Things continue to go from bad to worse for Boeing.
Even as the unexpected deaths of two whistleblowers who went public with concerns about the company’s practices have made headlines across the country, 10 more whistleblowers are waiting in the wings, according to a New York Post report.
Joshua Dean, a whistleblower for a Boeing supplier, died April 30 after contracting pneumonia, then drug-resistant bacterial infection.
Dean’s death at 45 came just two months after John Barnett, another Boeing whistleblower, was found dead in his car in Charleston, South Carolina. Barnett’s death was deemed an “apparent suicide.”
Barnett, 62, was in Charleston to provide testimony against Boeing in an ongoing lawsuit regarding serious safety issues with Boeing’s 737 aircraft, according to Fortune.
And whistleblowers aren’t going away.
One such whistleblower, Ed Pierson, a former senior manager at Boeing’s 737 factory in Renton, Washington, attempted to get Boeing executives to halt production of the 737, according to the Post.
In 2018 and 2019, two 737 MAX crashes killed a total of 346 passengers and crew.
Pierson left Boeing six years ago to become the founder of the Foundation for Aviation Safety, an organization dedicated to improving airline safety and holding companies like Boeing accountable for their failures, according to the Post.
Are there serious problems at Boeing?
“It’s an unstable company right now from the top to the bottom,” Pierson told the Post. “Senior corporate leadership is so fixated on not admitting the truth that they can’t admit anything.”
The allegations raised by the whistleblowers against Boeing have been damning, accusing the company of cutting safety corners in the interest of profit, and misleading the public about the safety of their aircraft.
Pierson testified before Congress in April and accused Boeing of being complicit in covering up safety incidents with its aircraft.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat this, this was a criminal coverup,” Pierson said in reference to Boeing’s response to the Alaska Airlines incident in January, where an exit door blew off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 jetliner mid-flight, requiring an emergency landing.
Barnett, who retired as a quality engineer for Boeing in 2017, spoke out to warn the public that Boeing was cutting corners to get its aircraft into service quicker, the Post reported.
One anonymous Boeing employee told the Post that he was skeptical about the circumstances surrounding Barnett’s death, saying that Barnett had “made some pretty powerful enemies” at Boeing.
Police investigating Barnett’s death have found no evidence of foul play.
Speaking in the aftermath of Barnett’s death, Boeing downplayed any assertion of retaliation, stating that they “encourage all employees to speak up when issues arise. Retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”
Dean, who worked at Spirit AeroSystems, a Wichita, Kansas-based company that manufactures major aircraft parts for Boeing, raised concerns in 2022, claiming that bulkhead holes were being improperly drilled on parts for the 737 MAX.
He was fired from his company less than a year later.
“I think they were sending out a message to anybody else,” Dean told NPR in February. “If you are too loud, we will silence you.”
It’s not just whistleblowers that have called out Boeing for its failures. In September 2020, the House Tranpsortation Committee — then under control fo the Democratic Party — issued a report of an investigation into Boeing’s culpability for the 2018 and 2019 737 MAX crashes.
The reported, issued by the committee’s Democratic majority, concluded that the crashes were “the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the FAA.”
And still, three years later, whistleblowers continue to speak out against the company’s practices — one of the worst nightmares a major manufacturer can face.
The Post did not identify the 10 more whistleblowers who are going to come forward, but the country could learn their names soon. And hear their stories.
