John Barnett, a former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm's production standards, was found dead in his truck in a hotel parking lot in South Carolina on Monday.
He had been testifying in a whistleblower case against the company in the days before his passing.
Boeing Whistleblower Found Dead
On Monday, the Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to BBC. Boeing expressed their sorrow at hearing of Barnett's passing. In a statement, the company said Barnett's passing saddens them, and their thoughts are with his family and friends.
The company claimed that Barnett had died due to a "self-inflicted" wound and police investigations are underway. His death comes when production standards at both Boeing and its key supplier, Spirit Aerosystems, are under intense investigation.
Barnett worked for the US plane giant for 32 years until his retirement in 2017 on health grounds. He launched a long-running legal action against the company after his retirement. He began serving as a quality manager in 2010 at the North Charleston plant, which produces the 787 Dreamliner, a cutting-edge aircraft mostly used for long-haul flights.
In 2019, Barnett revealed that under-pressure workers had deliberately installed subpar airplane parts during construction. He also claimed to have discovered serious problems with oxygen systems, which may explain why one in four breathing masks would not function in an emergency.
He said that shortly after arriving in South Carolina for work, he had started to worry that the urgency to produce a new aircraft meant that safety was jeopardized during the assembly process, which the company denied.
Furthermore, he later told the BBC that workers had let defective components disappear from the factory because they had not followed the protocols to trace them.
According to Barnett, sub-standard components have been removed from scarp bins and put on airplanes built to prevent production line delays. He claimed that tests on the emergency oxygen systems intended to be installed on the 787 revealed a failure rate of 25%, indicating that one in four of the systems might not deploy in an emergency.
He warned the managers to his concerns, but no action had been taken. Boeing denied Barnett's claims. However, a 2017 study by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), supported some of Barnett's concerns.
It was determined that at least 53 "non-conforming" parts were unknown and considered lost. Boeing was mandated to implement corrective measures.
Regarding the oxygen cylinders issue, the company said that in 2017, it identified some oxygen bottles received from the supplier that were not being properly deployed. However, it denied that any of them were actually fitted on aircraft. Furthermore, he said that Boeing's denied charges had damaged his character and career.
Boeing's Aircraft Incident
On Monday, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner traveling from Australia to New Zealand encountered a technical event that resulted in a strong movement that startled passengers out of their seats.
According to first responders and LATAM airline, five people remain hospitalized after the plane dipped violently due to an unidentified problem.
Meanwhile, in another incident in early January, a brand-new Boeing 737 Max was nearly destroyed when an unused emergency exit door blew off the aircraft shortly after takeoff from Portland International.
On Friday, Boeing said before the incident over the Indian Ocean that it thought the door's technical failure resulted from an event during production and that necessary documentation describing the removal of a failed crucial component was never created.
