Prior to his death, whistleblower John Barnett was testifying against Boeing over concerns about standards.

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.

  • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
    7·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
      4·
      8 months ago

      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…

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
          3·
          8 months ago

          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…

          • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            8 months ago

            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.

            • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
              1·
              8 months ago

              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 :)