The Death of John Barnett

The Class Consciousness Project published an article on 25th February on the ongoing and seemingly never-ending crises which have beset Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer and defence contractor.

In that article, we detailed the decline in the company which focussed mainly on its 737-Max aircraft, which has been involved in two crashed at the costs of 338 lives and, in January of this year, was involved in a serious accident when an Alaskan Airlines plane’s plug door blew out while the plane was in flight at an altitude of 16,000 feet. The problems which have beset Boeing, and in particular the 737-Max, were chronicled in the Netflix 2022 documentary ‘Downfall: The Case Against Boeing’, where former employees, including John Barnett, spoke on the shifting internal culture at Boeing and how this, as well as the pursuit of profit over safety and engineering excellence, led to the disastrous loss of life involving Boeing’s planes.

Mr Barnett had been an employee of Boeing for over thirty years and he retired in 2017 on ‘health grounds’. For the final seven years of his career at Boeing, he worked as a Quality Manager at the Boeing plant in Charleston, South Carolina, which builds the 787 Dreamliner airplane, which is the successor to the legendary Boeing 747 jumbo jet. Barnett witnessed what was a degradation of standards at Boeing, particularly in his final years at the company, including workers being forced to fit sub-standard parts and the allegation that, of the oxygen generators fitted to supply breathing apparatus to passengers in the event of an emergency, one in four fitted did not work. These details were revealed to the BBC in an interview he did with the broadcaster in 2019.

At the time of his death, Mr Barnett was pursuing a civil lawsuit against his former employers and was taking part in a deposition, which is out-of-court testimony recorded for use in legal proceedings. His claim was that he was forced to retire at age 55, ten years sooner than he wanted, and that he was overlooked for promotions and suffered harassment because of his protestations against the decline in standards at Boeing. On its face, it looks highly unlikely that a man who had spent years both inside and outside Boeing raising his concerns about what he saw should suddenly decide to take his own life. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen, but the fact that he was found dead just days after taking part in a deposition which had not yet concluded has raised suspicions that there may be foul play involved in Mr Barnett’s death.

Barnett’s lawyers immediately cast doubt on the finding of the coroner that the death was suicide. They stated that:

“We didn’t see any indication that he would take his own life. No one can believe it. The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public. No detail can be left unturned.”

Barnett himself told a family friend that if anything was to happen to him, it would not be suicide. He knew that he was a marked man and may pay the ultimate price for being a whistleblower and neither his lawyers or his own family or friends believe that his death was self-inflicted. It is also notable that, when noted whistleblowers like Mr Barnett are found dead in suspicious circumstances, the bourgeois media will leap to the conclusion that suicide was the cause, whereas when Alexei Navalny died in prison in February, our media machine leapt to the conclusion that Vladimir Putin had bumped him off, despite there not being a shred of evidence to support this assertion or any conceivable reason why Mr Putin would have had Navalny bumped off. In essence our media would have us believe that Putin had him killed because he’s bonkers.

Barnett’s mother said on 28th March that Boeing’s treatment of her son led to his death, though his brother stated that the family would wait for the results of the investigation into his demise before making any judgements.

John Barnett was a proud employee of Boeing for over thirty years. He believed that, by going public with his legitimate concerns about a company whose standards had slipped considerably in his time there, he would help a lost firm find its way again. People will speculate about the circumstances of his very sad and untimely death, but what is clear is that Boeing has, through its own actions, taken another innocent victim.