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It is widely recognized that for the Kennedys, tragedy has come often and from unexpected quarters. The filmmaker Rory Kennedy, born six months after the assassination of her father Robert Kennedy, has known her share. But in 2024 it was a loss outside the political dynasty that shook her to the core.
John Barnett, a quality inspector turned whistleblower at Boeing, one of the world’s biggest plane manufacturers, was found dead in his truck outside a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. Affectionately known as “Swampy” because of his roots in Louisiana, Barnett had a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
“I pray the motherfuckers that destroyed my life pay!!!” he wrote in a journal that was found beside him. “I pray Boeing Pays!!! Bury me face down so Boeing and their lying ass leaders can kiss my ass[.] To My Family and Friends, I Found My Purposes! I’m at Peace!”
Kennedy, 58, had come to befriend Barnett after featuring him in Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which examined the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets in 2018 and 2019 that claimed 346 lives. His harrowing death spurred her and producing partner Mark Bailey to make a sequel, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, streaming on Netflix from August.
She recalls by phone: “I was horrified and heartbroken. I spoke to his mom pretty immediately after we had heard that news. She said to me, we need to make sure John’s story gets out there, and that was a big part of why we decided to revisit this.
“I’ve never done a documentary follow-up in this kind of way but we all felt that Boeing is such a big company and we all fly these airplanes all over the world. I don’t want one of these planes falling out of the sky and I feel like I have a lot of inside knowledge and also connections to understanding what’s going on inside of Boeing and I just felt like we’ve got to stay at this.”
Barnett had worked at Boeing for 32 years, witnessing its innovative heyday, but more recently saw safety compromised by the pursuit of profits. Kennedy says: “Over the course of his career he saw that vision deteriorate and focus much more on money and the bottom line at the expense of quality and safety.
“He was one of the first whistleblowers to come forward who worked at Boeing to talk about what was going on behind the scenes and, unlike many other whistleblowers, he had an extensive documentation of what he had witnessed.”
Barnett was transferred to Boeing’s new, non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to oversee production of the 787 Dreamliner. Kennedy’s film tells how workers with no aviation experience were hired and allegedly taught simply to “rubber stamp paperwork” while managers pounded landing gear pins with sledgehammers.
Barnett meticulously documented the lapses, including the discovery that scrap parts – some of them rotted and physically painted red to indicate they were defective – were being quietly installed on passenger jets.
He also conducted tests on the 787’s emergency oxygen systems and discovered a staggering 25% failure rate. If a plane depressurised at 40,000 ft, one in four passengers would be left gasping for air, risking brain damage or death within minutes. In 2024, when a door plug panel on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max blew out at 16,000 ft, many of the oxygen tanks did not work.
Boeing has previously expressed full confidence in the 787 Dreamliner, citing “comprehensive work” to ensure its quality and safety, and disputed what it called “inaccurate” claims regarding the jet’s structural integrity.
For several years Barnett had brought complaints to management about unsafe systems and missing parts. He said he was harassed, downgraded, docked pay and explicitly told by superiors not to put safety concerns in writing so the company could maintain “culpable deniability”.
In 2017 he filed a whistleblower complaint against Boeing with the Department of Labor and took early retirement from Boeing, suffering from depression and severe anxiety. He was in Charleston for a deposition in a legal action alleging that Boeing had retaliated against him when he took his own life.
Freefall traces the aviation giant’s decay directly back to the 2005 arrival of chief executive Jim McNerney, a protege of General Electric’s Jack Welch, famous for pioneering a ruthless brand of capitalism that maximised shareholder value above all else, instituting mass layoffs, outsourcing and an obsession with the bottom line.
When McNerney took over, Boeing embraced the Welch philosophy of perfecting the tools of profit. To build the new 787 Dreamliner, the film alleges, the board slashed the budget from an estimated $10bn to $5bn, outsourcing massive sections of the plane to suppliers across the globe. The result was chaos. Parts did not fit together, delays mounted and quality control evaporated.
To compound the issue and avoid unionised labour in Seattle, Boeing opened the disastrous second assembly line in South Carolina. Kennedy continues: “You had folks who are running the company who are trained with this idea that we should cut costs, that we should try to get as much money for the stockholders as possible, that we should get as much money for CEOs as possible and cut, cut, cut everything else including at the expense of safety.”
Yet one Boeing chief executive after another walked away with multi-million dollar payoffs even as the company lost billions. In one memorable scene from 2024, Josh Hawley, a Republican senator, grills Boeing’s Dave Calhoun: “Is quality part of your compensation package because we’ve had multiple whistleblowers come before this committee and allege that Boeing is cutting every possible corner on quality and safety, not just in the past but now.
“They’ve alleged that you’ve eliminated safety inspections, that there are fewer inspectors doing quality inspections out there, they’ve alleged that when they raised issues and concerns they were reassigned, they were retaliated against, they were physically threatened. That doesn’t sound like attention to quality to me and yet you’re getting paid $33 million a year.”
In another sequence, the film features hidden-camera footage obtained by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit from inside the South Carolina Dreamliner factory. Workers are asked if they would take an all-expenses-paid trip anywhere in the world if the only condition was that they had to fly on the 787 they were currently building.
“They all say no way, I’m not getting on this plane, and these are the people who make the planes, so they know what’s going on and they’re offered a free trip and they are saying no way.”
Would Kennedy herself fly Boeing? “I don’t feel terribly safe. Personally, I don’t fly on the 737 Maxes and I don’t fly on the Dreamliners, the 787. I do fly on other Boeing aircraft. It is, as everybody who flies knows, very hard to get around that entirely.”
Boeing declined to cooperate for the film, which was also the case with Downfall: The Case Against Boeing in 2022. But Kennedy recalls a chance meeting with a Boeing employee after that first installment. “I asked her what the response was and she said, ‘We did a screening of Downfall to the top 250 executives at Boeing and it was very powerful and I felt, and the room felt, you got everything right.’”
But she remains sceptical about whether Boeing has truly learned the right lessons. “I’ve heard them talk the talk continually but I’m not seeing any kind of structural change or any of the meaningful changes that would lead me to believe this is a company that once again is focusing on excellence and focusing on safety and that is its top priority.”
Freefall adds to Kennedy’s prolific filmography, ranging from Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton to the Oscar-nominated The Lady Days in Vietnam, and from The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib to this year’s Queen of Chess, about Judit Polgár, a Hungarian prodigy who broke into the male-dominated world of international chess.
In 2012 she turned the camera inward with Ethel, a study of her mother, who raised 11 children on her own after Robert Kennedy’s death. The film recognised America’s ongoing fascination with the family, which helps explain the visceral public reaction to Donald Trump seizing control of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, a congressionally mandated living memorial to Kennedy’s uncle.
She was mortified by the president’s hostile takeover but heartened by a court decision that saw workers remove Trump’s name from the white marble wall of the Kennedy Center last weekend. “I am very glad to see his name come down,” Kennedy says. “It’s been an unfortunate chapter, one of many for this administration, but it’s an incredibly clear congressional law that states that the Kennedy Center is a memorial to my uncle John F Kennedy and it’s meant to be a memorial and the name cannot change without congressional approval.”
The dispute, she believes, is bigger than one arts complex. “The Kennedy Center issue is such a trigger for people because it’s not just taking over something that is a celebration of an extraordinary and well-loved president, but it’s also so inappropriate to put his name on a building that he has no power to rename. It’s also this power grab.”
