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Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

bbc.com

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Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#511

Post by salawat »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #469
baja_blast wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life. You'd think after he was done with hearings, something he was been advocating and trying to have happen since 2017. Why would he do Boeing a favor and kill himself before he could inflict further damage to the company?

Inflict damage or have the company wake up to its duty to safety and realign with its original intentions? I see whistleblowing as a call to integrity and healing, not an act of personal retribution.

Regardless, as a practitioner in the Quality field, I find the timing exceedingly suspect. Even if Boeing did rip him a new one in deposition, (which 32 years of employment and a documentation heavy culture more than equips a legal department to do) you don't close the ticket until it's resolved. He may have intended to do this all along; but not before all the dirty laundry got aired.

There is no way that any of this doesn't smell to high heaven. Not with a Federal criminal probe in the wind.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#512

Post by goku12 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #397
S_A_P wrote: post #384

What I don’t understand is how does Boeing expect to make the issues go away? Covering up the problems just kicks the can down the road. They still have shoddy planes out in the world. Is quarterly performance now more important than not having planes fall out of the sky somewhere later on? I guess I’m naive here.

Whistleblowers dying in suspicious circumstances is more about sending a message to potential future whistleblowers than anything else.

The NTSB is bearing down on Boeing to give up the names of the staff that worked on the Alaska Airlines aircraft whose door plug blew out. At this rate, Boeing wont have to worry about whistleblowers. The investigation alone will be enough to open that can of worms.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#513

Post by golergka »

lawn wrote: post #509
kube-system wrote: post #506

A piece of information in this article which is not in that article: > 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."

Driving someone to suicide is also a direct cause of death, and should be treated as such.

Being direct cause of death is treated very differently based on mens rea, or intent. Assassinating somebody and causing a death by accident or by negligence carries very different penalties. Being a cause of something and being guilty of it are different things.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#514

Post by WalterBright »

lainga wrote: post #495
geysersam wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily corporations are not the only structures in society. Courts, unions, citizens rights and democratically elected parliaments exist to counterbalance the incentives of the rich.

But not to give you health insurance.

Employer health insurance got its start in WW2 when Roosevelt instituted wage freezes. Shipping companies could not raise wages to attract more workers, so they raised wages indirectly by offering health insurance.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#515

Post by Supermancho »

goku12 wrote: post #505
kiicia wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this suicide by jumping out of window, like all of high profile suicides in russia?

> It said the 62-year-old had died from a "self-inflicted" wound on 9 March and police were investigating. I wonder what gave them the conclusive evidence that the wound was self-inflicted.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13187989/Boeing-whi...

Suicide note? Given his interview, where he did not seem at all concerned (Jan 31) and his upcoming scheduled testimony (after years of pursuing this), call me suspicious.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#516

Post by chasd00 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #446
gorbachev wrote: post #311

Regardless of whether there was foul play or not, it's looking pretty bad for Boeing. They, or someone else with a stake of protecting the company, killed someone, or they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself.

> they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself. Give the man some agency. If he chose to end his own life, that was his decision alone. And it may be entirely unrelated to Boeing. Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life.

I wonder if there's a clause where retirement benefits are clawed back if you choose to become a whistleblower. That would hurt; 62 years old, your whole life spent at Boeing, and then all your retirement suddenly evaporates because you chose to cause problems.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#517

Post by shadowgovt »

vinay_ys wrote: post #457

Why does a whistleblower need to be identified? Why can't it be an anonymous tip to the regulator, who then uses the tip during audits to dig deeper and get to the truth? If they can't get to the truth even after being provided a tip, then their audit process is too broken? This whole business of non-anonymous whistleblower has too much power-imbalance and always seems to end badly for the individual.

Sometimes anonymous is sufficient.

But if the regulator is building a legal case in the US against a company and the only evidence they have is what the whistleblower provides, right to face one's accuser (a right we do not give up lightly) demands that the whistleblower be named.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#518

Post by indoclay »

kube-system wrote: post #504
kiicia wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this suicide by jumping out of window, like all of high profile suicides in russia?

> https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow... His family doesn't believe so: > 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."

I think we could agree generally that "the hostile work environment at Boeing ... led to his death." It is appalling that they could apply this kind of pressure to one of their own .

I'm not familiar with the process here, but does anyone know if the officer makes the determination that this is a "self-inflicted gunshot wound"? I thought that kind of assessment was for the coroner to determine over the course of the investigation.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#519

Post by WalterBright »

wavemode wrote: post #413
dehrmann wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced. Boeing doesn't want more attention, depositions are stressful, and whistleblowers are predisposed to martyrdom. If you're Boeing, this doesn't make the problem go away, it makes it worse .

You're talking about a company that shipped MCAS in its new planes without training pilots on what it was or how it worked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people. So, an argument that this murder wouldn't be rational, gives me zero confidence that it didn't happen.

Pilots were trained in how to deal with runaway stab trim. There were three MCAS incidents. The first one you never hear about because the crew followed the runaway trim procedure and safely completed the flight. The second one did not and they crashed. The third received an Emergency Airworthiness Directive that reiterated the procedure, apparently forgot about it, and crashed.

Yes, the MCAS design was defective. The crews didn't follow their training, either.

Re: Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

#520

Post by chasd00 »

blast wrote: post #188

The timing is suspicious but that doesn't mean it wasn't suicide. If he was determined to kill himself there might be several reasons to do it today. Maybe he wanted to cast suspicion on Boeing. Or maybe he didn't want to testify - could be tons of reasons for that. I have no idea. Just saying the two events could be connected without it being murder.

suicidal people are, be definition, crazy. It's impossible to put yourself in their shoes. When the switch flips, suicide just seems like the logical solution and is very matter-of-fact. It's impossible to really understand what's going on in a suicidal person's mind at the time.

/have some experience here a couple decades back

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