Boeing’s strategy sent the stock soaring more than 1,000% over 20 years. But it contained dangerous flaws that are only now coming into view amid a drumbeat of terrible news.
SATURDAY, MARCH 9, dawned with thunderstorms rolling across Charleston, S.C., and daggers of lightning illuminating the skies of the historic city. Just after 10 a.m., Rob Turkewitz was sitting in a tony lawyers’ office downtown, waiting for his client John Barnett to testify. Barnett was slated to continue the account of the production gaffes he had allegedly witnessed up close on the Boeing factory floor, a dramatic narrative that he had started the previous day. Following a long career in Everett, Wash., where by all accounts he took pride in the planes his teams assembled, Barnett did a stint from late 2010 to 2017 as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant that assembles the 787 Dreamliner. In that role, he had alerted senior managers to what he saw as myriad violations of legally required processes and procedures, and he maintained that his warnings were being ignored. In the years following his departure, Barnett emerged as arguably the most renowned Boeing whistleblower, recounting the quality-control abuses he claimed to have witnessed to everyone who would listen.
Turkewitz wasn’t totally surprised that Barnett was late for this round of depositions. “Downtown Charleston was flooded by one of the worst rainstorms I’ve ever seen,” he recalls. “I’d called John’s room at the Holiday Inn where he was staying at 9 a.m. to see if he wanted me to pick him up, but he didn’t answer.”
Barnett’s charges had drawn fresh attention in the wake of the January 737 Max door-plug blowout on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 just after takeoff from Portland, Ore., followed by a string of other mishaps on Boeing aircraft. In interviews after the door debacle, Barnett had been scathing in his criticism of Boeing’s lapses, and he attributed the catastrophe to the types of sloppy practices he said he had witnessed and flagged years earlier at the North Charleston plant.
But later that Saturday morning, Barnett would be found dead in his truck outside the Holiday Inn. The Charleston County coroner ruled the cause of death as a “self-inflicted wound,” and a police report disclosed that a “white piece of paper resembling a note” lay in plain view on the passenger seat. Its contents haven’t been disclosed. (“We are saddened by Mr. Barnett’s passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends,” read a statement released by Boeing; the company did not comment further for this story.)
Barnett’s death was the latest shocking turn in a series of tumultuous events that have rocked the world’s most prominent aerospace company over the past three months. The drumbeat of news has included airline customers’ dis
