Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth

In the days before his death, John Barnett was in Charleston, giving a deposition for the whistleblower suit he had filed against Boeing. According to one of his lawyers, Rob Turkewitz, he was upbeat about his testimony, feeling he was finally able to tell the story of his efforts to get the company to take safety more seriously—and the rejection of those efforts by his bosses, who, according to Barnett, simply didn’t want to hear about it.

The last day of the deposition was scheduled for Saturday, March 9. But that morning, he was found in his truck, a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand. The police said it was “a self-inflicted wound.”

The reaction from people who knew Barnett was utter disbelief. On that last day, his lawyers told Time magazine, “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.” A family friend told ABC News that he had told her, “I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”

The internet lit up. It was an “alleged suicide,” or “an apparent suicide.” “Whatever happened to John Barnett, the Boeing whistle-blower who declared he wasn’t suicidal and then died from ‘an apparent suicide?’ ” read one post on X. The clear implication was that Boeing was somehow involved in his death. (In a statement, the company said, “We are saddened by Mr. Barnett’s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.”)

As suspicious as his death was, no one in a position of power is calling for an investigation. And they’re not likely to. But I do know this: everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too.

On Monday, two weeks after Barnett’s death, Boeing announced that three top executives, including the CEO and the chairman of the board, were being booted out of the company. Finally, it seems, Boeing was waking up to the fact that its internal culture was destroying its reputation. There were the crashes of the two Boeing 737 MAX planes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people. In January, a door panel flew out of an Alaska Airlines plane made by Boeing, while it was in flight, nearly pulling one of the passengers out with it. Was Barnett’s suicide—if that’s what it was—the last straw?

Perhaps it was. For seven years, from 2010 to 2017, assigned to the company’s South Carolina assembly plant and appalled by the lax controls, Barnett had tried to persuade his managers that the mistakes they were letting slide could one day be fatal. In 2019, Barnett told a journalist at Corporate Crime Reporter that his managers “started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. . . . They just wanted to push planes out the door and make the cash register ring.”

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