The WEIGHT of a BOEING 787

Mitch Barnett spent years fighting one of the world's largest aircraft manufacturers. It cost him his life.

- Sean Flynn

VICKY STOKES WAS STANDING BY THE stove, tending a pot of gumbo, when a friend texted her to say that a second Boeing whistleblower was dead. It was a gray morning at the beginning of May, and she was at home in Alexandria, Louisiana, a little city midway between Shreveport and Baton Rouge. Rain had been falling in hard bursts since dawn.

She didn’t know this whistleblower. His name was Josh Dean, and he used to be a quality inspector for Spirit AeroSystems, which makes, among other things, fuselages for Boeing’s 737 Max— the aircraft involved in multiple deadly crashes and near misses over the past six years. He’d been fired in April 2023 because, he claimed, he had discovered manufacturing defects that his managers preferred not to fix. “Serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management” is how he put it in a complaint to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Dean was 45 years old and healthy until, in mid-April, he was killed by an infection by a rare and aggressive bacterial infection. Shortness of breath progressed quickly to pneumonia; he was sedated and connected to machines for two weeks. At some point, he had a stroke and doctors thought that if he survived, they might have to amputate his hands and feet.

“That’s a terrible way to die,” Vicky’s son Rodney Barnett said, and Vicky nodded her head sympathetically.

Rodney, who was sitting on the couch across from his mother, had gotten texts about Dean’s death, too. So had his brothers Mike and Robbie, because the first Boeing whistleblower to die this spring was the fourth Barnett brother.