The fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX, which was forced to make an emergency landing with a gap in the fuselage, is seen during its investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Portland, Oregon, U.S. January 7, 2024.
NTSB | Via Reuters
US prosecutors plan to seek a guilty plea for boeing on charges linked to two fatal crashes of 737 Max planes, lawyers for victims' families said Sunday, criticizing a potential settlement as a “sweetheart deal.”
Justice Department lawyers and victims' families and their attorneys spoke for about two hours Sunday, discussing the plan, the attorneys said.
Boeing declined to comment and it was not immediately clear whether it would accept a plea deal. A guilty plea could complicate his ability to win government contracts. Boeing is a major defense contractor.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Justice Department said in May it was reviewing whether Boeing violated a 2021 settlement that shielded the company from federal charges related to the 2018 and 2019 crashes of its best-selling 737 Max jets, which killed all 346 people on the two flights. Under that settlement, Boeing said it would pay $2.5 billion.
The Justice Department reviewed the agreement after a door panel on a new 737 Max 9 exploded in mid-air during a Alaska Airlines flight in January, triggering a new safety and quality control crisis for one of the world's two suppliers of large commercial aircraft. The so-called deferred processing agreement was set to expire days before the door panel exploded.
Boeing admitted in 2021 that two of its pilots defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration by concealing the addition of a new flight control system to the planes before they flew commercially. That system was later implicated in the two crashes.
The plea deal would require Boeing to pay an additional fine of about $247 million and would require the installation of an external monitor at Boeing, according to Paul Cassell, one of the lawyers. Cassell called the new agreement a “slap on the wrist.”
