Former employee who testified against Boeing, John Barnett, found dead

John Barnett, the 62-year-old former Boeing employee who exposed the company's alleged safety problems, was found dead this Saturday in South Carolina. The man's body was found with "self inflicted injuries" in the parking lot of a hotel, the same place where he was to appear for a lawsuit in which he claimed that the aviation company had engaged in bad practices.

Specifically, recalls The Telegraph, Barnett, who worked for Boeing as a quality control manager at the Charleston factory for seven years, accused the company of the manufacture low quality parts that employees were forced to install on vehicles to continue producing materials and airplanes at high speed. Issues that worried the former worker, as he advised the company itself, which decided to ignore his recommendations.

The different safety problems of the Boeing 737

For this reason, after retiring in 2017 for health reasons, Barnett decided to sue the company for "denigrating his character and hindering his professional progression." He did it with tests, which BBC was able to access, where the former worker revealed that "inferior quality parts had even been removed from scrap containers," installing them on airplanes in the middle of construction to "avoid delays in the production line."

It was not the only problem that John Barnett uncovered. The former employee also claimed that the oxygen masks had "a 25% failure rate." This, he reported, meant that one in four masks "may not deploy during a real-life emergency."

Accusations that gained more relevance after several accidents in which certain parts installed on Boeing 737 airplanes presented problems and that forced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to carry out exhaustive investigations to discover if the vehicles had indeed been manufactured with defective materials.

Another piece of evidence that would prove that Barnett was right and that Boeing could indeed have manufactured low-quality vehicles in order to meet rapid production deadlines. A topic that the specialist Franco Rinaldi spoke about with the Voz Media journalist, Karina Mariani.