Boeing whistleblower found dead in South Carolina
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Coroner says he died on Saturday of ‘self-inflected’ wound
CHARLESTON (Web Desk) – John Barnett, a former Boeing employee who shared concerns over safety issues at Boeing, was found dead in the United States, as a coroner in South Carolina on Monday said he had apparently died of an apparent “self-inflected” wound.
While confirming the news, the official said the whistleblower had died on March 9 [Saturday] the police were the investigating the matter and he did not have any details.
On the other hand, his lawyer hasn’t so far commented on the issue, while Boeing – where Barnett, 62, worked for 32 years until his retirement in 2017 on health grounds – expressed condolences at the news of his death.
The BBC, which first reported the news, says Barnett, in the days before his death, had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.
From 2010, he worked as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant making the 787 Dreamliner, a state-of-the-art airliner used mainly on long-haul routes.
In 2019, Barnett told the BBC that under-pressure workers had been deliberately fitting substandard parts to aircraft on the production line.
He said he had become concerned soon after starting work in South Carolina that the push to get new aircraft built meant the assembly process was rushed and safety was compromised, something the company denied.
He later told the BBC that workers had failed to follow procedures intended to track components through the factory, allowing defective components to go missing.
Barnett said in some cases, substandard parts had even been removed from scrap bins and fitted to planes that were being built to prevent delays on the production line.
He also claimed that tests on emergency oxygen systems due to be fitted to the 787 showed a failure rate of 25 per cent, meaning that one in four could fail to deploy in a real-life emergency. He had alerted managers to his concerns, but no action had been taken, Barnett added.
Boeing denied his assertions. However, a 2017 review by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), did uphold some of Barnett's concerns.
It established that the location of at least 53 "non-conforming" parts in the factory was unknown, and that they were considered lost. Boeing was ordered to take remedial action.
On the oxygen cylinders issue, the company said that in 2017 it had "identified some oxygen bottles received from the supplier that were not deploying properly". But it denied that any of them were actually fitted on aircraft.
After retiring, he embarked on a long-running legal action against the company.
He accused it of denigrating his character and hampering his career because of the issues he pointed out – charges rejected by Boeing.
At the time of his death, Barnett had been in Charleston for legal interviews linked to that case, says BBC.
Last week, he gave a formal deposition in which he was questioned by Boeing's lawyers, before being cross-examined by his own counsel.
Barnett had been due to undergo further questioning on Saturday. When he did not appear, enquiries were made at his hotel. He was subsequently found dead in his truck in the hotel car park.
His death comes at a time when production standards at both Boeing and its key supplier Spirit Aerosystems are under intense scrutiny.
This follows an incident in early January when an unused emergency exit door blew off a brand-new Boeing 737 Max shortly after take-off from Portland International Airport.
A preliminary report from the US National Transportation Safety Board suggested that four key bolts, designed to hold the door securely in place, were not fitted.
Last week, the FAA said a six-week audit of the company had found "multiple instances where the company allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements".
