It is unfortunate that a sequel was required to Rory Kennedy’s 2022 documentary feature, which alleged that the profit-driven culture at a US aeronautics firm led to two plane crashes and the deaths of 346 people. But given the lack of corporate accountability evident at the end of Downfall: The Case Against Boeing – and the apparent complicity of regulatory body the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – it was inevitable. Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing opens with a rundown of a significant development in the story: the mysterious death in March 2024 of John Barnett, a former Boeing employee turned whistleblower.
Barnett, a contributor in the first film, was in the middle of a deposition when he was found dead at his hotel, which investigators ruled a suicide. Is this another casualty to add to Boeing’s mounting death toll? And is the alarming aviation safety scandal – supposedly resolved in November 2020, when the FAA lifted its grounding order on the Boeing 737 Max – in fact still ongoing?
This is the urgent claim of many of this film’s contributors. Some lost loved ones in the two Boeing plane crashes that happened within five months of each other – Lion Air Flight 610, which went down in October 2018, killing all 189 people on board, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed in March 2019. One contributor, Naoise Connolly Ryan, lost her husband and the father of her two small children, Michael Ryan, when he was killed alongside 156 others on Flight 302.
Others are Boeing whistleblowers who have gone public since the last film, inspired by it. He is continuing to do that now.” Hidden camera footage from Boeing’s Dreamliner assembly plant in South Carolina shows anonymised workers averring that nothing – not even a free luxury holiday – could tempt them to fly on the planes they manufacture. There is a vast moral chasm between those determined to do all within their power to prevent further loss of life and the Boeing leadership.
The only gap more glaring is the one between two shoddily outsourced sections of fuselage on a 737 Max. This isn’t a horror film, but you’ll struggle to find many movie scenes more nightmarish than Freefall’s reconstruction of the January 2024 incident when a door plug blew out mid-flight (it was missing all four of its crucial bolts) and several passenger oxygen masks malfunctioned. Barnett had warned of this danger years earlier.
His concerns were not only ignored, but also he was disciplined for having raised them. Beside the whistleblowers, there is another group of heroes in Freefall. Kennedy’s camera often cedes the floor to impressively fired-up politicians, such as the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, who, at a Senate hearing, challenges the now-retired Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun on his $32.8m 2023 salary, up 45% from 2022: “What is it you get paid to do exactly?” (Calhoun has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing.) It’s worth noting here that Rory Kennedy is not just any Kennedy, but one of the Kennedys: the youngest child of the former senator and US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and his wife, Ethel Kennedy, who was pregnant with Rory when RFK was assassinated in June 1968.
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