On Aug. 19, Netflix released Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing. This is not a documentary but an indictment against the management style of Boeing CEO James McNerney who oversaw the development of Boeing’s 737-MAX. McNerney graduated from the Harvard Business School, but his real training came from 20 years of working as an executive at General Electric under his mentor, Jack Welch. In 1999 Fortune magazine named Welch “the manager of the century,” and for a period Welch’s obsession of maximum quarterly profits made GE the most valuable company on Earth, but ultimately, under his watch, this multinational conglomerate became irrelevant and has now been chopped into smaller pieces. This disease of “profits at all costs” has also destroyed Boeing.
The film is directed by Rory Kennedy, a niece of President John Kennedy and daughter to the original Robert Kennedy, Sr. She has made other documentaries on topics from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to the final weeks of the Vietnam War. In 2022 Kennedy made the documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which investigated the two crashes in late 2018 and early 2019 of Boeing’s 737-MAX planes which left 346 people dead. She decided to make the 2026 sequel Freefall when Boeing refused to improve its safety standards. Kennedy told Time, “I was getting approached by whistleblowers inside Boeing saying, not only had things not improved, but they were actually getting worse, and would I consider revisiting this?”
The film points to the start of production of the new 787 Dreamliner around 2004 as a new low point for Boeing. Parts production would be outsourced with little or no engineering oversight, and final assembly would be done at a new facility in South Carolina, where “If you knew what a screwdriver was, you were hired.” Parts arrived which were visibly the wrong size, but at least on one occasion, employees used sledgehammers to force parts into place. When quality control employees told superiors about safety problems, they were told to never put these concerns in writing. The priority was not safety, but getting a plane out the door. The film depends upon many whistleblowers who are current or former employees, especially John Barnett who worked in quality control for over 30 years. Boeing harassed, humiliated , and eventually forced Barnett to leave the company. Barnett committed suicide, most likely from the hostile conditions which Boeing created for him. Ms. Kennedy laments the fall of a once proud engineering company, but provides no solutions.