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John Barnett, a former Boeing quality manager, had raised several concerns about the safety of the same place, a 787-8 Dreamliner, that crashed in India last week, killing 241 people. Barnett was found dead from a gunshot wound this past March, the day after he gave a deposition against Boeing in a wrongful termination suit.
Before his death, John Barnett had worked in quality control at Boeing for 32 years and three months ago and had made several warnings about the company’s 737 airliner being placed back into use after multiple incidents.
Barnett, who worked at the Boeing’s 787 manufacturing facility in Charleston, South Carolina, also claimed the Boeing 787 Dreamliner was being assembled with “sub-standard parts,” that quality control was routinely bypassed, and told the New York Times that he had not “seen a plane out of Charleston yet that I’d put my name on saying it’s safe and airworthy.”
Time also reports that in January of 2024 another whistleblower, engineer Sam Salehpour, came forward with claims that sections of the fuselage of the 787 Dreamliner were improperly connected. He claimed that when the sections wouldn’t fit, he “literally saw people jumping on the pieces of the airplane to get them to align.” He warned that gaps created during that assembly process could cause the plane to break apart during flight.
Despite those warnings and concerns, according to Time, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner has been in service since 2011 without a fatal crash, and that is with over 1,100 Dreamliners currently in use worldwide.
Another Boeing whistleblower who died suddenly last year and under mysterious circumstances, Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, had filed a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alleging “serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management of the 737 production line.” He too had sued Boeing claiming he was wrongfully terminated for raising safety concerns. Neither Dean nor John Barnett’s lawsuits against Boeing had reached a conclusion before their deaths.
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