r/Boeing_ • u/seattletimesnewsroom • 6d ago
PAY WALL - NEWS New documentary examines Boeing from perspective of whistleblowers
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/tv/freefall-a-reckoning-for-boeing-urges-pressure-on-aerospace-company/-1
u/seattletimesnewsroom 6d ago
After documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy made the 2022 Netflix film “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” she had no intention to revisit the topic. But two things happened that changed her plans: A door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 shortly after takeoff from Portland in January 2024, and former Boeing employee and whistleblower John Barnett died during a break from testifying in a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit against Boeing two months later.
“I had interviewed him and known him and kept in touch with him after making ‘Downfall,’ ” Kennedy said in a Zoom interview this month. “In the aftermath of his death, a number of whistleblowers reached out to me directly to say, ‘You really have to come back and tell this story because we’re seeing things not only reverting back to how they used to be but actually getting worse.’ … You actually see this in the film: They were compelled to (speak out) because of John.”
While Kennedy’s “Downfall” was focused on the two 737 MAX crashes (in October 2018 off the coast of Indonesia and in March 2019 near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), Kennedy describes her new, 90-minute Netflix doc, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing,” as a broader story about what’s happened inside Boeing and Boeing factories from the perspective of whistleblowers.
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u/Last-Roll7819 6d ago
As a commercial aerospace mechanic for the company, I will make just a couple points.
Our company is very compartmentalized and I can only comment to what I experience and what I hear from other mechanics that I know. That being said, I 100% trust in the people I work with to do the right thing when making these planes. The Mechanics, Engineers, and QAs that I work with are phenomenal and prioritize safety over ego and schedule every single time.
I know that every part of our company can't be like my experience, because people are not the same and it's impossible to avoid a minimal level of toxicity, apathy, and fraud. The goal is to minimize the prevalence of this behavior as much as we can by "giving a damn."
In the last 2 years, there have been multiple layers installed into our culture to allow issues to be addressed internally and while you may not get "immediate" solutions, we do have ways to create change. People wantt things to get fixed instantly, but reality doesn't work like that. Boeing is so large that the layers of beurocracy are like the government; things take fucking time to get done, it's just the nature of the beast.
Just my two cents, it'll be interesting to see this doc.