U.S. prosecutors intend to seek a guilty plea from Boeing regarding charges related to the crashes of two 737 Max aircraft, according to lawyers representing the victims' families on Sunday, who criticized the potential agreement and described it as a "sweetheart deal." CNBC reported that attorneys for the Justice Department, victims' family members, and their lawyers spoke for about two hours on Sunday. Boeing declined to comment, and it was not immediately clear whether the company would accept the guilty plea deal. The Justice Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
In May, the Justice Department stated that it was reviewing whether Boeing had violated a 2021 settlement that protects Boeing from federal charges. The company agreed to pay a $2.5 billion fine related to conspiracy charges connected to the crashes of its best-selling 737 Max in 2018 and 2019, which resulted in the deaths of all 346 people on board the two flights.
New Incidents
It is worth noting that the Justice Department reconsidered the agreement after a door panel exploded on a new 737 Max 9 aircraft during a flight for Alaska Airlines, raising a new safety and quality control crisis for one of the world's largest commercial aircraft suppliers. Boeing acknowledged that two of its pilots deceived the Federal Aviation Administration by concealing the addition of a new flight control system to the aircraft before their commercial launch. The department stated in 2021 that this system was later implicated in the two incidents.
