A former Boeing aerospace engineer, quality manager and whistle-blower John Barnett aged 62 was found dead in his pickup truck in the hotel parking lot in Charleston, South Carolina on March 9, 2024. Boeing workers had warned that whistleblower John Barnett “made powerful enemies” before his alleged suicide, as a puzzling discrepancy on his police report has emerged. He was found with a gunshot wound to the head and a pistol in his hand. Barnett was a quality control engineer who worked for Boeing for 32 years before he retired in 2017.
That same morning he was due to conclude private testimony in a lawsuit against the jet company where he had worked for most of his career. He had levelled serious allegations about quality shortcomings of Boeing airliners citing facts and eyewitness accounts. According to a report by Charleston police, he had extended his stay at the Holiday Inn hotel until March 8 and was caught on surveillance video leaving the hotel that morning.
Employees at the local Boeing plant where Barnett had worked until retiring in 2017 say the whole community is shaken up. One employee, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity, said workers were skeptical about the cause of Barnett’s death, which has been preliminarily labeled a suicide.
Two years post his retirement, he told the BBC in 2019 that Boeing cut corners by rushing to get its 787 Dreamliner jets off the production line and into service. Barnett gave numerous interviews describing how he had complained internally to the company about what he claimed were serious safety flaws he had detected.
From 2010, he worked as a quality manager at their North Charleston plant in South Carolina, where he worked on the 787 Dreamliner long-haul passenger aircraft.
Since retiring, Mr Barnett was engaged in legal action against his former employer for disparaging his character and hampering his career after being forced to retire for raising issues about the company.
Boeing denies this, claiming that Mr Barnett’s retirement plans were long-standing, and that they had “in no way negatively impacted Mr Barnett’s ability to continue in whatever chosen profession he so wishes”.
In 2019, Mr Barnett shared concerns about his former employer with the BBC, alleging issues with the oxygen system on board the 787 Dreamliner.
The qualified aerospace engineer raised concerns that passengers on board the aircraft could be left without oxygen in case of sudden cabin decompression.
After finding some oxygen bottles were not discharging, Mr Barnett commissioned a test of 300 brand new oxygen systems. He claimed 75 of them – a quarter – did not deploy properly.
He claimed that Boeing had blocked him from looking into the matter further. He then went to the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to complain, but they were unable to substantiate the claim as Boeing had informed them it was working to resolve the issue at the time.
In 2024, Mr Barnett joined other employees in speaking out against the 737 MAX aircraft, which has been subject to several mid-air technical emergencies in recent years. He had said “In my opinion, Boeing needs a reckoning from the top down,” he said. “This is a Boeing issue, this is not a 737 issue”.
The lawsuit makes a number of bombshell claims about Boeing — currently under scrutiny after a series of quality control problems, including a door plug falling off mid-flight — charging they retaliated against Barnett when he tried to raise the alarm about defaults in their manufacturing process.
Barnett said he suffered numerous instances of retaliation after internally reporting the airplane giant’s failure to comply with Federal Aviation Authority safety standards. He had said the company had not taken action, spurring him to go public, out of concern for people’s safety.
His lawyers are challenging the notion that he committed suicide and are calling for a thorough investigation. They say “We need more information about what happened to John,” attorneys Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles said in a statement.
The links :-
https://nypost.com/2024/03/20/us-new...-spied-on-him/ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2511711.html https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/IWQAD5OO