Current Events > More Details of John Barnett the Boeing whistleblower found dead

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 10:47:43 AM
#1:


https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

'John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,' the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnetts rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as Swampy for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed high on life according to one former colleague, was a great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone, as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of knowledge that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding thought and understanding and complex reasoning possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had overvalued experience and undervalued leadership before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

Prince Jimas some long-timers used to call himrepeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity leadership book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were phenomenally talented assholes, and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerneys plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerneys disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail outand buy outthe private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the suppliers non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.

But after the FAA cleared Boeing to deliver its first 787s to customers around the end of 2011, one of Swampys old co-workers says that McNerneys henchmen began targeting anyone with experience and knowledge for torment and termination. One of Swampys closest colleagues, Bill Seitz, took a demotion to go back west. A quality control engineer named John Woods was terminated for insisting inspectors thoroughly document damage and repair performed on composite materials, which were far less resilient than steel. Good machinists and inspectors who wore wristbands in support of a union drive were framed with dubious infractions. Everyone from Everett started dropping like flies, remembers a former manager at the plant.

Theres a form we all had to sign that says you take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, and it states pretty clearly that if something happens to a plane because of something you did wrong, you can face a major fine or jail time for that, the manager recalled. The Everett managers took that seriously. Charleston leadership did not.

The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called Multi-Function Process Performer, through which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90 percent of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising.This was supposed to speed up production and save Boeing millions once it successfully shed the thousands of inspectors it intended to axe. Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter, which explicitly required quality inspectors to document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database. Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoners dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didnt, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.

Swampy calculated that it would be a bigger pain for Boeing to fire him for doing the right thing than following orders, so he kept his head down and continued managing his inspectors as though he were back in Everett, taking special care to meticulously record every episode of noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) he encountered. He documented his discovery that machinists installing floor panels had been littering long titanium slivers into wire bundles and electrical boxes between the floorboards and the cargo compartment ceiling panels, where they risked causing an electrical short. A series of mysterious battery fires had already caused the FAA to ground the 787 for a few months just over a year after the first plane had been delivered. He wrote that 75 out of a package of 300 oxygen masks slated for installation on a plane did not actually pump oxygen. His team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery, and he discovered that more than 400 nonconforming aircraft parts had gone missing from the defective parts cage and likely been installed on planes illegally and without documentation, by managers and mechanics desperate to get them out the door.

Few quality managers were as stubborn as Swampy. A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the bullying environment in which defects had systematically stopped being documented by inspectors. They werent fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. They hire these people off the street, dude fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway, one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on coke and painkillers and weed because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.


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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 10:48:33 AM
#2:


The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that hed been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations; the HR file noted, fictitiously, that his boss had discussed his infraction with him earlier.

Swampy was no fool. Leadership wants nothing in email so they maintain plausible deniability, he wrote in the comments space on his corrective action plan paperwork. It is obvious leadership is just looking for items to criticize me on so I stop identifying issues. I will conform! He immediately applied for a job on the graveyard shift, whose supervisor promised the gig would go to the manager with the most seniority on the Final Assembly team. But the job went to a manager who had transferred to Final Assembly all of a week earlier, which is when Swampy began to realize hed been institutionally blackballed from the only company hed ever worked for.

He got two more internal job offers rescinded after that, including one from a group that was literally desperate for someone with Barnetts breadth of experience. They didnt care how bad I wanted him, the senior manager told one of Swampys friends. They said John Barnett is not going anywhere.

Finally, in early 2017 Swampy happened upon a printout of a list of 49 Quality Managers to Fire. The name John Barnett was number one. Swampy decided to go on a medical leave of absence, which turned into early retirement on March 1. He called a labor lawyer he knew from a colleagues case, and together they began the seemingly unending process of filing an aviation whistleblower complaint detailing his seven years at the Charleston plant. It made him sick to think that the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period during which hed watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch the stock price nearly triple once more during the two years after he left the company.

Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nations reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.

Swampy had no firsthand experience with the 737 MAX, but it was obvious that the ethos that drove the 787 plant had poisoned that program as well. He began sharing his story in media interviews, and soon the Department of Justice, which had opened a criminal investigation into the MCAS flight control system crashes that quickly widened to encompass the Dreamliner program, came calling as well.

While the criminal probe ultimately shriveled into one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice, something shifted within the FAA. Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd, though in practice it probably worked better than being regulated by an agency full of underpaid bureaucrats desperate to ingratiate themselves to Boeing. (Swampys best friend and later wife Diane Johnson worked at Boeing as an FAA liaison.) Most of the Boeing employees who worked in quasi-regulatory roles were like Swampy, terrified of anything going wrong on a plane they had inspected and deeply skeptical of their bosses, who seemed unconcerned about the consequences.

Amid the MAX grounding, the FAA began to take a closer look at the 787 program that was the subject of so many complaints from workers and airlines. The company had campaigned the FAA heavily to approve a random sampling method of inspecting the precision of the shims it cut to connect various pieces of the plane together; a closer look revealed the shims were not as precisely sized as the company had boasted. Eight planes were immediately grounded, and the agency forced Boeing to halt deliveries pending further investigation. Weeks stretched into years as nonconformances and noncompliances piled up; Boeing Looked for Flaws in Its Dreamliner and Couldnt Stop Finding Them, one headline summarized.

In December 2022, Aviation Week produced a helpful diagram mapping what sections of the plane had caused auditors the biggest headaches. Every single section, from the tip of the nose to the horizontal stabilizers, was marked up with red arrows. In 2023, deliveries were halted in January, February, and again in August over problems with the shimming, the horizontal stabilizer, and God knows what else. Swampy, and hundreds of others who had blown the whistle on Boeings managerial nihilism, had been thoroughly vindicated. But it was too late. There were no more cleanup crews left at Boeing; too much knowledge had been drained from the company.
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 10:49:22 AM
#3:


For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeings core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it, says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone.

Sorscher has warned Boeing management for decades now of the catastrophic effects of the brain drain inflicted by its war on brilliance. He says McDonnell Douglas managers published a statistical analysis in 1997 gauging productivity against the average seniority of managers across various programs that found that greener workforces were substantially less productive, which he found to be a mirror image of a kind of rule of thumb within Boeing that held that every Boeing employee takes four years to become fully productive. But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparisons sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt. The typical engineer or machinist assigned to the task of fixing Boeings 20,000 problems has never known a Boeing that wasnt a five-alarm dumpster fire.

Theres a terrifying visual representation of this: the satellite view of the Moses Lake Municipal Airport in an arid stretch of Washington east of Seattle, or the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, where hundreds of Boeing 737 MAXes sit in abandoned parking lots waiting for someone to fix them so they can finally be delivered. Meanwhile, pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate, criminal investigations are under way, and another in a long line of stock-conscious CEOs is stepping down. Boeings largest union, the Machinists, is trying to snag a board seat because, in the words of its local president, we have to save this company from itself.

SPEEA has demanded, understandably, that the board choose an aerospace engineer as its next CEO. But there are few signs that will happen: None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GEs Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.

By now you know what became of Swampy: He was found dead a few weeks ago with a gunshot wound to his right temple, apparently self-inflicted, on what was meant to be the third day of a three-day deposition in his whistleblower case against his former employer; his amended complaint, which his lawyer released last week, is the basis for much of this story.

It is worth noting here that Swampys former co-workers universally refuse to believe that their old colleague killed himself. One former co-worker who was terrified of speaking publicly went out of their way to tell me that they werent suicidal. If I show up dead anytime soon, even if its a car accident or something, Im a safe driver, please be on the lookout for foul play. Swampys wife Diane, who worked at Boeing for 28 years, died of brain cancer at age 60 in late 2022.

Discussing Swampys death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, I dont think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys. Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? Its a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere, he replied. More importantly, he added, there is a principle in American law that there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony. Lets say you rob a bank and while traveling at high speed in the getaway you run down a pedestrian and kill them. Thats second-degree murder at the very least.
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Jagr_68
04/04/24 10:50:08 AM
#4:


tl;dr: he was murdered.

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s0nicfan
04/04/24 10:50:30 AM
#5:


Thanks for the summary.

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MarthGoomba
04/04/24 10:51:09 AM
#6:


need a tl;dr for the important bits

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LonelyStoner
04/04/24 10:52:55 AM
#7:


More than anything I hope Boeing goes down for this, but I know they wont. Absolute bullshit.

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 10:55:17 AM
#8:


MarthGoomba posted...
need a tl;dr for the important bits

CEO Jim busted unions and started outsourcing to firms that did terrible jobs.
John Barnett was a quality manager at Boeing for a long time and found himself having to manage some of this. John refused to leave and tried his best to keep quality from going to zero and discussing problems. He was eventually fired.
Then he whistle blowed and was found dead.
Most of this you already knew so the article is more on the actual details. It is good read.

Prince Jimas some long-timers used to call himrepeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity leadership book he co-wrote.
Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were phenomenally talented a******s, and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented a******s work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerneys plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
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andel
04/04/24 10:58:28 AM
#9:


sometimes it's actually just suicide but it should be investigated thoroughly for sure. multi national weapons/aircraft companies are notoriously heavy handed and evil at times and this guy could have cost them billions in stock prices

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 10:59:36 AM
#10:


andel posted...
sometimes it's actually just suicide but it should be investigated thoroughly for sure. multi national weapons/aircraft companies are notoriously heavy handed and evil at times and this guy could have cost them billions in stock prices

comments like this are why articles like this are good

It is worth noting here that Swampys former co-workers universally refuse to believe that their old colleague killed himself. One former co-worker who was terrified of speaking publicly went out of their way to tell me that they werent suicidal. If I show up dead anytime soon, even if its a car accident or something, Im a safe driver, please be on the lookout for foul play. Swampys wife Diane, who worked at Boeing for 28 years, died of brain cancer at age 60 in late 2022.

Discussing Swampys death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, I dont think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys. Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? Its a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere, he replied. More importantly, he added, there is a principle in American law that there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony. Lets say you rob a bank and while traveling at high speed in the getaway you run down a pedestrian and kill them. Thats second-degree murder at the very least.
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:03:32 AM
#11:


anyways since you guys want tl;dr

important section:

The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called Multi-Function Process Performer, through which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90 percent of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising.

This was supposed to speed up production and save Boeing millions once it successfully shed the thousands of inspectors it intended to axe. Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter, which explicitly required quality inspectors to document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database.

Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoners dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didnt, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.

Swampy calculated that it would be a bigger pain for Boeing to fire him for doing the right thing than following orders, so he kept his head down and continued managing his inspectors as though he were back in Everett, taking special care to meticulously record every episode of noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) he encountered.

He documented his discovery that machinists installing floor panels had been littering long titanium slivers into wire bundles and electrical boxes between the floorboards and the cargo compartment ceiling panels, where they risked causing an electrical short.

A series of mysterious battery fires had already caused the FAA to ground the 787 for a few months just over a year after the first plane had been delivered. He wrote that 75 out of a package of 300 oxygen masks slated for installation on a plane did not actually pump oxygen.

His team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery, and he discovered that more than 400 nonconforming aircraft parts had gone missing from the defective parts cage and likely been installed on planes illegally and without documentation, by managers and mechanics desperate to get them out the door.
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McMarbles
04/04/24 11:05:58 AM
#12:


The whole it definitely had to be murder falls apart if you actually think about it.
Good thing conspiracy theorists never think!

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:06:32 AM
#13:


McMarbles posted...
The whole it definitely had to be murder falls apart if you actually think about it.
Good thing conspiracy theorists never think!

that makes no sense you didn't even read the article did you?
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BearlyWilling
04/04/24 11:10:15 AM
#14:


LonelyStoner posted...
More than anything I hope Boeing goes down for this, but I know they wont. Absolute bullshit.

This. I would love to see their collective heads roll for this, but at most, if there really is foul play involved, theyll just pin it on the person that pulled the trigger.

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Hmm...
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andel
04/04/24 11:12:23 AM
#15:


WingsOfGood posted...
comments like this are why articles like this are good

i read the entire text posted in the op. sometimes people commit suicide and the people around them refuse to accept it. i am not saying that's what happened here, this does seem suspicious, but it can't be discounted out of hand

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:12:45 AM
#16:


So John intimately knew the details of their outsourcing and quality defects and even being asked to break the law for them as shared in post 11

He stayed as a QA manager even after asked to BREAK THE LAW and refused to do so and documented all sorts of issues and failings

knowing that read this part:

In December 2022, Aviation Week produced a helpful diagram mapping what sections of the plane had caused auditors the biggest headaches. Every single section, from the tip of the nose to the horizontal stabilizers, was marked up with red arrows. In 2023, deliveries were halted in January, February, and again in August over problems with the shimming, the horizontal stabilizer, and God knows what else. Swampy, and hundreds of others who had blown the whistle on Boeings managerial nihilism, had been thoroughly vindicated. But it was too late. There were no more cleanup crews left at Boeing; too much knowledge had been drained from the company.

For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeings core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it, says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone.

Sorscher has warned Boeing management for decades now of the catastrophic effects of the brain drain inflicted by its war on brilliance. He says McDonnell Douglas managers published a statistical analysis in 1997 gauging productivity against the average seniority of managers across various programs that found that greener workforces were substantially less productive, which he found to be a mirror image of a kind of rule of thumb within Boeing that held that every Boeing employee takes four years to become fully productive. But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparisons sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt. The typical engineer or machinist assigned to the task of fixing Boeings 20,000 problems has never known a Boeing that wasnt a five-alarm dumpster fire.
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andel
04/04/24 11:13:19 AM
#17:


McMarbles posted...
The whole it definitely had to be murder falls apart if you actually think about it.
Good thing conspiracy theorists never think!

who said it is definitely murder? it seems like it could possibly be a murder, could also be a suicide.

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:16:59 AM
#18:


andel posted...
i read the entire text posted in the op. sometimes people commit suicide and the people around them refuse to accept it. i am not saying that's what happened here, this does seem suspicious, but it can't be discounted out of hand

I don't believe you.

Read this part:


Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nations reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.

Swampy had no firsthand experience with the 737 MAX, but it was obvious that the ethos that drove the 787 plant had poisoned that program as well. He began sharing his story in media interviews, and soon the Department of Justice, which had opened a criminal investigation into the MCAS flight control system crashes that quickly widened to encompass the Dreamliner program, came calling as well.

While the criminal probe ultimately shriveled into one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice, something shifted within the FAA. Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd, though in practice it probably worked better than being regulated by an agency full of underpaid bureaucrats desperate to ingratiate themselves to Boeing. (Swampys best friend and later wife Diane Johnson worked at Boeing as an FAA liaison.) Most of the Boeing employees who worked in quasi-regulatory roles were like Swampy, terrified of anything going wrong on a plane they had inspected and deeply skeptical of their bosses, who seemed unconcerned about the consequences.

So 157 people died.
Then 189 people DIED.

THEN John Barnett began talking about all this how Boeing literally asked people like him to BREAK THE FUCKING LAW and not properly quality inspect.

Think about that for awhile.
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McMarbles
04/04/24 11:19:43 AM
#19:


andel posted...
who said it is definitely murder? it seems like it could possibly be a murder, could also be a suicide.

Jagr_68 posted...
tl;dr: he was murdered.


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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:26:45 AM
#20:


Timeline:
  1. People die on Boeing planes.
  2. Boeing just gets a slap on the wrist.
  3. Justice Department is like "huh. maybe there is something more here."
  4. John Barnett begins HIGHLY detailing exactly what was happening at Boeing and discussing issues his team documented like oxygen masks not working
  5. Justice Department calls him to testify.
  6. John Barnett is dead.


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andel
04/04/24 11:27:26 AM
#21:


WingsOfGood posted...
I don't believe you.

Read this part:

So 157 people died.
Then 189 people DIED.

THEN John Barnett began talking about all this how Boeing literally asked people like him to BREAK THE FUCKING LAW and not properly quality inspect.

Think about that for awhile.

if there is evidence of murder i will believe it was murder but so far there doesn't seem to be. people kill themselves, and people being harassed by a multi billion dollar company are more likely to be in a bad state of mind.

it could be murder but just stating 'he was murdered' doesn't mean anything.

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:29:07 AM
#22:


andel posted...
if there is evidence of murder i will believe it was murder but so far there doesn't seem to be. people kill themselves, and people being harassed by a multi billion dollar company are more likely to be in a bad state of mind.

it could be murder but just stating 'he was murdered' doesn't mean anything.

Why does it bother you so much you make multiple posts about it?

That is very strange. Almost like you really want it to be suicide?

Timeline:
  1. People die on Boeing planes.
  2. Boeing just gets a slap on the wrist.
  3. Justice Department is like "huh. maybe there is something more here."
  4. John Barnett begins HIGHLY detailing exactly what was happening at Boeing and discussing issues his team documented like oxygen masks not working
  5. Justice Department calls him to testify.
  6. John Barnett is dead.


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PowerMan5000000
04/04/24 11:29:38 AM
#23:


Never flying Boeing again

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Karovorak
04/04/24 11:31:19 AM
#24:


Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were phenomenally talented assholes,

Here, everything you need to know is right there:

If you put the integrity of planes, and there literally the lives of your customers, above stock value, you are the asshole.

McMarbles posted...
The whole it definitely had to be murder falls apart if you actually think about it.
Good thing conspiracy theorists never think!

I know, people have killed themselves for less, but...

Why during the whistleblower process? Taking it with you into your grave, okay, and letting it all out before you die to make some amments, also somewhat understandable.

But not in between.

Yeah, I go full on conspiracy on this.

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Uta
04/04/24 11:36:17 AM
#25:


Discussing Swampys death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, I dont think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys. Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? Its a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere, he replied. More importantly, he added, there is a principle in American law that there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony. Lets say you rob a bank and while traveling at high speed in the getaway you run down a pedestrian and kill them. Thats second-degree murder at the very least.

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LightningThief
04/04/24 11:37:23 AM
#26:


NGL, didn't actually read the article or the OP.

Based on what little I know, sure as fuck won't be flying Boeing
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andel
04/04/24 11:37:23 AM
#27:


WingsOfGood posted...
Why does it bother you so much you make multiple posts about it?

That is very strange. Almost like you really want it to be suicide?

Timeline:
1. People die on Boeing planes.
2. Boeing just gets a slap on the wrist.
3. Justice Department is like "huh. maybe there is something more here."
4. John Barnett begins HIGHLY detailing exactly what was happening at Boeing and discussing issues his team documented like oxygen masks not working
5. Justice Department calls him to testify.
6. John Barnett is dead.

i made one post and you weirdly tried to spin the narrative that it is 100% a murder despite there not being evidence of that. it's a suspicious death which means either the police will investigate or the internet and citizens will so blindly claiming 'this is a murder' is how we get insane conspiracy theories. if it turns out to be a murder we will hear actual evidence

---
I am thinking about just walking into the river now that Megaupload is gone and condoms are in porn.-Fubonis
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Umbreon
04/04/24 11:37:58 AM
#28:


It's not impossible for it to be suicide, but the circumstances are so incredibly suspicious that him being silenced seems way more plausible.

It's not like anyone here has evidence one way or the other.

But correct me if I'm wrong: Didn't he say something like "If something happens to me, I didnt kill myself" at some point before being found dead?

---
Black Lives Matter. ~DYL~ (On mobile)
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:38:09 AM
#29:


andel posted...
i made one post and you weirdly tried to spin the narrative that it is 100% a murder despite there not being evidence of that. it's a suspicious death which means either the police will investigate or the internet and citizens will so blindly claiming 'this is a murder' is how we get insane conspiracy theories. if it turns out to be a murder we will hear actual evidence

Giving a timeline that is accurate is spinning it?

Maybe the timeline convinces you then? Think that over.
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andel
04/04/24 11:39:05 AM
#30:


Karovorak posted...
Here, everything you need to know is right there:

If you put the integrity of planes, and there literally the lives of your customers, above stock value, you are the asshole.

I know, people have killed themselves for less, but...

Why during the whistleblower process? Taking it with you into your grave, okay, and letting it all out before you die to make some amments, also somewhat understandable.

But not in between.

Yeah, I go full on conspiracy on this.

it's a suspicious death and should be investigated as such but suicide is usually a highly irrational action and people that commit suicide are generally not in a normal state of mind

---
I am thinking about just walking into the river now that Megaupload is gone and condoms are in porn.-Fubonis
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:39:42 AM
#31:


andel posted...
people that commit suicide are generally not in a normal state of mind

Yet John was. So why would you think it is suicide?
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andel
04/04/24 11:40:20 AM
#32:


WingsOfGood posted...
Giving a timeline that is accurate is spinning it?

Maybe the timeline convinces you then? Think that over.

your weird reaction to my post was obv trying to claim that this is 100% a murder which is an ignorant take at this point. you can say it's suspicious, but you haven't presented any evidence of murder

---
I am thinking about just walking into the river now that Megaupload is gone and condoms are in porn.-Fubonis
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McMarbles
04/04/24 11:40:44 AM
#33:


Karovorak posted...
Here, everything you need to know is right there:

If you put the integrity of planes, and there literally the lives of your customers, above stock value, you are the asshole.

I know, people have killed themselves for less, but...

Why during the whistleblower process? Taking it with you into your grave, okay, and letting it all out before you die to make some amments, also somewhat understandable.

But not in between.

Yeah, I go full on conspiracy on this.
Yes, clearly the logical thing would be to do the most suspicious thing possible.

---
Currently playing: Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster (Switch)
Never befriend a man in sandals and always measure twice, cut once.
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andel
04/04/24 11:41:20 AM
#34:


WingsOfGood posted...
Yet John was. So why would you think it is suicide?

how do you know this? no one but themselves know what state of mind they are in.

i don't think it's suicide, i just don't know either way, same as you.

---
I am thinking about just walking into the river now that Megaupload is gone and condoms are in porn.-Fubonis
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:42:45 AM
#35:


andel posted...
your weird reaction to my post was obv trying to claim that this is 100% a murder which is an ignorant take at this point. you can say it's suspicious, but you haven't presented any evidence of murder

Weird reaction? I asked why you keep posting about it. It is like you are trying to convince yourself. Not sure why though. You don't work at Boeing do you?

And giving a timeline isn't saying anything. If you see the timeline and it makes you think he was murdered, then you need to consider why that is.

----------

Timeline:
1. People die on Boeing planes.
2. Boeing just gets a slap on the wrist.
3. Justice Department is like "huh. maybe there is something more here."
4. John Barnett begins HIGHLY detailing exactly what was happening at Boeing and discussing issues his team documented like oxygen masks not working
5. Justice Department calls him to testify.
6. John Barnett is dead.
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:44:10 AM
#36:


andel posted...
how do you know this? no one but themselves know what state of mind they are in.

i don't think it's suicide, i just don't know either way, same as you.

Family and Friends exist.

All of them report the same.

The article even said:


It is worth noting here that Swampys former co-workers universally refuse to believe that their old colleague killed himself.

But you will deny this of course because it does not fit your bias. Maybe lay aside bias seek objective information?

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Barber102
04/04/24 11:45:01 AM
#37:


Its fairly obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that John Barnett was eternally silenced so he could not testify further.

I love how stupidly the term conspiracy is thrown around trying to nuke the conversation. Not all conspiracies are nonsense, some shit does happen. I know these days a lot of it is lunacy but come on people some conspiracies are based in reality.

---
Dinosaurs built the pyramids.
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LightningThief
04/04/24 11:45:39 AM
#38:


Umbreon posted...
It's not impossible for it to be suicide, but the circumstances are so incredibly suspicious that him being silenced seems way more plausible.

It's not like anyone here has evidence one way or the other.

But correct me if I'm wrong: Didn't he say something like "If something happens to me, I didnt kill myself" at some point before being found dead?
His death is incredibly suspect. So just playing devils advocate here, a wannabe martyr could say that, then off themselves.

Think of foreign and domestic terrorists, or political activist with a mission to prove a point at the known cost of their life.

Now don't read too deep into my post, I'm only playing devils advocate. I didn't read the article.
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:46:30 AM
#39:


Barber102 posted...
Its fairly obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that John Barnett was eternally silenced so he could not testify further.

I love how stupidly the term conspiracy is thrown around trying to nuke the conversation. Not all conspiracies are nonsense, some shit does happen. I know these days a lot of it is lunacy but come on people some conspiracies are based in reality.

Yea there are conspiracies that are no longer conspiracies because they were proven true.
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McMarbles
04/04/24 11:46:41 AM
#40:


WingsOfGood posted...
Weird reaction? I asked why you keep posting about it. It is like you are trying to convince yourself. Not sure why though. You don't work at Boeing do you?

And giving a timeline isn't saying anything. If you see the timeline and it makes you think he was murdered, then you need to consider why that is.

----------

Timeline:
1. People die on Boeing planes.
2. Boeing just gets a slap on the wrist.
3. Justice Department is like "huh. maybe there is something more here."
4. John Barnett begins HIGHLY detailing exactly what was happening at Boeing and discussing issues his team documented like oxygen masks not working
5. Justice Department calls him to testify.
6. John Barnett is dead.
Yes, if someone was about to testify, Id have him killed (and apparently in broad daylight in public), IF I WAS A GIGANTIC MORON.
Which the CEO might be! Im just saying that having someone who is testifying against you killed is literally the best way to draw suspicion to yourself. Any competent criminal would not do this.

---
Currently playing: Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster (Switch)
Never befriend a man in sandals and always measure twice, cut once.
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:47:50 AM
#41:


McMarbles posted...
Yes, if someone was about to testify, Id have him killed (and apparently in broad daylight in public), IF I WAS A GIGANTIC MORON.

Why would that be moronic?

You would have people like McMarbles claiming it was suicide and get away with it.
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Murphiroth
04/04/24 11:48:43 AM
#42:


Wings in here throwing a melty over the mere statement that this might have been a suicide rather than murder but definitely should be investigated to find out for sure.

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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:49:30 AM
#43:


Murphiroth posted...
Wings in here throwing a melty over the mere statement that this might have been a suicide rather than murder but definitely should be investigated to find out for sure.

You don't know what the word melty means do you?
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Smackems
04/04/24 11:52:01 AM
#44:


Assassination is a myth

---
Common sense says it may not taste good, but it'll make a turd.
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Baha05
04/04/24 11:54:09 AM
#45:


Smackems posted...
Assassination is a myth
Tell that to Putins opposition, or fuck go far back as Lincoln or Kennedy, or King who are probably the most famous ones.

---
"He may be Mr. Clean, but his soul will always be dirty!"
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Murphiroth
04/04/24 11:55:38 AM
#46:


WingsOfGood posted...
You don't know what the word melty means do you?

I'm sure you'll obnoxiously enlighten us.
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 11:58:28 AM
#47:


Baha05 posted...
Tell that to Putins opposition

What do you mean? Putin opposition is just clumsy and should stay away from windows.

/s
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Umbreon
04/04/24 12:04:11 PM
#48:


This is 2024. You don't need to be competent you just need enough money and to win favor with enough cultists.

You shoot someone in broad daylight and have bots go "Nah that's AI". Depending on who's favor you have.

---
Black Lives Matter. ~DYL~ (On mobile)
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Mew
04/04/24 12:06:51 PM
#49:


PowerMan5000000 posted...
Never flying Boeing again
Same. I know airline travel is generally pretty safe these days but look at Boeing trying to take it two steps back.

If their employees arent even willing to fly on their planes I sure as fuck wont.

---
https://iili.io/J2AP3an.gif
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WingsOfGood
04/04/24 12:08:22 PM
#50:


Umbreon posted...
This is 2024. You don't need to be competent you just need enough money and to win favor with enough cultists.

You shoot someone in broad daylight and have bots go "Nah that's AI". Depending on who's favor you have.

But why does Boeing have cultists supporting them? And why does it seem possible some users here might sorta be into that?

Doesn't make sense.
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