A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm’s production standards has been found dead in the US.
John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017 on health grounds.
In the days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.
Boeing said it was saddened to hear of Barnett’s passing.
It said the 62-year-old had died from a ‘self-inflicted’ wound on March 9 and police were investigating.
From 2010, he worked as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant making the 787 Dreamliner, a state-of-the-art airliner used mainly on long-haul routes.
In 2019, Barnett told the BBC that under-pressure workers had been deliberately fitting sub-standard parts to aircraft on the production line.
He also said he had uncovered serious problems with oxygen systems, which could mean one in four breathing masks would not work in an emergency.
He said soon after starting work in South Carolina he had become concerned that the push to get new aircraft built meant the assembly process was rushed and safety was compromised, something the company denied.
He later said that workers had failed to follow procedures intended to track components through the factory, allowing defective components to go missing.
He said in some cases, sub-standard parts had even been removed from scrap bins and fitted to planes that were being built to prevent delays on the production line.
He also claimed that tests on emergency oxygen systems due to be fitted to the 787 showed a failure rate of 25 per cent, meaning that one in four could fail to deploy in a real-life emergency.
Boeing denied his assertions. However, a 2017 review by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), did uphold some of Barnett’s concerns.
It established that the location of at least 53 ‘non-conforming’ parts in the factory was unknown, and that they were considered lost. Boeing was ordered to take remedial action.
On the oxygen cylinders issue, the company said that in 2017 it had “identified some oxygen bottles received from the supplier that were not deploying properly”. But it denied that any of them were actually fitted on aircraft.
After retiring, he embarked on a long-running legal action against the company.
He accused it of denigrating his character and hampering his career because of the issues he pointed out – charges rejected by Boeing.