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A soft landing for Boeing?

Plea deal between Boeing and US Dept of Justice involving two 737 Max crashes has families demanding accountability.

By Danylo Hawaleshka
Published On 25 Jul 2024

History Illustrated is a weekly series of insightful perspectives that puts news events and current affairs into historical context using graphics generated with artificial intelligence.

If you're Boeing, you’ve been making the news for all the wrong reasons. But a recent “sweetheart deal”, as one lawyer put it, to avoid prosecution, also avoids accountability for the deaths of 346 people, say lawyers for their families.
Boeing’s troubles came to light with two crashes of its 737 Max passenger jet. In October 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. Five months later, 157 people were killed when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in Ethiopia.
After the second crash, all of Boeing’s Max jets were grounded for almost two years. The crashes were later blamed on flawed software that caused the two planes to dive uncontrollably.
In 2021, Boeing and US prosecutors reached a $2.5bn deal that included a $500m fund for families of the victims. Crucially, the deal avoided a public trial that risked exposing, in embarrassing detail, Boeing’s safety failings.
Then, in January 2024, a door plug on a 737 Max blew out during takeoff over Portland, Oregon. The FAA investigated and said Boeing and its subcontractor, Spirit AeroSystems, had “allegedly failed to comply with manufacturing quality control requirements”.
In May, the US Justice Department announced that it had found that Boeing had violated the terms of its 2021 deal, which had imposed a new safety compliance programme.
But on July 7, in a second plea deal, Boeing again avoided a public airing of its safety failings when it agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the US government. That deal still requires a judge’s approval.
On the day this second deal made the news, a Boeing 757 lost a wheel during takeoff, while Boeing also grappled with its malfunctioning CST-100 spacecraft, which has stranded two astronauts on the international space station.
Clearly, the FAA's concerns about quality control are an issue, and while Boeing has enjoyed great success with the 737 Max, in recent years the jet has also proven profoundly problematic. Now, as the families of the dead prepare to fight a deal they don’t like, patience with Boeing has clearly maxed out.