Rory Kennedy thought she was through with Boeing.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind “Last Days in Vietnam” and “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” — and youngest child of late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy — had spent years making “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” a 2022 documentary exploring the “profits over people” approach at the airplane manufacturer, from outsourcing its parts to covering up safety issues, that led to a pair of its 737 MAX planes crashing within five months of each other, claiming 346 lives. And then John Barnett, the chief whistleblower against Boeing and key subject of her doc, was found dead in his car in March of 2024, one day prior to his third deposition, under what Kennedy calls “quite suspicious circumstances.”

“I had interviewed John Barnett for ‘Downfall’ and had kept up that relationship with him because he was such a special person,” Kennedy tells Variety. “When he passed away, I was directly in touch with his mom very early on. Over the course of trying to figure out what happened to him and being in touch with his lawyers and really trying to understand the circumstances, that was motivation for me to go back and tell this story.”

So, Kennedy made a follow-up film, “Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing,” premiering Aug. 19 on Netflix (just like its predecessor). It follows the investigation into Barnett’s mysterious death and contains testimony from former Boeing employees who contend that the company failed to dramatically improve its safety standards, as well as that of victims’ families outraged by the Trump Department of Justice’s $1.1 billion nonprosecution agreement with Boeing, whereby they’d avoid any criminal convictions over the 737 MAX crashes and retain their status as a government contractor.

Barnett served as Boeing’s quality manager from 1985 to 2017, and for the last seven of those years had managed quality control at the Boeing South Carolina plant, which produces the 787 Dreamliner. According to “Freefall,” Jim McNerney, a Jack Welch protégé who served as Boeing CEO from 2005-2015, incorporated a “profits above all else” approach at the company whereby parts were outsourced from other countries and labor for the Dreamliner was moved to the South Carolina plant, since it was nonunion. There was a running joke at the South Carolina plant that anyone able to handle a screwdriver could be hired there, and damning undercover videos filmed in the plant, and shown in “Freefall,” see Boeing employees confessing that because the Dreamliner was built with rotted scrap parts, they wouldn’t fly on it even if their family was offered a free vacation around the world.

“We see this at a lot of companies where they lose sight of what the original vision is for the company and really get swayed by profits at the expense of safety,” says Kennedy. “But for an airplane company that is across pretty much all the airlines across the United States other than JetBlue, the implications are so much more significant when they’re being sloppy. When you’re up at 30,000 feet you hope the bolts are installed correctly.”

When asked if she’d never fly on a Boeing 737 MAX or 787 Dreamliner, Kennedy didn’t mince words.

“A hundred %. And honestly, the Dreamliner as well. I wouldn’t get on a Dreamliner,” she maintains. “You see in the film undercover footage of people in the Dreamliner factory and they’re asked if they’d go on a free vacation with their family to fly all around the world but they’d have to go in a Dreamliner, and they all say, ‘No, I’m not getting on this plane. I see how it’s built.’ If they’re not going to get on it, I’m not going to get on it.”

Barnett, meanwhile, began reporting safety violations to Boeing in 2013, but was admonished for putting his concerns in writing.

“I had multiple managers berate me,” Barnett said. “On my performance management review, I was downgraded and my pay was docked for putting quality concerns in writing. They said flat-out they do not want anything in documentation so they can maintain culpable deniability.”

Indeed, Boeing is alleged to have retaliated against Barnett, repeatedly demoting him by reassigning him to other departments where he couldn’t kick up a fuss.

“John raised up enough issues and raised enough flags from inside the company that they eventually decided to move him to somewhere where he couldn’t have that effect on the production system,” claims Roy Irvin, a Boeing quality investigator, in the film. “Seeing what John went through … it was upsetting.” 

Facing financial trouble from the Dreamliner, as well as stiff competition from Airbus, which had outfitted its planes with fuel-efficient engines, McNerney decided that in lieu of creating a new fuel-efficient airplane model, Boeing would simply retrofit existing 737 planes with fuel-efficient engines, which became known as the 737 MAX. This led to massive profits and a financial windfall for McNerney, who left Boeing in 2015 as a company savior with a retirement package of close to $50 million. His hand-picked successor, Dennis Muilenberg, took over, and as the doc contends, it was more of the same.

In 2017, a fed-up Barnett filed a whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and, after being warned by his doctor that his heart would give out due to the stress if he stayed at Boeing, retired from the company. Then came the crashes. The first occurred on Oct. 29, 2018, when Lion Air Flight 610 went down in Indonesia, killing 189 people; followed by Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019, which took the lives of 157 people. Both were 737 MAX planes, and both were due to a faulty plane-stabilizing feature called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System that Boeing had reportedly tried to scrub from flight manuals.

Following the two crashes, Barnett came forward late 2019 to discuss Boeing’s myriad safety problems with the BBC and New York Times. Muilenberg refused to quit and was fired as CEO in 2019, but not before raking in $128 million over his four-and-a-half years as CEO and leaving with a retirement package worth over $60 million (he was replaced by David Calhoun, the chairman of the board). 737 MAX planes were grounded for 20 months, only to resume U.S. flights again in December 2020.

The families of the 157 victims of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 sued Boeing, whose lawyers attempted to argue that the company should not be held liable for pain-and-suffering damages because everyone aboard the plane died on impact. Kennedy still can’t believe it.  

“When 346 people die and Boeing’s lawyers argue that those people didn’t suffer because they hit the ocean so hard, and that they were so traumatized during that period of time that they can’t process that they’re going to die and so they didn’t suffer during those six minutes, there’s such a lack of humanity,” she reasons.

Once 737 MAX flights resumed, Boeing was placed on a three-year probationary period as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement. But days before it expired, on Jan. 5, 2024, a door plug blew off of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 — another 737 MAX plane — shortly after takeoff (three bolts were missing due to factory error), leading to cabin depressurization and a big hole in the plane revealing the night sky. “Freefall” presents passengers’ alarming first-person footage of the incident. Thankfully, everyone onboard survived.

“Freefall” contains moving interviews with victims’ families, such as Naoise Connolly Ryan, whose husband, Mick Ryan, was a U.N. employee aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Following the delayed-prosecution agreement, Ryan was outraged.

“I went, ‘No way.’ Three hundred forty-six lives lost, brand-new planes falling from the sky, somebody has got something wrong here. This can’t be true,” Ryan says in the film. “We’ll get them to pay a fine, we’ll tell them that they’re on probation [and] after three years you’ve been really, really good and you get a clean slate. It’s like it never happened. The CEO should have been prosecuted. Instead, they wrote that senior management knew nothing about what was going on. It is utter disbelief that somebody could get away with killing 346 people. This … It hurts.” (Just last week, a jury awarded Ryan’s family $29 million.)

On March 9, 2024, Barnett was found dead in his truck from a single gunshot wound to the head, with his pistol in his hand and a suicide note on the passenger seat. Because he was found dead the day before this third deposition stemming from his 2017 whistleblower complaint against Boeing, conspiracy theories spread like wildfire that Boeing had him killed. An investigation was launched, and “Freefall” contains intimate footage of Barnett’s parents receiving confirmation that their son took his own life (surveillance footage showed only Barnett entering his vehicle). We also see Barnett’s lawyer read a portion of his suicide note:

“I CAN’T DO THIS ANY LONGER!!! ENOUGH!! FUCK BOEING!!!” he wrote. “I pray Boeing pays. Bury me face down so Boeing and their lying-ass leaders can kiss my ass.”

While Boeing may not have pulled the trigger, Barnett’s lawyer argues in the film, their treatment of him caused his death. And Kennedy agrees.

“I think what John’s lawyers say toward the end of the film, that Boeing may not have been responsible for killing John but they’re certainly responsible for his death, is true and rather undeniable,” she remarks. “It’s a very poignant moment.”

As a number of ex-employees contest in “Freefall,” the problems persist at Boeing, and since the Trump DOJ has failed to properly hold the company and its leaders accountable, that onus is now on the public.

“My hope is that people watch this film and they put pressure on the company and say, ‘OK, I’m not going to fly Boeing planes anymore if you’re not going to change your culture and we don’t see a change of ways,’” Kennedy says, adding, “And go fly JetBlue.”