Boeing Whistleblower Found Dead amid Lawsuit Against Company

A former Boeing employee who became a whistleblower against Boeing was found dead in the middle of a lawsuit he was assisting.

John Barnett died on March 9th at the age of 62 in what police described as a “self-inflicted wound.” Before his death, he was “giving evidence in a whistleblower case against the company,” the paper said. BBC. Burnett worked for Boeing for 32 years before retiring from the company in 2017 for health reasons. The BBC writes:

Starting in 2010, he worked as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant, which manufactures the 787 Dreamliner, a state-of-the-art airliner used primarily on long-haul routes.

2019, Mr. Barnett Said The BBC reported that workers under pressure were deliberately fitting substandard parts onto aircraft on the production line.

He also said serious problems were found with the oxygen system, which could cause one in four breathing masks to fail in an emergency.

He said that soon after he started working in South Carolina, he became concerned that the push to build new planes would speed up the assembly process and compromise safety, something the company has not done. I denied it.

He later told the BBC that the defective parts went missing because employees did not follow procedures to trace them within the factory.

In some cases, he said, substandard parts were taken from scrap bins and installed on planes under construction to prevent production line delays.

Barnett also said that the Boeing 787’s emergency oxygen system has a 25 percent failure rate in real-world emergencies, adding that he had alerted senior management to the problem. Boeing denied all of his claims, but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) acknowledged in 2017 that there was some truth to some of his claims, identifying the location of at least 53 “nonconforming” parts in the factory. was deemed to be lost, and made a request to Boeing. We will take “corrective action.”