Following John Barnett's suspected suicide in March this year, another whistleblower on production safety and product quality issues at Boeing in the United States, Joshua Dean, died of a sudden illness on April 30 at the age of 45.
Joshua Dean
According to a May 1 report by the Seattle Times, Dean lives in Wichita, Kansas, and has always been in good health and has a healthy lifestyle. Family members said that two weeks ago, Dean suddenly sought medical attention and was hospitalized with breathing difficulties, and then his condition deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and doctors were unable to recover.
Dean worked as a quality inspector for Boeing's airframe supplier, Spire Aerosystems, and was one of the first whistleblowers to accuse Ace executives of ignoring flaws in the manufacturing process of the 737 MAX.
Commenting on the former employee's death, Joe Buccino, a spokesman for the company, said: "We are with Dean's family. His sudden departure came as a shock to each and every one of us. ”
Dean is a mechanical engineer who began working at Spire in 2019 and was laid off the following year in layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic, returning to Ace in May 2021 as a quality inspector, according to the Seattle Times.
According to Dean, in October 2022, he discovered a serious manufacturing defect in the 737 MAX model, but when he raised the issue with management, he received no response or answer.
Dean said that because of the focus on the above-mentioned defects, he left out another manufacturing defect in the same audit related to the accessories used to connect the vertical tail to the fuselage. He was fired when the flaw was discovered in April 2023 and caused the Boeing Renton plant to suspend deliveries. In August of the same year, the company admitted that some of the 737 MAX aircraft had hundreds of misaligned and duplicate drill holes in the tail end. This caused the Renton plant to suspend deliveries again.
Dean later complained to the U.S. Department of Labor and the FAA, saying that he had "concealed quality issues," used him as a "scapegoat," and fired him in retaliation for raising aviation safety-related concerns.
In recent months, safety accidents have occurred in several types of Boeing aircraft, exposing Boeing's safety culture, quality control and other problems. The FAA initiated a production audit of Boeing and Bound Ray.
John Barnett
On March 9 this year, Barnett, who had worked at Boeing for 32 years and exposed the company's quality control problems, was found suspected of having died by suicide at the age of 62. The Charleston County Coroner's Office in South Carolina said Barnett appeared to have died from "a self-injurious gunshot wound." This claim raises questions. Nearly two months after the incident, the police have not yet concluded their investigation.
Barnett worked as a quality control manager at the North Charleston, South Carolina plant that produces Boeing 787 airliners in 2010, retired in 2017 for health reasons, and broke the news about Boeing's production safety in 2019. He was supposed to be questioned on March 9 about his defamation lawsuit against Boeing, but he did not appear in court and was later found dead in the car in the hotel parking lot where he was staying. According to documents released by his lawyers, Barnett said he had been "harassed, vilified and humiliated" for expressing concerns about Boeing's quality control process.
The Seattle Times reported that Barnett was advised by a South Carolina law firm, which also represented Dean. Brian Knowles, one of the lawyers representing him, said he did not want to speculate about the timing and cause of the two deaths.
Source: CCTV News, China News Network