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It is unfortunate that a sequel was required to Rory Kennedy’s 2022 documentary feature, which alleged that the profit-driven culture at a US aeronautics firm led to two plane crashes and the deaths of 346 people. But given the lack of corporate accountability evident at the end of Downfall: The Case Against Boeing – and the apparent complicity of regulatory body the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – it was inevitable.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing opens with a rundown of a significant development in the story: the mysterious death in March 2024 of John Barnett, a former Boeing employee turned whistleblower. Barnett, a contributor in the first film, was in the middle of a deposition when he was found dead at his hotel, which investigators ruled a suicide. Is this another casualty to add to Boeing’s mounting death toll? And is the alarming aviation safety scandal – supposedly resolved in November 2020, when the FAA lifted its grounding order on the Boeing 737 Max – in fact still ongoing?

This is the urgent claim of many of this film’s contributors. Some lost loved ones in the two Boeing plane crashes that happened within five months of each other – Lion Air Flight 610, which went down in October 2018, killing all 189 people on board, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed in March 2019. One contributor, Naoise Connolly Ryan, lost her husband and the father of her two small children, Michael Ryan, when he was killed alongside 156 others on Flight 302.

Others are Boeing whistleblowers who have gone public since the last film, inspired by it. “John Barnett was a lighthouse,” says one. “When I first started at the company, he was pointing people in the right direction. He is continuing to do that now.” Hidden camera footage from Boeing’s Dreamliner assembly plant in South Carolina shows anonymised workers averring that nothing – not even a free luxury holiday – could tempt them to fly on the planes they manufacture.

There is a vast moral chasm between those determined to do all within their power to prevent further loss of life and the Boeing leadership. The only gap more glaring is the one between two shoddily outsourced sections of fuselage on a 737 Max. This isn’t a horror film, but you’ll struggle to find many movie scenes more nightmarish than Freefall’s reconstruction of the January 2024 incident when a door plug blew out mid-flight (it was missing all four of its crucial bolts) and several passenger oxygen masks malfunctioned. Barnett had warned of this danger years earlier. His concerns were not only ignored, but also he was disciplined for having raised them.

Beside the whistleblowers, there is another group of heroes in Freefall. Kennedy’s camera often cedes the floor to impressively fired-up politicians, such as the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, who, at a Senate hearing, challenges the now-retired Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun on his $32.8m 2023 salary, up 45% from 2022: “What is it you get paid to do exactly?” (Calhoun has not been charged with criminal wrongdoing.)

It’s worth noting here that Rory Kennedy is not just any Kennedy, but one of the Kennedys: the youngest child of the former senator and US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and his wife, Ethel Kennedy, who was pregnant with Rory when RFK was assassinated in June 1968. It was en route to Rory Kennedy’s wedding three decades later that the plane carrying John F Kennedy Jr, his wife and his sister-in-law went down, killing them all. So this is a film-maker who understands not only what it feels like to lose family in a sudden and shocking tragedy, but also those Camelot-era American values of progress and public service – values Boeing itself once exemplified.

Kennedy’s previous projects include the Emmy-winning Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and the Oscar-nominated Last Days in Vietnam. Freefall is a clear-eyed, serious-minded film to stand alongside these, but it also echoes a string of other recent documentaries on how, in the neoliberal era, unregulated capital has infiltrated and corrupted such diverse industries as construction (Grenfell: Uncovered), tech (The Social Dilemma) and pharmaceuticals (The Crime of the Century).

The pattern of allegations is always the same: an incoming CEO seeks to maximise shareholder profit, whatever the cost to product quality, employee welfare or public safety; warnings are ignored; disaster occurs, then blame is shifted, often with breathtaking shamelessness, on to the dead.

Kennedy’s two documentaries gather their participants’ righteous rage steadily enough to burn off the cloud cover of this corporate obfuscation, leaving a clear view of the horizon ahead. In their view, until the individuals in Boeing’s failed leadership face criminal prosecution – as opposed to multimillion-dollar retirement packages – nothing will change.

In response to the filmmakers’ requests for comment, Boeing stated that some of the claims against the company “remain unfounded” and that “others are issues that Boeing thoroughly addressed or continues to improve upon”.

• Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing is on Netflix