Rory Kennedy calls for Boeing CEOs to face ‘criminal charges’ amid new exposé

A Director’s Decade-Long Confrontation with Boeing Ends in a Second Netflix Documentary

Cybersecarmor.com – Rory Kennedy has spent years studying the inner workings of one of America’s largest aerospace manufacturers, and the experience has left her with a fear she describes as almost unbearable. Speaking candidly about her personal relationship with air travel, the 57-year-old filmmaker acknowledged that turbulence sends her into a state of acute distress.

“I have a long history of grabbing the person next to me when it gets bumpy or turbulent. I have a lot of anxiety with flying, and now I have a lot more.”

For anyone familiar with the Kennedy name, that anxiety carries an almost genetic weight. The family’s connection to aviation disasters stretches back decades. George and Ann Skakel, parents of Kennedy’s mother Ethel, were killed in 1955 when their aircraft went down near Union City, Oklahoma. A decade later, Ethel’s brother George Skakel Jr. lost his life in another aviation accident in 1966. On the Kennedy side of the family, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. — eldest brother of Robert F. Kennedy — died in 1944 after his naval aircraft exploded mid-flight. His sister Kathleen Kennedy perished in a crash in 1948. Most recently, John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette, and Lauren Bessette were killed in 1999 while flying to what would have been Rory Kennedy’s own wedding.

That lineage of loss, however, is not what drew Kennedy to spend years inside Boeing’s corporate machinery. What pulled her in was a different kind of tragedy: the 737 MAX 8 crashes of 2018 and 2019, which together claimed 346 lives. Her 2022 documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing examined those disasters and the company’s admitted failure in its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, the automated flight-control software Boeing identified as the root cause of both accidents.

“Freefall” and the Broader Pattern

The follow-up, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, now available on Netflix, widens the lens considerably. Rather than focusing solely on the two MAX crashes, the film traces what Kennedy describes as a sustained corporate culture that dismissed employee warnings, punished whistleblowers, and allowed corroded components to remain on assembly lines. The throughline, in her telling, is something she calls a “continued lack of humanity” — a phrase she says struck harder than any single technical failure.

“It’s not just for the whistleblowers but also the families who lost family members in the 737 MAX crashes. In hearing from loved ones, you really see how these decisions and policies trickle down to impact people’s lives in such profound ways and create such a sense of loss and just abject sadness. That stays with me, and I think that really drives me more than anything to make the film.”

The documentary arrives at a moment when Boeing’s public image remains fragile. The company spent years under FAA oversight after the MAX was grounded in 2019, and regulators imposed sweeping corrective measures before allowing the aircraft to return to service. Whether those measures produced lasting cultural change, or whether the old cost-cutting instincts simply reasserted themselves once external scrutiny eased, is precisely the question Kennedy’s film puts to the audience.

Boeing’s Response

In a written statement, a Boeing spokesperson pushed back on the documentary’s framing. The company characterized the allegations as matters that had been “widely reported over the past several years,” noting that some remained “unfounded claims to this day” while others represented issues the company had “thoroughly addressed or continues to improve upon under the rigorous oversight of our regulators.” The spokesperson added that customers, industry experts, policymakers, and employees were now “seeing improvements in how we work together and deliver quality products,” and that the team was working daily to “earn the trust of those who depend on us.”

The John Barnett Thread

One of the film’s most emotionally charged elements concerns John Barnett, a Boeing employee who had spoken publicly about conditions he observed inside the company. Kennedy first encountered his story while researching Downfall. After that film’s release, Barnett was being deposed — questioned formally — about what he had witnessed. During that period, he died under circumstances Kennedy describes as “very suspicious.”

Asked what it was like to investigate his death as someone who already knew him, Kennedy said the experience was deeply concerning. She noted that the psychological toll of whistleblowing had been visible in Barnett for some time; he had spoken openly about it and was in therapy. The investigation into his death added a layer of personal grief to what was already a professional inquiry.

Why a Second Film?

Kennedy explained that after the MAX crashes, Boeing publicly accepted responsibility for the MCAS failure and pledged to stop prioritizing profit over safety. For a period, those assurances seemed credible. But once the FAA lifted the grounding order and regulatory attention shifted, she observed what she characterized as a reversion to prior practices.

“They seemed to make some significant changes that were reassuring, while they were fixing the 737 Max. But pretty soon after that plane went up into the air, and the government scrutiny stopped and the regulations pulled back on them, they reverted back to their old ways, it seemed.”

The Barnett deposition and his subsequent death crystallized her decision to return to the subject. What had begun as an investigation into two specific crashes became, in her account, a question about institutional accountability: whether a company that has publicly promised reform can be trusted to sustain that reform without constant external pressure.

The broader implication extends beyond one corporation. As commercial aviation continues to expand — with new aircraft programs, supply-chain pressures, and labor disputes reshaping the industry — the question of how much oversight is sufficient, and how quickly regulatory attention fades after a crisis passes, remains unresolved. Kennedy’s two-film project, now streaming side by side on Netflix, places that question squarely in front of a general audience that may never have followed the FAA dockets or congressional hearings where it was previously debated.