He cleared the performance plan and kept the reviews clean - then came the pink slip
A 61-year-old Boeing engineer says the company used its own performance system to force him out over his age.
In a complaint filed in federal court in Virginia on September 1, 2026, the engineer accuses The Boeing Company of age discrimination, disability discrimination, and retaliation. He joined Boeing around 2005 and worked his way up to a senior software engineering role. His claims fall under three laws: the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act and Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Virginia Human Rights Act.
The complaint traces the trouble to a management shake-up in mid-2021. Around that time, the filing says, four engineers over the age of 50 were moved off his program at once, leaving him as the oldest engineer on it.
His age soon became a talking point, according to the complaint. During a 2022 meeting, the filing says, a program manager looked at him and said, “you’re old, so you don’t have any kids going on spring break.” The same manager, the complaint alleges, described performance improvement plans as a tool for getting back at people, quoting him as saying that to “get back at” people, “you put them in the PIP.”
What came next is where HR teams will lean in. The engineer says a different manager, barely a month into the job, hit him with a performance improvement plan for “failure to complete work” less than a month after he returned from a hospitalization - work he says did not exist. He completed the plan and kept earning positive reviews, the filing says, but the scrutiny did not let up. He describes being written up for showing up three minutes late to a meeting, for talking over a colleague, and for a single unannounced day working from home - while younger engineers, he alleges, worked remotely and set their own hours without anyone blinking.
The complaint says the same manager also began asking, through 2024, when he planned to retire.
From there, the filing stacks up a run of formal actions: a corrective action over remote work; an ethics-office complaint from his manager accusing him of mischarging his time, which the engineer says he disproved with his own records and which was dismissed; an accusation that he was absent without leave - and a one-day unpaid suspension - after he says he told his manager he was in the emergency room; and a denied request to work remotely while recovering from knee surgery, which pushed him onto FMLA leave instead.
Throughout, the engineer says he flagged age bias to management roughly eight or nine times, filed ethics and HR complaints, and asked more than once to be moved to a new manager. HR, the complaint says, told him it could not make that change. Boeing terminated him on or around November 21, 2025.
The disability side of the case rests on a “perceived disability” argument - that Boeing treated him as disabled after a hospitalization and a later health emergency, whether or not he actually was. The retaliation claims lean on timing, with the toughest actions landing after he reported discrimination and named his manager in complaints. He is seeking his job back, along with economic and compensatory damages.
The allegations have not been tested in court, and no judge has ruled on any of the claims.
