A second Boeing whistleblower has suddenly died “after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection.” Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?
Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died (Seattle Times)
“If it’s Boeing I ain’t going”?
Considering they’ve made probably more than half the commercial aircraft flying today, what’s coming out in the news about Boeing’s transformation since their acquisition of Mcdonnell-Douglas is frightening. Some people are even referring to the merger as a testament to the genius of MD management, because “they bought Boeing with Boeing’s money”. The Seattle giant went from being an engineering-first aircraft company to an accountant-first corporation that happened to make aircraft, and that’s when things started going wrong. Even the headquarter move to Chicago was, in hindsight, a big tell that at the corporate level engineering was no longer job #1. But it gets worse.
Suicide Mission (The American Prospect)
See also: The Strange Death of a Boeing Whistleblower (The American Prospect)
What drives a man to “suicide”?
On March 9th a man named John Mitchell Barnett was found dead in a Charleston NC hotel parking lot, victim of an apparent suicide. But this wasn’t just any ordinary schmoe, Barnett was the main whistleblower for assembly and quality issues in the Charleston Boeing plant that produced the 737 MAX.
Funny how that happened. The man dedicated the last few years of his life to exposing problems that put the entire flying public at risk, and just when the issues he warned about are making headlines, suddenly, he “commits suicide”. Come on people. Sure, he died of a gunshot wound, but I would stake a large amount of money to say that he was not the one to pull the trigger.
The Charleston County coroner ruled the wound was self-inflicted, but when you think about the amount of pull that a huge employer like Boeing have on a place the size of Charleston you realize how the wheels of justice are sometimes greased just enough by major economic players into “being team players”.
Here is a video on the man and the major safety issues he tried to warn the public about.
