The fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX, which was forced to make an emergency landing with a hole in the fuselage, is seen during the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Portland, Oregon, USA January 7, 2024.
NTSB | Via Reuters
US prosecutors plan to seek a guilty verdict Boeing over a lawsuit related to two deadly crashes of 737 Max planes, lawyers for the victims' families said Sunday, calling a potential settlement a “sweet deal.”
Justice Department attorneys and family members of the victims and their attorneys discussed the plan for about two hours Sunday, attorneys said.
Boeing declined to comment and it was not immediately clear whether it would accept a settlement. A guilty plea could complicate the country's ability to win government contracts. Boeing is a major defense contractor.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The DOJ said in May it was investigating whether Boeing violated a 2021 settlement that shielded the company from federal charges related to the crashes of its best-selling 737 Max planes in 2018 and 2019, which killed all 346 people on the two flights. Under that agreement, Boeing said it would pay $2.5 billion.
The DOJ has reviewed the case agreement after a door panel from a new 737 Max 9 blew into the air during a Alaska Airlines flight in January, sparking a new safety and quality control crisis for one of the world's two suppliers of large commercial aircraft. The so-called deferred prosecution agreement was set to expire just days before the door panel exploded.
Boeing admitted in 2021 that two of its pilots deceived the Federal Aviation Administration by concealing the addition of a new flight control system to the planes before they were flown commercially. That system was later implicated in the two crashes.
According to Paul Cassell, one of the lawyers, the settlement would require Boeing to pay an additional fine of about $247 million and call for the installation of an external monitor on Boeing. Cassell called the new agreement a “slap on the fingers.”
