The True Story Behind Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing

A still from Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing —Courtesy of Netflix For Boeing, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 live in infamy.

The first plane crashed in October 2018 in the Java Sea shortly after taking off, and the second crashed in central Ethiopia only five months later.

Both were Boeing 373 Max aircrafts, a newer and more fuel efficient model that had was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017.

Within two years of first entering into service, every 737 Max had been grounded after the same malfunction led to a combined total of 346 fatalities.

Three years later, Netflix released Downfall: The Case Against Boeing , exploring how the company’s obsession with profit and maintaining a competitive edge led the former titan of aviation safety to the point of endangering anyone who flew their newest aircraft model—as well as Boeing’s efforts to deny their own complicity.

That was in 2022.

This year, Freefall : A Reckoning for Boeing takes a wider look at Boeing’s continued reputation.

“When we finished that film, Boeing ultimately had taken responsibility,” says Rory Kennedy, director of both documentaries.

Speaking to TIME over Zoom, she says the company “assured the flying public, as well as the airlines and Congress, that it had learned its lesson and changed its ways.

It did seem initially that it had made some corrections, but soon after the 737 Max got [back] into the air, I started seeing the headlines again.” The need to return to the Boeing story Kennedy has made documentaries about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the final weeks of the Vietnam War, and the impact that the death of her father—Robert F.

Kennedy—had on her mother Ethel.

Freefall is her first sequel, motivated, she says, by Boeing’s refusal to improve its once venerated, now dire safety standards.

“I was getting approached by whistleblowers inside Boeing saying, not only had things not improved, but they were actually getting worse, and would I consider revisiting this?” At a certain point, you didn’t need to be a whistleblower to recognize Boeing was struggling to improve its recent track record.

In January 2024, a 373 Max 9 plane operated by Alaska Airlines lost a rear door plug in midair, plunging the 171 passengers into pure terror until the plane was able to land with no fatalities.