Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix 2026
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The search for accountability at all levels is the driving force in Netflix’s new documentary, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing.”
The documentary, from Oscar-nominee Rory Kennedy, is a follow up to her 2022 investigative look at the two crashes of brand-new Boeing aircrafts that took place within five months of each other in 2018 in the documentary “DOWNFALL: The Case Against Boeing.”
“Freefall” focuses on the whistleblowers who were witnessing a decline in Boeing’s safety and quality standards, including John Barnett, who died by suicide in 2024 after his second day of providing deposition materials in his whistleblower case against the airline company.
Barnett’s death sparked a flurry of conspiracy and rumors, but those are not the focus of “Freefall.” Instead, the documentary traces back Barnett’s career at Boeing as a quality manager, bringing in interviews with him and several other quality experts who worked for the company. All of them witnessed incidents that displayed a lack of safety and quality control at the company and faced pushback or threats of retaliation when reporting them to management.
Also featured in the documentary are interviews with Naoise Ryan, the widow of Mick Ryan, one of the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX crash. She and other family members of the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crash victims worked together to try to bring Boeing to some kind of...
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