Two accidents involving the company’s top-selling 737 MAX jet killed 346 people.
The US Department of Justice will allow Boeing to avoid a criminal trial if the aerospace giant agrees to plead guilty to a fraud charge related to two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft over half a decade ago, people familiar with the matter have told Bloomberg.
The plane manufacturer will decide whether to accept the plea deal by the end of the week, sources said, citing DOJ officials’ conversations with relatives of the victims and their attorneys.
Two separate Boeing 737 Max 8 crashes, one involving Lion Air and the other Ethiopian Airlines, occurred in a span of less than five months between 2018 and 2019, leaving 346 people dead.
Under the plea deal, the aircraft producer will reportedly be fined $243.6 million on top of the $243.6 million it paid as part of a 2021 deferred-prosecution agreement. The agreement would also impose an obligatory independent monitor to audit Boeing’s safety and compliance practices for three years.
The offer from the DOJ is a “sweetheart plea deal,” according to Paul Cassell, a lawyer representing the crash victims’ families.
“The deal will not acknowledge, in any way, that Boeing’s crime killed 346 people,” the attorney said in an email, as cited by Bloomberg. “The families will strenuously object to this plea deal.”
In 2021, Boeing agreed to pay over $2.5 billion as part of an agreement with the DOJ after the company admitted to deceiving the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about an obscure flight control system linked to the crashes. In both cases, faulty sensor readings caused the 737 Max 8 jets to enter a nosedive. If Boeing had complied with the deal, the charge would be dropped after a period of three years, which would have expired in July of this year.
In May, federal prosecutors accused Boeing of violating the terms of the agreement, claiming the company failed to set up sufficient compliance measures. In June, the company said it disagreed with the prosecutors’ assessment, claiming that it had not violated the deal.
Image credit: Sven Piper
The “piggy-back” system that allowed the 737-MAX to fly with larger engines more forward than the normal 737 center of gravity but that cause a stall with some positive angles of attack should have NEVER been allowed: The control law modifications should have been integrated with the existing FCS (Flight Control System) and re-certified. Probably why Boeing did not do this is the extra cost. The bottom line is the US Dollar at Boeing. When MD (McDonnell Douglas) purchased Boeing in 1997, the joke is that MD purchased Boeing with Boeing money: Boeing management (most of whom were experienced engineers) were replaced by MD “money men” – people obsessed by making profits for the shareholders. The latest “fashion” of DEI does not help the situation but is not the main cause of the problem – the obsession with money is.
Innocent people that have an expectation that an airplane should fly them safely have been betrayed by greedy cooperate psychopaths who want their mansions, they want their Ferraris, they want to snort cocaine off naked prostitutes, and they are obsessed by making more money than they would ever need in many lifetimes. They just do not care.
I predict that in the future there will be many more failures of Boeing until the company is “wound up” and goes bankrupt. I give it a few years at the most. I feel sorry for the good people who work at Boeing and contempt for its corrupt management.
I can add slightly more to this.
It greatly appealed to airlines as the 737 Max was marketed on the basis it greatly reduced retraining and certification period and costs to those flying the existing model. This is a considerable cost when crew are removed from active service to training for shorter periods.
As I understood, the wings were enlarged to carry more fuel.
https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-max-vs-737-800/
I’ll assume there was also a clause saying, “We’ll stop prosecuting you if you stop killing whistleblowers…”