Two crashes of a newly delivered airliner, five months apart, left 346 people dead and put commercial aviation under a level of public scrutiny it had not faced in years. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is the 2022 documentary feature that returns to that period.

What is Downfall: The Case Against Boeing about?

Rory Kennedy directs an 89-minute account of the months following those two accidents, the second of which, in March 2019, set off alarm on a global scale within days. The approach is investigative rather than narrative: it moves from the accidents to the inquiries they triggered, and from there to the manufacturer named in the title, whose conduct is the subject placed under examination. This is a United States production that stays in the documentary register throughout, assembled from the record rather than from dramatised reconstruction of the flights. The title announces the framing — a case, built piece by piece, rather than one revelation held back for a final act. The figure of 346 deaths remains the fixed reference point the film returns to.

About the cast

There is no acted cast. As a documentary, the people on screen appear as themselves rather than as characters, and the credited creative authorship sits with director Rory Kennedy, the name attached to the film in the catalogue. Nothing in the listing points to a scripted ensemble.

Context & significance

Aviation documentaries occupy a particular corner of non-fiction filmmaking: the subject matter is technical, the stakes are unambiguous, and the underlying record is unusually well documented. Downfall arrived in 2022, three years after the second of the two accidents, by which point the investigations and the public argument around them had produced a substantial written trail to work from. At 89 minutes it is a standard feature length rather than a limited series, so it moves at the pace of a single sitting. Its subject is not region-specific: air travel is shared infrastructure, and the alarm that followed March 2019 was described at the time as worldwide.

Watching Downfall: The Case Against Boeing on Ktime

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