Boeing Hits Turbulence Again: Whistleblower FOUND DEAD

Boeing is in the news

again

this time after a

whistleblower

named John Barnett was

found

dead

in his car in the parking lot of a Charleston hotel. The Charleston County Coroner confirmed his death, reporting that the 62-year-old man died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in March. 9. The police are investigating now. John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years until his retirement in 2017. Days before his death, he had been testifying in a whistleblowing lawsuit

again

st the company in 2019. Barnett told the BBC that he had reportedly seen workers under pressure. By installing substandard parts on two planes, he also alleged that the substandard work on the plane was because executives wanted to speed up production now that Barnett was based in Louisiana, but died in South Carolina, where he had traveled. to testify in a Boeing-related defamation case.

In the case, he claimed that Boeing had intentionally damaged his reputation and career in retaliation for raising concerns about safety issues in Boeing's product line, while dozens of passengers were injured aboard a Boeing-made plane flying from Sydney to Auckland, New Zealand, on Monday, according to the Associated Press Lam Airlines said in a statement that there was a technical event during which the flight caused strong movement. The Boeing 7879 Dream Liner landed at Auckland Airport as scheduled and was due to continue to Santiago, Chile. Now about 50 people were treated at the airport. scene of mostly minor injuries, 13 of them were taken to a hospital, so we have been covering several of these incidents with Boeing and reporting on the inclusion of guests we have had on the show talking about some of the decisions that were made. have taken in top management. that seem to prioritize paying money to shareholders, um, doing these stock buybacks rather than investing in the company in ways that have caused a lot of problems, uh, in outsourcing and manufacturing to companies that don't typically make airline parts. and they don't. have the same type of safety protocols in place to ensure that their specifications meet standards, so, for example, an example that Bill Willam Begee, a long-time airline expert, gave was that a parts manufacturer had been a parts manufacturer. has been subcontracted to a surf shop, for example, in this case people are surprised because it is someone who since 2017 has been filing this whistleblowing claim against Boeing and was also traveling at the time of his death to defend himself or to file a defamation lawsuit.

They claim that the airline had been retaliating against him in the first place, people have been pointing out that 75% of suicides tend to happen at home and that there are huge financial implications for a company like Boeing that is suffering a lot in the media for Many of these events like the one you just described that occurred in New Zealand are making headlines for all the wrong reasons, people have deep concerns about flying safety in the first place and Boeing is now becoming synonymous with problems in the air. Sure, now, obviously, the official ruling here is suicide, like you said, self-inflicted gunshot wound in his car, you know, the Washington Post report obviously says that the process that he's gone through is very stressful and has caused him problems. doctors, been there.

A long time, so I wouldn't do it, although I obviously understand that Boeing wants to avoid bad press and that this is an inconvenient court matter for them. It's being presented as a suicide and that seems perfectly plausible to me. Also, um, we, yes, we've been talking a lot about problems on the plane, remember that that fall, yes, the flight, and the passengers sitting next to the door, if they hadn't been strapped in with their seat belts, could have been a fatal accident. Yeah, which would have been nice, so there's been a handful of uh. I looked at the statistics of deaths on airplanes in those circumstances.

There have been no plane crashes in the US for a decade, which is a nice record in sterling terms. It remains that way. Flying is one of the safest and absolutely safe forms of transportation, it's much safer than cars, we have tens of thousands of deaths in cars every year so I don't want to scare people away from flying unnecessarily. but that is not the question, the question is whether or not they want to fly on Boeing and Boeing in particular has been Ground Zero for many of these incidents. Remember just in January, the nose of the plane fell off, the bow wheel of the plane fell off. before a plane took off, and I think it's not just a question of whether or not someone literally dies in this New Zealand incident, dozens of people were taken to the hospital, they were also treated for their injuries at the scene, and they are also deeply uncomfortable, people are trying to get there. places and the fact that you have to change planes because the plane you're on broke down or you have to reroute because the door of the plane you're on flew off while flying thousands of miles above the ground is a problem important to a lot of people and it's a pretty important issue for Boeing that they are trying to do damage control and we should also cover another time the millions of dollars in lobby money that they have put into various politicians and an effort to try to keep This type of things in secret remember that this is also a kind of monopoly problem.

Boeing supplies a lot of airplanes in this industry and there is a sort of collective action problem here where if Boeing goes down are there people who can replace it and provide alternative machines for all these airlines, well it's a difficult situation, the latest What we want to see is a shortage of available planes, I think most people's experience with flying these days is that it's increasing, too. expensive and inconvenient and we would not want to cut off the supply of aircraft because that would exacerbate those problems. I've talked a lot about the, in my opinion, very annoying, um uh uh, requirements for pilots to get a certain amount of um uh. hours of training in the air, which is like double in the US than in Europe or even Canada, where there is no evidence that it creates more safety, it just creates more bottlenecks for H in hiring pilots , of course we want the planes to be safe we ​​don't want them to start crashing all the time this is not this is not pilot error none of what we have described today as pilot error and in particular the FAA audit of Boeing 737 Max planes, which is the game that's been really central to a lot of these accidents,

found

dozens of problems, failed 39 of 89 FAA audits on this plane, so what's the point?

There will be consequences for Boeing and some intervention. for Public Safety before we get to a place where we talk about how many people died in a plane crash, remember, a lot of these planes were grounded earlier this year. I think in January, when one of these incidents first occurred, it's not the first time this particular type of plane has been grounded, but I think the question is whether they'll be able to get to the root cause of some of these problems. , at least as the complainants describe it, like the one who just died, who, who points out. to management decisions and basically trying to reduce costs and prioritize shareholder value, are you going to address that type of problem at its root or are we just going to continue stopping planes doing inspections and carrying on as usual until there is a most significant tragedy?

Yeah, I don't know, we'll keep paying attention to that and we'll have more Rising right after this.