Former Boeing employee, John Barnett, was found dead from an “alleged self-inflicted gunshot” on 9 March, between days of testifying against the aircraft manufacturer.
Barnett retired from Boeing’s North Charleston plant in 2017 after working with the company for 32 years, the last 7 of which as a quality manager. He had started raising flags about the manufacturer’s quality and safety due diligence before he retired and had been continuing his pursuit of unveiling irregularities ever since.
The former quality manager was testifying in front of a Charleston court. He was interrogated by Boeing’s attorneys and was in the middle of cross-examination by his own council when he failed to show to court. His lawyer, Brian Knowles, said he called the hotel to check on Barnett after he didn’t show up to court and that’s when hotel staff found him dead in his truck in the parking lot.
“[He] was supposed to do day three of his deposition here in Charleston on his AIR21 case”, Knowles wrote in an email. AIR21 is a US whistleblower protection programme for employees of air carriers, certain aircraft manufacturers and designers, and employees of their contractors, subcontractors or suppliers.
“John had been back and forth for quite some time getting prepared. (…) [We] calling this morning and his phone would go to voicemail. We then asked the hotel to check on him. They found him in his truck dead from an alleged self-inflicted gunshot. We drove to the hotel and spoke with the police and the coroner”, the attorney explained in his email.
Barnett was testifying against Boeing after flagging that, at the North Charleston plant, ” sub-standard” plane parts were still installed on aircraft, even taken out of the bin and fitted to planes, just to meet production deadlines. Moreover, he was saying that the emergency oxygen mask deployment system on the 787 Dreamliners built at the plant failed 25% of the time.
“The new leadership… started pressuring us to not document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They started bypassing procedures and not maintaining configurement control of airplanes, not maintaining control of non conforming parts – they just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring”, Barnett told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview in 2019.
Although Boeing denied the allegations, an investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revealed in 2017 that at least 53 “non-conforming” parts were indeed unaccounted for in the factory, allegedly declared lost. Boeing was ordered to immediately locate and detail the missing parts.
Soon after, on its own initiative, the manufacturer admitted it had “identified some oxygen bottles received from the supplier that were not deploying properly”, but claimed the defective tanks had not been installed on planes.
NEW: Boeing whistleblower John Barnett’s lawyer is casting doubts that Barnett died from a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 12, 2024
Lawyer Brian Knowles is referring to the suicide as “alleged.”
“John had been back and forth for quite some time getting prepared. The defense examined him… pic.twitter.com/JsfpWJIw7g
Boeing has been having a bad reputational year since a plug-in panel blew out mid-air on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 in January. Since then, Boeing has been appearing in the news on a weekly basis, with wheels falling off planes, cracked windshields, missing bolts and missdrilled holes. In the investigation launched on the 737 incident, the FAA has found “systemic quality-control issues“.
