Trouble Ahead.
Boeing has gotten itself in deep trouble with the U.S. Justice Department. Federal officials are drawing up criminal charges against the company, and they’ve given the American aircraft giant just a week to decide whether to plead guilty. If they don’t, the case will see trail, potentially opening the company to more severe penalties than those on offer in the plea deal.
The charges follow a pair of disastrous crashes involving the Boeing 737 Max platform, which claimed several hundred lives.
According to Mark Lindquist, a lawyer representing the families of the 346 victims of the 2018 and 2019 crashes, said that Justice Department officials alerted the families to the offered plea deal in a June 20 video meeting. Many of the family members expressed their anger that prosecutors were allowing Boeing the opportunity to plead guilty to a reduced slate of charges rather than going for the jugular and forcing the corporate giant to face its culpability in open court. One family member expressed the feeling, during the meeting, that prosecutors had subjected the victim’s families to gaslighting.
Massachusetts resident Nadia Mileron, mother of 24 year-old Samya Stumo who died in the second of the two crashes in the case, expressed her disappointment at being dismissed by prosecutors, who told the families that they could make an argument to the judge if they were dissatisfied.
The charges are the latest development in an ongoing case, in which Boeing was previously allowed to pay a fine of $243 million in order to avoid criminal charges stemming from plane crashes which took place in 2021. In exchange for getting off with a fine, the aviation firm agreed to create and promote a program to uncover and prevent violations of Federal fraud laws.
Boeing came under renewed scrutiny when a mishap on March 2024 Alaska Airlines flight—when a door flew off the aircraft while it was in flight—led investigators to the conclusion that the company was not sticking to its end of the deal.
