FREEFALL: A RECKONING FOR BOEING – Review by Loren King
Another infuriating expose about corporate malfeasance and greed, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is prolific investigative documentarian Rory Kennedy‘s must-see follow-up to her 2022 film, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.” While that film exposed Boeing’s complicity in the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, Kennedy’s latest examines the corporation’s systemic and obscene retaliation against whistleblowers who tried to warn about shoddy work and safety negligence.
The heart of the investigation is the case of John Barnett, a Boeing employee for 32 years who first sounded the alarm about rampant safety problems at the 787 Dreamliner factory in Charleston, South Carolina. Boeing, under a new CEO bent on increasing profits for shareholders, opened the plant to avoid hiring union workers and to speed up production.
After the fatal crashes, for which Boeing was never held responsible, the company sent Barnett and other safety experts from its flagship unionized factory in Seattle to Charleston to oversee jet construction. But Barnett’s repeated warnings about negligence, including about flawed oxygen masks that ended up failing on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max in 2024 and which is depicted in the film via harrowing footage, were ignored by Boeing’s top brass. The film documents a chilling years-long campaign of intimidation and retaliation that led to Barnett’s suicide in 2024.
Besides detailing Barnett’s long fight and tragic end, Freefall offers testimony from several other Boeing employees who, empowered by Barnett’s efforts and despite threats, have found the courage to speak out and corroborate Barnett’s documentation of deliberate and routine corporate cost-cutting at the expense of public safety. Freefall could not be more timely in its expose of how the quest for profit above all else, including the billions paid to CEOs in corporate payouts, kills people and tears apart families with reckless disregard.
