A passenger on a United Airlines flight seemingly caught on video a pilot fixing a window from the interior of the plane before takeoff from Denver to Dallas.
An influencer named Kristin posted footage of the incident in her Instagram Story on Sunday.
“They are literally replacing a window with all of us just chilling and sitting here waiting to take off?!?!?!” she wrote.
Her footage showed a man dressed in the white uniform worn by pilots. The shoulder flap with black and yellow stripes is typically worn by pilots and no one else on the plane.
The self-described toddler expert then asked her Instagram followers whether it was normal for a pilot to make repairs to a plane.
Kristin later confirmed that her plane made it safely to the destination with no problems.
The lack of mechanical issues and her toddler sleeping on her lap for the duration of the flight led her to declare, “It’s eclipse season y’all. Miracles can happen.”
United has had more than its fair share of problems with planes in 2024 so far, including a flight in which a door plug blew off at 16,000 feet. The problems seemed to affect Boeing 737 Max aircraft, which were temporarily grounded to investigate the problems.
The Boeing planes were recently allowed back in the air after no evidence of systemic problems was found.
TMZ highlighted whistleblower testimony from John Barnett, a former Boeing quality control inspector who said the manufacturer was cutting corners as far back as 2017 when he retired from the company.
One specific allegation Mr. Barnett made was that inspectors were pulled from operations, leaving the mechanics to check their own work.
On one of his last quality control inspections at Spirit Aeronautics, he claimed that his team found 300 violations, some of them serious.
Mr. Barnett was found dead in his car on March 9, as he was in Charleston, South Carolina, to give testimony in the whistleblower case against Boeing.
His death seemed like an apparent suicide, but police are still investigating.
“He thought of himself as trying to do the right thing. And that’s what bothered him, that nobody would listen as to what was going on there,” his brother, Rodney Barnett said after his death.
In the 2022 Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, he said the company “quit listening to its employees.”
“So every time I’d raise my hand and say, ‘hey we got a problem here’, they would attack the messenger and… and ignore the message,” Mr. John Barnett said in the film.
“He wasn’t trying to hurt Boeing,” Mr. John Barnett’s attorney, Rob Turkewitz, said. “He was trying to save Boeing. He saw this coming and he said, ‘You know, this is all going to come down on Boeing.'”
Mr. Turkewitz said that the stress of testifying against Boeing was wearing on Mr. John Barnett before his death and that testifying brought back painful memories about his time working there.
“That was wearing on him,” Mr. Turkewitz said. “I think it all came back to him.”
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said he will step down at the end of 2024 because of the safety issues.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby tried to reassure customers about the airline’s safety in March after the incident with the door panel, a tire that fell off mid-flight, and other incidents.
Mr. Kirby said the incidents were “all unrelated” but that the airline is looking at them closely and “using those insights to inform our safety training and procedures across all employee groups.”
Steps that the airline is already taking include “an extra day of in-person training for all pilots starting in May and a centralized training curriculum for our new-hire maintenance technicians.”
“You can be confident that every time a United plane pulls away from the gate, everyone on our team is working together to keep you safe on your trip,” Mr. Kirby wrote.
