Boeing whistleblower found dead in US
bbc.com
John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017.
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 Mr Barnett's passing. The Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to the BBC on Monday.
It said the 62-year-old had died from a "self-inflicted" wound on 9 March and police were investigating.
You are viewing a single comment
Erm. Are you talking about something OTHER than the changed 737-MAX design and the MCAS system? Because those two related crashes happened in late 2018 and early 2019 - 5-6 years ago. Got a link to the >20 years ago incident you are talking about?
The only crash I know of thats similar to what they're talking about happened in an airbus plane, and during landing not takeoff. The pilots tried to pull up on their side sticks to avoid crashing, but the plane ignored the input because it would have overcorrected and caused the plane to stall. As a result they crashed onto the runway.
That isn't to say Boeing doesn't have a history with such things. Look into United Airlines 811 in 1989. Improper design caused a massive chunk of the fuselage to be ripped out in flight, throwing 9 people into the ocean and causing a rapid decompression. Initial investigations said the cause was human error, but the family of one of the victims researched it themselves and found out that wasn't the case.
Can't find an airbus crash on landing with that description - do you have a year, place, or flight number?
And of course, Boeing and Airbus also have had bad design decisions - just think of the A400-M...
Iberia flight 1456
Thanks. Reading up on that however, reads like not so much a negligent design, but a lesson learned from a new scenario that hadn't caused an issue before.
PS: I cringed hard at the use of "male" in the description of the pilot & copilot on the wikipedia page - seems some incel wrote that...
I would've assumed it should have been designed to dampen the input to a point where it isn't dangerous, instead of ignoring it entirely. There could be a reason they didn't do that which I'm not seeing, but that seems like a good idea at first glance.
I agree but we both have the luxury of hindsight. I think it's really difficult to always anticipate all failure scenarios in advance. I am saying that as someone who just discovered had a "bug" in his software discovered that caused a buffer overflow because I didn't anticipate a buffer as small as 32 Kilobytes in a data link that was designed for 32 Megabits per second :)
Not the person you responded to, but they may be talking about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which I believe the FAA grounded (I could be misremembering the John Oliver points about it) after several incidents within the first few months of release.
Wikipedia says the dreamliner had it's first flight only in 2009, so hardly 20+ years ago... I think previous poster was just confusing the very recent 737-MAX accidents with some historical ones.
what i meant was decades ago, not the "recent" crashes of 2018..
i tried to find it but didn't yet. there are way more plane crashes than i thought i would have to go through..
looking at "new technology" introduced (as it was quite new) i stumbled over this article and remembered that the "three computers voting" (while the pilot may only take place in that voting - as a minority ...) was part of the discussions back then (which is not written in that article however, but i found one piece, yay!):
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950605&slug=2124705
i feel like i could remember something wrong like it maybe was not a takeoff but possibly a go-around where the crash happened... not sure i won't yet give up searching, but i have to stop for now..
edit: i am not saying it was a 777, i just found a piece of my 20year old puzzle...
went through lots of plane accidents to find the one i think to remember, but had to stop as i do not want to increase fear of flying. however i stumbled about this one, Airbus A320 Air France flight 296 on 26th of June, 1988 which was sort of related as some "security" mechs seemed to have prevented crash prevention there and fired discussions. but this one was earlier and it was not boeing (and it looks like no one tried to cover things). however since it was during an airshow, not a commercial flight, i now figured out that the one i remember could have been a testflight, cargo flight or something else like a flight show as well... not sure if i "can" find it, the little i remember.