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Boeing's Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth
- olesya1979 3y ago[dead]
- zer00eyz 3y ago'The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer. "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."' FROM: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-dead https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow... Can we stop trying to make this some conspiracy. The man shot himself with is own gun (making him an unfortunate statistic). What articles like this do are give an unlikely narrative that Boeing can weasel out of. They were shitty to him. The stress they caused drove the man to kill himself. Thats the story, dont buy this other sensational nonsense and give them a pass.
- yetihehe 3y ago> Thats the story, dont buy this other sensational nonsense and give them a pass. Give them a pass for driving a man to suicide?
- _heimdall 3y agoThat's a really, really complex line to draw. Suicide is by definition a choice a person makes for themselves. How do we decide where responsibility transitions from running your company (very) poorly to directly causing someone to decide to take their own life? Could Boeing be held legally responsible in some way? Maybe so, and maybe they should be in most peoples' opinion, but it isn't as clear as assuming they must have been directly responsible for driving a man to suicide.
- BowBun 3y agoBesides on non-serious forums, I haven't seen people seriously propose this (this being anything nefarious like Boeing actually trying to take him out) with any evidence. The sentiment on HN from what I've seen is that we believe he killed himself due to the harassment and hostile work environment enabled and encouraged by Boeing leadership. They should be held responsible via existing laws around protecting whistleblowers.
- hosh 3y agoEmotionally, it seems hard for me to believe that the Boeing leadership would be part of something criminal. And yet, the timing is weird. This dude hasn’t been employed by Boeing for some years. He was part of a Netflix documentary made about it. I don’t think the public took him seriously until people died, and there were multiple safety incidents. It would be interesting to see what the police report about this was. How long has he owned that gun? From what angle the that bullet come from? Were there any drugs still in his system? Any witnesses at the time of the shooting? If it was suicide, surely there are evidence that it is suicide and other evidence disproving that he was murdered.
- gorjusborg 3y agoYou don't need to pull the trigger. You just do everything in your power to make their life unlivable. They take care of the rest. This is why whistleblower laws have to be strong and be enforced very swiftly.
- hosh 3y agoWhile that can be true, there would still be evidence supporting that, besides making things unlivable. My questions still stands -- what were the circumstances around the gun shot? How long has he owned that gun? How exactly did it happen? Isn't it worth checking?
- croes 3y ago>Boeing leadership would be part of something criminal They are definitely part of something criminal, not murder but the whole mess and the resulting deaths are a criminal act.
- tomthehero 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoYou can't post like this here and we ban accounts that do, so please don't do it again. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- sudden_dystopia 3y agoYou act like nobody has ever conspired to do anything immoral before, like it’s some completely outlandish thing. History is rife with conspiracy. Maybe this guy did kill himself, but your attitude is quite unserious and ignorant.
- ctrl-j 3y agoThere's about two sentences in the article that say "it's suspicious, but nobody's going to look into it harder than they have." The rest of it goes over how he was justified in being a whistleblower. The article is fine IMO.
- zer00eyz 3y agoThe whole first half of the article is a veiled implication that he was killed. "he was upbeat about his testimony, feeling he was finally able to tell the story of his efforts to get the company to take safety more seriously" The police said it was “a self-inflicted wound.” (Are those quotes or air quotes? cause they feel like the latter). " No one can believe it." "A family friend told ABC News that he had told her, “I ain’t scared, but if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.” " "The internet lit up. It was an “alleged suicide,” or “an apparent suicide.”" and then... "it's suspicious, but nobody's going to look into it harder than they have." At no point did the author of the article cover what the actual family said. That the man was ready to be a statistic from stress. Boeing was the source of that stress. By opening up the article leaning into the conspiracy theory side of things, it only serves to discredit the rest of the content. The narrative of "his doctor told him to quit the dam job or have a heart attack" ... "the situation gave him anxiety and PTSD" is another strike against Boeing in all this. He becomes a man pushed to, and over the brink by a corporate giant. Considering the circumstances that sounds awful and reasonable.
- rib3ye 3y agoThe piece you linked shows many indications he was in great spirits and eager to testify, so I am not sure it supports your efforts to refute the conspiracy. Personally, I am more vulnerable to the conspiracy that the suicide was forced or staged after reading that article.
- nemo44x 3y agoEveryone is different but it's not uncommon for a person who commits suicide to appear to be happy and normal in advance of it. There's a variety of reasons for this such as they've made up their mind and are finally at peace, or that they cover it up because they don't want anyone to interfere, etc. Some people are manic and have super highs and crushing, sudden lows and they kill themselves when they crash. Not saying this is the case here, but him being in great spirits doesn't really contradict the action of killing yourself.
- throwaway5752 3y agoThe article in question doesn't make this claim. > As suspicious as his death was, no one in a position of power is calling for an investigation. And they’re not likely to. But I do know this: everything John Barnett said about Boeing’s problems was true. Everything. If the company had been willing to listen to him, 346 airline passengers would still be alive. And maybe Barnett would be too. This article is about the cultural problem at Boeing, and only tangentially about John Barnett.
- baq 3y agoIs a three letter agency capable of doing this? Definitely yes. What’s the motive? Not sure. Maybe he really did it himself.
- hanniabu 3y agoWhat are you going to say next, that Daphne Galizia had a history of car problems before it exploded after releasing the Panama Papers? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb...
- bzmrgonz 3y agoyou forgot they have contraption engineered specifically to make it look like suicide mate.. https://youtu.be/XbpKJIQXEuY?si=VktwKwo4MyPTqMxb https://youtu.be/XbpKJIQXEuY?si=VktwKwo4MyPTqMxb
- yunwal 3y agoAbsolutely ridiculous to not be suspicious here. Yes, stressed people kill themselves often, but not during a deposition that could accomplish everything they’ve been working for and putting their job security on the line for over the past decade. That is not when people feel hopeless. There are plenty of recent examples of murders to cover up corporate crimes. This would not be particularly out of the ordinary. Unfortunately we’ll never know for sure because for some reason no one is going to do a serious investigation into his death.
- hn_p4ttern 3y ago[flagged]
- pc86 3y agoTwo things can be true simultaneously.
- sarimkx 3y ago[flagged]
- nolok 3y agoOne, that's way to much uppercase letter Two, the other more realistic name for the "OSINT community" is witch hunt and I don't see what good that would do
- morkalork 3y agoWho remembers when reddit found the Boston marathon bomber?
- flavius29663 3y ago[flagged]
- kube-system 3y agoPutting conjecture in caps does not change them into facts.
- flavius29663 3y agoabsolutely, but CAPS are intended to draw attention, and we should be paying much more attention to this. How did we end up in a society where multinational companies can assassinate their whistleblowers in plain daylight and we're all completely apathetic about it? Same with Epstein.
- kube-system 3y agoNo, we shouldn't be paying more attention to unsupported conjecture, mostly made up by people on the internet who watch too many spy movies, and who resort to putting their text in capital letters because nobody is taking them seriously. Just because people have conspired in the past doesn't mean literally every unrelated thing that happens in the future must be for the same reason. Most things that happen, happen for simple reasons.
- SaintSeiya 3y ago[flagged]
- nolok 3y ago"Who needs facts and proofs when I can feel it in my guts !" Works for you, works for the flat earther.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flykespice 3y agoIf Boeing was a chinese company USA government would be all head over the heels investigating the cause of death.
- 93po 3y agofixed: If Boeing was a chinese company with no American ownership, the USA government would be all head over the heels investigating the cause of death.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Fripplebubby 3y agoI've been thinking about this a lot lately. In my opinion, Boeing is a company that is expected to do something about 10x more difficult than other companies: they build and sell massively complex machines that have to work safely and reliably 100% of the time (discounting planned redundancy), and even a small mistake in design or execution compromises the safety of hundreds or thousands of people, even if it takes years for the flaw to become apparent. If you couple this with all the growth in air traffic in the past few decades, I think failures like we've seen are nearly inevitable. Honestly, even with the tragic MAX crashes, I think it's nearly a miracle that air disasters happen as infrequently as they do (Boeing, Airbus, or what have you). People point to mismanagement at Boeing, including lately labor outsourcing / labor arbitrage (building plants in SC instead of WA to avoid unions, Spirit Aerosystems, etc) but I see that as part of how Boeing tried to meet the growing demands of air travel. That's not to let everybody off the hook, because clearly some changes need to take hold so that this doesn't happen again. That's the gold standard of the aviation industry, after all - that we can prevent a particular disaster from ever happening again, and we're willing to spend the time and money to see it so. I think all the true crime enthusiasts following the John Barnett case is just going to distract from solving the hard problems - getting the design and execution right on every single plane, 100% of the time. Professional class people have gotten used to cheap/affordable jet travel anywhere, anytime, that is safe all the time - but I don't think many have internalized how difficult this is to do and maintain.
- 93po 3y agoI disagree about expectations. Boeing is expected to meet a reasonable standard of effort to build safe planes that can be competitive. Failures can and will happen, and in the same way we accept the risk of death by car accident every time we drive, no one is shouting "we must stop all air travel!!!" every time a plane fails and people die. A really common sense standard of effort would be "people feel comfortable internally reporting problems". The opposite was true to the point that Boeing's management seemingly did everything possible to prevent people reporting issues. And now, potentially, someone with an interest in Boeing felt this strongly enough that someone was literally murdered over reporting a problem.
- FabHK 3y ago> In an effort to get the plane out quickly, Boeing, with the assent of the FAA, had even told the airlines that their pilots didn’t need to conduct flight simulator tests. That was a critical mistake, because the pilots would have discovered the issue that caused the planes to crash. Is that so? The simulators would have been able so simulate the failure of one of the two AOA sensors, and the simulated MCAS would've kicked in, issuing stabiliser trim nose-down commands, and the pilots would've tried to fix it with the trim nose-up switch on the yoke, and this would've gone back and forth a while until they'd stopped trimming up for a bit, and it would've simulated a crash? That's possible, but news to me. Here's a source [0] saying "the simulators have been shown to be incapable of replicating the conditions under which the two 737 MAX aircraft crashed" and "Boeing have discovered that their simulators cannot accurately recreate a fault with the anti-stall system." Seems to me that (at least) one of the two articles is wrong. [0] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-simulator/ https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-simulator/
- johnea 3y ago“Instead of building airplanes, all they cared about was building the bottom line.” This is the fundamental flaw of modern american capitalism: it's not that profit is the #1 concern, it's that profit is the ONLY concern. There's a huge difference between the two, the system we have places no balancing considerations against returns. It's not even really "profit", but stock value. Comensating employees, especially the c-suite, in stock should return to being illegal.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoCan't give stock to employees? The communists will be mad.
- zild3d 3y agoDo you not think these issues will be poor for Boeing shareholders and beneficial to Airbus shareholders?
- z3ncyberpunk 3y agoMurdered whistleblower*