A Skeptic Under Pressure

It almost looks as if they just moved into their two-bedroom apartment near Austria's old Imperial Palace: Some boxes shipped from the U.S. have never been opened and the bedroom windows are still covered with sheets because the family ran short of money before they could buy curtains.

The three young Mangan children have stopped asking about their plight, although 9-year-old Timothy gets angry every once in a while. "I wish I can yell at them," he blurted out recently about his father's former employer.

Joseph Mangan, 41, is a whistle-blower. As a result he and his family find themselves in a foreign country with unfamiliar laws, fighting a legal battle that has left them almost penniless.

A year ago, Mangan told European aviation authorities that he believed there were problems with a computer chip on the Airbus A380, the biggest and costliest commercial airliner ever built. The A380 is a double-decked engineering marvel that will carry as many as 800 passengers -- double the capacity of Boeing Co.'s 747. It is expected to enter airline service next year.

Mangan alleges that flaws in a microprocessor could cause the valves that maintain cabin pressure on the A380 to accidentally open during flight, allowing air to leak out so rapidly that everyone aboard could lose consciousness within seconds.

It's a lethal scenario similar to the 1999 crash that killed professional golfer Payne Stewart and five others when their Learjet lost cabin pressure and they blacked out. The plane flew on autopilot for hours before crashing in South Dakota.

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.