Check Out Boeing in ‘Freefall’

If you’re looking for something to remind you that predatory capitalism is alive and well without looking at your wallet, I suggest Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing.

Freefall is a 2026 Netflix documentary directed by Rory Kennedy, following up on her 2022 film Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. This time, Kennedy centers the story on Boeing whistleblowers, particularly former quality manager John Barnett, who spent years alleging serious manufacturing and safety problems inside the company before his death by suicide in 2024. And friends, watching the doc will make you very leery about hopping on that plane for your quick jaunt to Punta Cana. The documentary made me wish the United States had more competition in commercial aircraft manufacturing so the aviation industry wasn’t essentially a Boeing-Airbus duopoly.

The film also touches on the two 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people, while examining the near catastrophic 2024 Alaska Airlines incident in which a door plug blew out of a 737 MAX 9 shortly after takeoff. Thankfully, a quick thinking plane crew saved a lot of people that day, considering this was a preventable problem – a whole exit door being ripped off – with oxygen masks failing as Barnett predicted.

Through former employees, victims’ families and industry insiders, Freefall argues that Boeing’s problems weren’t just a lil’ engineering failure but the result of a corporate culture increasingly focused on cost-cutting, production schedules and shareholder value at the expense of safety.

Watching the documentary, it’s a pretty damning critique of those who want to keep doing more and more with less to maintain shareholder value – at the cost of our safety. And as a very public company that’s ingrained into our daily lives, that’s a scary prospect: we all fly because it’s the best way to travel, but we shouldn’t be compromising our safety to do so. And what’s more infuriating is how little individual accountability senior executives have faced.

Seeing all these former Boeing safety inspectors face real consequences and still deride the company for its lack of transparency and its disregard for safety should be on the radar of every member of congress. The whistleblowers lose their jobs, friends, and face social and professional punishment and all our elected officials have to do is their jobs, but  hey, do we really believe they do anything for the American people? Nah.

One of the film’s ugliest revelations comes from longtime Boeing quality manager Merle Meyers, who says scrap parts — some “basically rotted” — were improperly returned to production during work on Dreamliners. Boeing disputed that the specific defective parts Meyers identified made it onto aircraft, but his allegations point to something more harrowing than a single bad component: a system where questionable parts could disappear back into the manufacturing process at all. The problem isn’t what investigators found. It’s what they may never find. No one can say with certainty how many improper parts made it onto planes — or how many similar practices are still waiting for someone inside the company to blow the whistle.

So we’re out here just raw-dogging our safety. The documentary proves that over and over. If you have flight anxiety, it’s best to not watch this one. I wish I hadn’t.