted by: Grinetch Ebbeack9361 2005-10-02 |
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