The Utah Supreme Court has upheld the termination of a former Morton Thiokol employee whose failure to complete an inspection procedure delayed testing of a redesigned space shuttle booster motor.
In a unanimous 15-page ruling issued Friday, the court found that Thiokol's firing of Billy Johnson was proper because, contrary to Johnson's argument, its employee handbook did not constitute an employment contract.The decision upheld a summary judgment granted to Thiokol by 1st District Judge Franklin Gunnell.
In 1988, Thiokol was in the midst of a redesign project aimed at correcting flaws in the booster, which had been blamed for the January 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
In July 1988, Thiokol established a leak check test procedure to verify the placement of redesigned O-rings, which had played a part in the failure of the Challenger booster.
Johnson, who had been a process inspector since 1979, was assigned to inspect the leak check test procedure "although he had not received adequate training regarding the new process," Chief Justice Gordon Hall wrote.
At the same time, all inspectors were working mandatory overtime to meet Air Force deadlines and had been urged by upper management to avoid shutdown orders because they would result in unacceptable scheduling pressure, the justice wrote.
On July 8, 1988, technicians were involved in five simultaneous operations even though Johnson was the only inspector in the building and thus was unable to witness each motor "set-up" as required.
At one set-up, he glanced at the motor but did not complete a 39-step operation to verify the procedure, although he certified he had completed the inspection.
However, Johnson failed to notice that certain hoses had been improperly installed. During a routine test operation the following day, excess pressure caused by the hoses forced the O-rings out of their groove and damaged some insulation, delaying a motor test-firing by 20 days.
"The incident resulted in an investigation by NASA officials and was highly publicized in both the local and national news media," Hall wrote.
Johnson and the employee who installed the hoses were fired.
Johnson filed suit in February 1989, claiming that Thiokol had terminated his employment without good cause, thus breaching an implied-in-fact contract provision.
The lower court granted a summary judgment dismissing the case, and the high court upheld that ruling, holding that Thiokol had not violated its own employment policies as outlined in the employment handbook.