David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Greed II October 2026

A couple of years ago, I wrote a column called “Greed” about the Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. It was a horrifying and frightening look at how Boeing, a company once defined by engineering excellence, allowed greed, cost-cutting and financial priorities to contribute to two 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people.

Well, there is now a sequel.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is available on Netflix, from the same director, Rory Kennedy, and it continues the story of what happened at Boeing after Downfall. Netflix itself describes it as Kennedy’s follow-up to the earlier film.

It is an absolute must-watch documentary for every traveler. I’m serious. Stop whatever you’re doing right now and watch it. This article will be here for you when you’re done.

Amazingly, Freefall may be even more disturbing than Downfall.

The first film explained how Boeing got to the point where two airplanes could crash because a company that once allowed engineers to lead had adopted a culture where cost, schedule, stock price and executive compensation became dominant priorities. The new film asks the obvious question: After 346 people died, investigations were held, executives testified before Congress, the 737 MAX was grounded around the world and Boeing promised to change, did it?

The answer presented by Freefall is terrifying. Clearly, nothing has changed.

What makes the documentary so effective is that it broadens the story beyond the MAX crashes. It focuses heavily on Boeing whistleblowers, particularly John Barnett, the longtime quality manager who warned about serious manufacturing and safety issues involving the 787 Dreamliner. It also takes us through the January 2024 Alaska Airlines incident in which a door plug blew out of a 737 MAX 9 shortly after takeoff. Four bolts that were supposed to hold the plug in place were missing.

Think about that for a moment. We are not talking about some obscure line of computer code behaving in an unexpected way. We are talking about bolts. On an airplane.

But one of the most important things Freefall does is trace the philosophy behind all of this. It spends time examining the influence of the Jack Welch school of management on Boeing’s leadership, and that struck a nerve with me because I have never believed in that philosophy.

Welch became legendary at General Electric for relentlessly pursuing efficiency, shareholder return and financial performance. His management philosophy also became associated with “stack ranking” employees and regularly eliminating those at the bottom. The concept was that there should always be a bottom group of performers who knew their jobs were at risk.

I have always found that idea horrific and inhuman.

I would never want to work on a team where everyone wasn’t expected to be a star. If someone genuinely cannot perform a job, that is obviously a management issue that needs to be addressed. But deliberately creating a system in which there must always be losers – regardless of how good the overall team might be – doesn’t create excellence. It creates fear. It encourages people to protect themselves rather than one another. It encourages them to tell management what management wants to hear. And, most dangerously, it discourages the person who sees something wrong from raising his or her hand and saying, “Stop.”

That might be a lousy way to run almost any company. It has proven to be a deadly way to build airplanes.

Freefall shows what happens when that philosophy is combined with the relentless extraction of value from a company. Senator Josh Hawley (a person with whom I often don’t agree in any way) confronts former Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun in footage from a Senate hearing, attacking a system that still rewarded executives handsomely while Boeing deteriorated because of their policies.

The larger point is difficult to miss: You can only strip-mine a company for so long before you begin stripping away the things that made the company valuable in the first place.

You can squeeze suppliers. You can outsource manufacturing. You can reduce headcount. You can pressure employees. You can move work to wherever somebody promises to do it cheaper. You can reward executives for improving financial metrics. You can return enormous amounts of money to shareholders.

On a spreadsheet, all of those things can look terrific.

An airplane doesn’t fly on a spreadsheet. Husbands, wives, children – human beings are neither safer nor given a better experience while executives and shareholders laugh all the way to the bank. We frequent travelers have more than enough proof of that. Excellence in performance and excellence in stock performance are often not correlated at all.

Eventually you start pulling blood from a stone. And when the company makes airplanes, the consequences of extracting that last dollar can be measured in something other than quarterly earnings.

That is the part of this story that should concern every traveler because we have watched a variation of it throughout the airline industry for decades. In fact, that’s exactly what I was writing about in Greed. Airlines remove a little more space, eliminate another employee, outsource another function, cut another service and find another fee. Executives are rewarded for extracting another few dollars from every passenger and another few percentage points from every operation. Each individual decision can be rationalized as efficiency.

There has to be a line between efficiency and destruction.

At Boeing, Freefall makes a powerful case that the line was crossed long ago.

The most infuriating part is how little genuine accountability appears to have followed. Boeing entered into agreements with the government, paid penalties, replaced executives and repeatedly promised improvement. Yet the new documentary introduces more whistleblowers describing a culture in which people responsible for quality say they were ignored, pressured or punished for raising concerns. Boeing disputes some of the allegations in the film and says it has addressed or continues to address others.

But a few years after Downfall, Kennedy had enough material to make another feature-length documentary.

That alone is astonishing.

In Greed, I wrote about a company that I believed had gotten away with killing 346 people because engineering excellence had been subordinated to financial priorities. I hoped the horror exposed by Downfall represented the bottom – the point where Boeing, regulators, lawmakers and the flying public would finally demand that the company rediscover what had once made the Boeing name synonymous with aviation excellence.

Freefall makes that optimism look naïve.

And that leaves travelers with an uncomfortable problem. I fly constantly. For most of my life, seeing Boeing on an aircraft was reassuring. Boeing represented American engineering at its best. Today I find myself looking at the aircraft type when booking a flight and thinking about things I never used to think about.

After watching Freefall, it is difficult not to wonder whether I want to fly on another Boeing aircraft.

Then comes the even more disturbing thought.

If the management philosophy that allowed this to happen is not unique to Boeing – if the same relentless pursuit of shareholder value, executive compensation, outsourcing, cost reduction and doing more with less has permeated the airlines, manufacturers, maintenance organizations and other companies upon which modern aviation depends – perhaps the question isn’t whether I want to fly on another Boeing.

It is how comfortable I should be flying on anything.

If you travel, watch Downfall if you haven’t already. Then watch Freefall.

Just don’t expect to sleep particularly well afterward.

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This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

Copyright 2026 David Danto

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!