RFK Jr.’s Sister Compares His Incompetence to Boeing Crashes

Rory Kennedy says she believes it’s “really important to have people who are in positions who really know what they’re doing”—whether that’s at Health and Human Services or the most powerful airplane manufacturer in the country.

The Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning director, whose newest documentary, Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, is streaming now on Netflix, made her comments in response to a question about her decision to speak out publicly against her brother, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 72.

“So I think it’s a really important job,” she continued of the Trump administration role her older brother currently occupies. “And really important to have somebody in that position who really has a full life’s history of doing it.”

Kennedy then drew the comparison to the string of profit-hungry Boeing CEOs who oversaw the disastrous actions she exposes in her two films.

“The folks who historically were running Boeing were engineers when the company was extraordinary, and making amazing airplanes, and doing things that nobody else had done,” she said. “And I think that when you see people who are brought into the company that have a greater expertise in making money and just being CEOs, but may have run a company that oversees dishwashers, it reduces the level of quality.”

Freefall chronicles how Boeing allegedly underwent a major shift in quality control when former General Electric executive James McNerney took over as CEO in 2005.

“And so I think that it’s really important to have people who are in positions who really know what they’re doing,” Kennedy continued, putting a fine point on her analogy. “And I feel very strongly about that.”

Like the majority of her political dynasty family, Rory Kennedy—the youngest of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children—denounced RFK Jr. after he decided to run as a third-party candidate in 2024 and then subsequently joined Trump’s campaign and brought his anti-vaccination crusade to HHS. She endorsed Kamala Harris for president and called her brother’s embrace of Trump a “betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.”

Freefall, which is Kennedy‘s second documentary about Boeing after 2022’s Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, centers on disturbing revelations about allegedly unsafe practices from whistleblower John Barnett, who police believe took his own life in the midst of his ongoing deposition against the company.

“When John died, a number of other whistleblowers approached me to say, not only was everything that John said true, but that the situation had gotten even worse,” Kennedy explained. “And they were seeing very alarming instances of activities that were not following protocols and were very concerning to them in terms of the safety of flight.”

The most harrowing scene in the new film comes when Kennedy uses cellphone footage to bring viewers inside the 2024 Alaska Airlines flight that had its door panel blown out mid-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft. We see the plane depressurize and passengers unable to use apparently faulty oxygen masks that whistleblowers had warned about.

“It’s heart-wrenching to think about what they went through,” Kennedy says of the passengers on that Boeing 737 MAX. “I mean, had that plane been 20,000 feet higher, I’m not sure anybody would have survived that. So it’s scary. And that was an instance where they just didn’t follow the protocols. They didn’t put the screws back into the door!”

Passengers on other 737 MAX flights were less fortunate. In 2018, a Lion Air flight crashed into the sea off the coast of Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. The next year, an Ethiopian Airlines flight using the same aircraft crashed six minutes after takeoff, killing 157 people. These incidents forced the FAA to ground all 737 MAX planes, but they were back in service four years later.

Asked how she has changed her personal flying habits since making her films about Boeing, Kennedy didn’t hesitate to reveal the two aircraft she avoids at all costs.

“I personally won’t fly a 737 MAX or a 787 Dreamliner,” she said. “And people can come to their own conclusions. There are airlines, not a lot of them in the United States, but I know JetBlue doesn’t use Boeing at all. So if you want to just stay away from Boeing altogether, then you could fly more JetBlue.”

“I don’t get paid by JetBlue, by the way,” Kennedy added with a wry laugh.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is streaming now on Netflix.