Boeing will plead guilty to a criminal fraud charge stemming from two deadly crashes of 737 Max jetliners after the government determined the company violated an agreement that had protected it from prosecution for more than three years, the Justice Department said Sunday night.
Federal prosecutors gave Boeing the choice this week of entering a guilty plea and paying a fine as part of its sentence or facing a trial on the felony criminal charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Prosecutors accused the American aerospace giant of deceiving regulators who approved the airplane and pilot-training requirements for it.
The plea deal, which still must receive the approval of a federal judge to take effect, calls for Boeing to pay an additional $243.6 million fine. That was the same amount it paid under the 2021 settlement that the Justice Department said the company breached. An independent monitor would be named to oversee Boeing’s safety and quality procedures for three years.
The plea deal covers only wrongdoing by Boeing before the crashes, which killed all 346 passengers and crew members aboard two new Max jets. It does not give Boeing immunity for other incidents, including a panel that blew off a Max jetliner during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, a Justice Department official said.
No more too big to fail companies
Boeing made $76B in revenue in 2023. This is slightly more than 1 day’s revenue for them ($210M / day) or a bit more than 10 days profit for them ($21M / day). They will keep doing what they’re doing, but increase their spending on a PR campaign to improve their public image.
Exactly. This is like if you charged the average person $1 for causing a major motorway accident.
It’s a joke of a fine in the face of Boeing’s profits - basically telling them they can get away with severe and wreckless disregard for human life in return for just over a week’s profits.
You make 1$/day?
No, but it’s on a similar scale as far as Boeing is concerned.
No it isn’t, you were just replying to someone saying that it’s slightly more than their daily revenue (equivalent to a person’s income before taxes and spendings)…
They will keep doing what they’re doing
Wrong.
This plea deal helps them quantify the cost of safety lapses, which they didn’t have before. Now they know that they’ll only get fined a tiny bit, they know that it’ll be worth it to cut further corners if that helps them sell maybe 5-10 more planes in total.
Just part of the cost of doing business.
If my maths is right that works out to just over 48 minutes of profit per person killed…
Saw it coming. This article could almost be a re post
Now what. They going to fake jail like Orange Hitler.
flatterydefense contracts will get you everywhere!They did it once, then did it again and not only is it still just a fine, the fine didn’t even go up. Given inflation since then, the fine actually went down in real terms.
That’ll teach them for sure! /s
“You have to put over $400 million of your own money and launder it back around into the safety department of your own company”
That’ll teach em.
I liked it better when large corps could go dark practically overnight, e.g. Enron. Andersen, et al.
And then the concept of “too big to fail” was born.
More specifically, the government got Enron but the PR campaign waged by corporate lobbyists is directly responsible for the milquetoast prosecutions since then. They actually got a majority of Americans to believe the government was at fault for people losing their jobs and pensions. The pensions that were already embezzled. And the jobs that were already getting cut because the embezzling was starting in on the corporation.
Too big to fail means too big to exist, you’re a defacto monopoly and need to be broken apart if you’re too big to fail.
Does duopoly count, the only competitor is Airbus
Being monopolistic does not mean you have no competitors, but that you are big enough to adversely affect the free market so that you can’t be competed with.
So yeah, it counts, and so does Apple for example.
The system is broken
The system is working perfectly as intended.
Damn, I wish I could commit felony fraud and get off with just a fine.
Although, doesn’t the government usually prefer to not work with convicted felons? Does this mean they’ll prefer other companies for contracts, etc.?
We’d need to actually have an aviation market instead of (checks notes) two corporations.
One. Airbus is foreign competition, just like the Chinese company that now is entering the market.
The US govt will not buy Airbus over Boeing, and will not let airlines overwhelmingly switch to it either.
We don’t need Boeing for for passenger jets. We need them for, well let’s just roll out the list.
- AH-64
- CH-47
- V-22
- F-15
- F-18
- C-17
- KC-46
- T-7
And I’m getting tired of copying things from their Wikipedia. It goes on into drones and missiles too. So this isn’t about the foreign competition, it’s about keeping a part of our defense industry marginally competitive with Boeing and Lockheed both kicking around.
So there is the market capitalist solution of breaking them up and letting the pieces compete with each other, or the socialist solution of nationalizing them.
If this goes on, how do you know any of those airframes aren’t as much of a sham as the 787?
This is how you end up with an army like Russia.
Oh dude, military procurement is unreal. I’m surprised our stuff actually functions.
The thing is, a lot of it might not. See Russia for an example.
So basically they will say sowwy, they get a wrist slap, and then we coke party like it’s 2099?
Boeing killed John Barnett
The people who need to be held accountable, won’t be. They’ll continue to live in lavish luxury without any repercussions.
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
Pleading to avoid criminal charges regarding cases where people died should not be a thing…
Corporations are not people when it’s convenient
“Sometimes doing what’s right isn’t as important as doing what’s profitable”
Are we filing charges against sock puppets named Boeing? Who is the man in charge? Over three hundred people are dead. Those families deserve justice, not whatever this is.
In the US the corporation acts as a legal shield, except in criminal cases. The fact that the DOJ hasn’t ripped that shield away and stuck a probe up their ass tells you everything you need to know about how true my first sentence is. Despite hearing it ad nauseum every time something like the Ohio train crash happens.
What a sick joke our DOJ is.
