Boeing whistleblower shoots himself dead

[Johnny Yesno]

In his truck. In the carpark outside his hotel. On his way to court. Nothing to see here.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68534703

BREAKING: Boeing Whistleblower FOUND DEAD After Stunning Testimony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUKRBazqkAY

Paging buzby!

[Buelligan]

Maybe it's a beard thing.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Being cleanshaven didn't seem to help Willie McRae much.

[Zero Gravitas]

I don't believe this for one second.

If he had wanted to kill himself then why did he go to such lengths to avoid flying on 787s?

[jamiefairlie]

Enemies of the state are awfy suicidal stent they?

[Dr Trouser]

I worked in a civil aerospace airframer for over 20 years (the other one) and I've met and worked with a lot of Boeing employees. Even 25 years after the merger with Mcdonell Douglas you can still spot which came from Boeing and which came from the profit fixated shit can merchants of McDonnell Douglas.

We all knew the 787 issues when they pushed everything into the supply chain, as it's a small community and we get to see all the manufacturing cock ups. However while we thought the 787 was the pinnacle in shit supply chain management, good to see they excelled themselves with the 737MAX

RIP John, hope the fuckers go down for this

[BlodwynPig]

Murder. It's always murder. Boeing are murderers.

[shoulders]

The presenter Krystall Ball will have to go into the American names thread.

This is utterly awful, Boeing make all this money off the back of a series of aircraft renowned for their reliability and simplicity to fix problems, aircraft production by its very nature has to be a quality comes first operation. They make a shit tonne of money either way due to being one of a handful of companies with the ability to deliver volume.

Who fucks that up?

Can only imagine how much pressure was exerted on this poor guy to stay quiet. Corporate America, a black hole of evil.

[buzby]

For info, the 'whistleblower' case he was involved in was not the US Government vs. Boeing. It was a private case where he alleged he experienced retaliation from the company for raising quality and safety concerns which forced him to retire from his job. He originally filed the complaint with OSHA in January 2017 and after a four year investigation they concluded that there was no retaliation, which Barnett later appealed. The case has been pending since 2021, as the two sides have gone through discovery and prehearing motions (Boeing's motion to dismiss the claim was denied in 2022) and was set for a hearing in June.

Barrett went public with comments about production defects he saw on the 787 line in November 2019, after the 737 Max crashes brought media attention on Boeing's lax attitude to quality and safety.

The article in the link details the history of his claims about 787 production quality issues and how they were handled by the FAA. It should be remembered that the FAA had been in Boeing's pocket for years by that point and had effectively become a rubber-stamping organisation with regards to manufacturing quality and certification issues, it was only after the 737 Max investigation that the FAA's shortcomings were exposed and Boeing came under much more scrutiny.

[Johnny Yesno]

The article in the link details the history of his claims about 787 production quality issues and how they were handled by the FAA. It should be remembered that the FAA had been in Boeing's pocket for years by that point and had effectively become a rubber-stamping organisation with regards to manufacturing quality and certification issues, it was only after the 737 Max investigation that the FAA's shortcomings were exposed and Boeing came under much more scrutiny.

Ah, Grace Blakeley mentioned this in passing during one of her recent interviews.

Thanks for the extra info. I'm glad the pager still works!

[touchingcloth]

This is utterly awful, Boeing make all this money off the back of a series of aircraft renowned for their reliability and simplicity to fix problems, aircraft production by its very nature has to be a quality comes first operation. They make a shit tonne of money either way due to being one of a handful of companies with the ability to deliver volume.

Who fucks that up?

They are a public company and have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders first and foremost, ignorant.

[shoulders]

Share price is heavily dependent on reputation as well as headline financial performance.

Colossally embarrassing aircraft failures repeating again and again which is then traced back to penny pinching and short cuts that would shame a regional newsagents is probably not going to help deliver value for shareholders.

It didn't help VW's share price when they had been found to be cheating emissions tests.

[Mr_Simnock]

A lot of potential revenue lost - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131733/aircraft-order-cancellation/

[Buelligan]

Find it quite boggling, after this news, this poor man and other peoples' revelations, the imminent heat-death of the planet and so on, Boeing has a share price at all.  Who would willingly hop onto a Boeing?

[bgmnts]

Boeing are surely the epitome of too big to fail?

The company can tank as much stock as it wants, it will just fire a few thousand workers and get bailed out by the government or something.

Shareholders be getting paid.

[touchingcloth]

Boeing are surely the epitome of too big to fail?

The company can tank as much stock as it wants, it will just fire a few thousand workers and get bailed out by the government or something.

Shareholders be getting paid.

Yeah, any sufficiently large private company is indistinguishable from a publicly owned one.

[shoulders]

Who would willingly hop onto a Boeing?

Most of my plane journeys seem to be on 737-800s which from what I have read is the last great passenger jet Boeing managed to construct.

The planes are maintained and fixed by contract engineers rather then Boeing themselves.

Their reliability and safety record is have been subject to the most real-world conditions over the longest period  of any aircraft in circulation, so if I was asked to choose, that one please.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Not really sure why but Youtube recommended me a vid a while back of some planespotter who goes around taking trips on knackered passenger planes in less well-off parts of the world.


The comments had some posts from other people in to planes totally unsurprised it was an Embraer 120. Apparently the Brazilians designed them to be 'tolerant' of a lackadaisical approach to observing their recommended service procedures to the point they can practically fly without wings.

[touchingcloth]

Most of my plane journeys seem to be on 737-800s which from what I have read is the last great passenger jet Boeing managed to construct.

The planes are maintained and fixed by contract engineers rather then Boeing themselves.

Their reliability and safety record is have been subject to the most real-world conditions over the longest period  of any aircraft in circulation, so if I was asked to choose, that one please.

You'd possibly feel differently if most of your plane journeys were within the US and provided by US-based airlines. The point is relatively moot, because Boeing has the market sewn up and Airbus can't produce planes quickly enough to provide the airlines who would rather use alternative manufacturers. And if you were confident with Boeing but wanted to fly with an airline other than the four largest, you might have concerns about the engines they were using. However, it doesn't matter! The big four airlines have the engine market sewn up, so if you want to fly budget you don't have your choice of engine.

If it's not Boeing, you're not going; it's Pratt & Whitney, it's time to shitney.

[buttgammon]

Is the 777-300ER going to be a safe bet for a long-ish trip?

Not really sure why but Youtube recommended me a vid a while back of some planespotter who goes around taking trips on knackered passenger planes in less well-off parts of the world.


The comments had some posts from other people in to planes totally unsurprised it was an Embraer 120. Apparently the Brazilians designed them to be 'tolerant' of a lackadaisical approach to observing their recommended service procedures to the point they can practically fly without wings.

This guy's channel is a source of morbid fascination for me, but having overcome a fear of flying, I try not to watch them when I have an upcoming trip, even though the fact that he's still alive despite constantly travelling on rickety, rusty deathtraps must be reassuring on some level.

[buzby]

Share price is heavily dependent on reputation as well as headline financial performance.

Colossally embarrassing aircraft failures repeating again and again which is then traced back to penny pinching and short cuts that would shame a regional newsagents is probably not going to help deliver value for shareholders.

It didn't help VW's share price when they had been found to be cheating emissions tests.

Boeing artifically rig their share price by buying back shares (for example, between 2014 and 2018 the company spent $39 billion on buying back 138 million shares) which allows them to pass on profits to the large investment companies that bought the shares, artificially boosting the company's share price in the process, which then allows the senior executives to cash in their stock options with big profits. All perfectly legal and above board, you see.

This was all part of the transition after the McDonnell-Douglas 'reverse takeover' from being an engineering company to a financial services company (symbolised by the corporate HQ moving from Seattle to Chicago, far way from any of the manufacturing bases). The was led by a generation of executives who all learned their trade at GE, the pioneer of this process of 'unlocking shareholder value'.

Harry Stonecipher, the CEO of McD-D at the time of the merger in 1997 who then took over as CEO of Boeing after Phil Condit resigned in the wake of a defence procurement bribery scandal in 2003, famously said "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.".

Stonecipher was ex-GE (1960-84), as was his successor Walter James McNerney, who took over in 2005 (GE 1982-2001, leaving after losing the runoff to become GE's CEO), Dennis Muilenberg, who took over in 2015 and oversaw the development of the 737 Max was a Boeing lifer, and was invited to fall on his sword by the board of directors in 2019 over the Max crisis (with a $60 million golden handshake of bonuses and stock options he was owed).

Muilenberg was replaced with another ex-GE man in 2020, the current CEO Dave Calhoun, who joined GE from college and rose to Vice Chairman in 2005 before leaving the following year to be CEO of financial data provider Neilsen Holdings and also joined the board of the investment management firm Blackstone Group in 2014 as the MD of their private equity operations before being recruited by Boeing's board in 2020. Given his background, it's pretty clear the direction they want him to take the company.

Most of my plane journeys seem to be on 737-800s which from what I have read is the last great passenger jet Boeing managed to construct.

The planes are maintained and fixed by contract engineers rather then Boeing themselves.

Their reliability and safety record is have been subject to the most real-world conditions over the longest period  of any aircraft in circulation, so if I was asked to choose, that one please.

The 737-800 certainly wasn't the last great plane Boeing made. It was overstretched version of the 737-NG (much as McD-D had done with the DC9 to turn it into the MB80 and MD90), intended to wring the last cents out of the 1960s-designed cash cow before embarking on a new narrowbody design to compete against the A319/A320. The new design was ultimately cancelled due to predicted development time/cost reasons and companies such as SouthWest and Ryanair who had vast fleets of 737s not wanting the expense of converting all their pilots to a new type, so they went with the stretching the 737 again with 737 Max, which has proved a bodge too far.

The overstretched fuselage of the 737-800 and -900 variants left the aircraft with longitudinal stability problems discovered during flight testing that needed a partial fly by wire control system to combat. This system was further bodged into MCAS on the Max, which was ultimately responsible for the 2 fatal crashes.

There was also the rudder hardover issue that led to a number of fatal crashes and near misses in the 1990s. After fighting the NTSB's findings for years Boeing were eventually pressured into redesiging the hydraulically-powered rudder control unit in 2000, but 737s are still experiencing rudder control issues years after the redesigned units have been retrofitted.

I know you do a lot of travel to Europe - are the 737s you fly on from RyanAir? They have a fleet of 395 737-800s, 193 737 Max-8s (which they refer to as the 'Gamechanger' in their fleet list, to avoid any negative connotations), and they have 400 737 Max-10s on order to replace the -800s (though they are on permanent delay as there are further unresolved airworthiness certification issues with that variant). In the wake of the United 737 Max-9 door loss issue when United's CEO said they are reviewing any further 737 Max deliveries and orders, O'Leary commented that he would happil;y take them off Boeing's hands (he was after all one of the primary drivers for the Max's existence).

The last great aircraft Boeing made is usually considered to be the 777, which was designed before the McD-D merger.

[BlodwynPig]

My fear of flying just became terminal

[shoulders]

I know you do a lot of travel to Europe - are the 737s you fly on from RyanAir?

Yes and Jet2.

As I remember, easyjet and Wizz Air use Airbus.

The only worrying thing I've spotted lately is the staff having trouble closing the front door on a couple of flights. In one case we were grounded for 5-10 minutes while a young lad went back and forth with it unsuccessfully.

 

[beanheadmcginty]

I don't understand why we ever stopped flying around in DC-8s, considering they can survive interstellar travel. Trust in Xenu I say.

[buzby]

The only worrying thing I've spotted lately is the staff having trouble closing the front door on a couple of flights. In one case we were grounded for 5-10 minutes while a young lad went back and forth with it unsuccessfully.

The front cabin doors on the 737 have always been difficult to close. Because of the small diameter of the narrowbody fuselage barrel and they are so close to the cockpit, the fuselage where the door aperture is curves in two dimensions so the upper and lower hinges are not aligned (the upper hinge is further inboard). This means that as the door is opened or closed it has to be lifted up and then drops down again.

Because the door is so heavy, this can be quite difficult for some cabin crew to do (which has hindered emergency evacuations - one of Ryanair's in particular, which resulted in them having to buy a new crew trainer fitted with the real doors found on the aircraft). The design would never pass the current airworthiness certification standards, but part of Boeing's desire to not spend on R&D and continue flogging the 737 horse is that they managed to pull the wool over the FAA's eyes by having any new variants covered by 'grandfather' certification from the original 737. For the 737NG Boeing added an lift assist spring on the front left door to make it slightly easier to open and close, but it reportedly doesn't help very much.

I've remembered another issue with the 737NG variants (including the -800/-900 models) - in 2019 it was discovered during a conversion of retired 737-800s into freighters that some high-cycle airframes could develop cracks in the rear wing attachment points on the fuselage (known as the 'pickle forks'):

The pickle forks were supposed to be lifed to 90000 cycles, the same as the rest of the airframe, but the cracks were found in aircraft that had done about 35000 cycles.

It was surmised that this was due to increased stress from the extra weight of the  NG on the main landing gear legs acting through the rear wing spar and/or increased stress at the wing root from the additional bending moment from the additon of the winglets on the 737NG (which was done to increase fuel efficiency).

Boeing issued directive to inspect aircraft that had done 30000 cycles or more within a week and aircraft that had done between 22500 and 30000 cycles within the next 1000 cycles. By early November 2019, about 1200 aircraft of the 6300 737NGs worldwide had been inspected and cracks had been found in 60 examples (5%). These aircraft had to be grounded until they could be repaired by replacement of the parts (this was still only listed as a temporary repair as they did not understand why the parts had cracked). Aircraft that were not found to have cracks have to undergo periodic reinspection.

[confettiinmyhair]

Boeing Boeing Gone

[Ambient Sheep]

Statement from his lawyers, from here (although link doesn't work in the UK, presumably not EU either) via this PPRuNe thread:

"John was a brave, honest man of the highest integrity. He cared dearly about his family, his friends, the Boeing company, his Boeing co-workers, and the pilots and people who flew on Boeing aircraft. We have rarely met someone with a more sincere and forthright character.

"In the course of his job as a quality manager at Boeing South Carolina, John learned of and exposed very serious safety problems with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and was retaliated against and subjected to a hostile work environment, which is the subject of his pending AIR-21 case.

John was in the midst of a deposition in his whistleblower retaliation case, which finally was nearing the end. He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on. We didn't see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it.

We are all devastated. We need more information about what happened to John. The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public what they find out. No detail can be left unturned."

~Statement from Barnett's lawyers Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles

Says it all, I think.

EDIT: The latest post in that thread at the time of writing says:

The [New York Times] article also reports that Counsel for Mr. Barnett indicated the family will continue to pursue the legal action.

Meanwhile, I have a very good friend who flies between Belfast and Stansted most weekends.  I'm so glad that it's always Easyjet (and thus Airbus).

[shoulders]

Re: @buzby I think that information is good to know but would be more useful in context of what the issues are in competing aircraft built around the same time or since and their comparative significance.

[Zero Gravitas]

Because the door is so heavy, this can be quite difficult for some cabin crew to do

Is it?

oh yeah.

[Dr Trouser]

Re: @buzby I think that information is good to know but would be more useful in context of what the issues are in competing aircraft built around the same time or since and their comparative significance.

All aircraft will have issues of maturity when they hit EIS. Especially when you have the introduction of new systems or structures. The issue is about how you ensure redundancy and safety margin etc and mature the fleet while in service.

The 737 pickle forks are no different to the a380 wing root issues. The difference is Airbus spared no expense on analysis and rework, was open with operators about it and saw it as duty of care not a commercial loss.