Boeing Admits To Fraud And Conspiracy in $2.5 Billion 737 Settlement
Boeing Charged with 737 Max Fraud Conspiracy and Agrees to Pay over $2.5 Billion, Department of Justice
“The Boeing Company (Boeing) has entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) in connection with the FAA AEG’s evaluation of Boeing’s 737 MAX airplane. Boeing, a U.S.-based multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells commercial airplanes to airlines worldwide, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) in connection with a criminal information filed today in the Northern District of Texas. The criminal information charges the company with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States. Under the terms of the DPA, Boeing will pay a total criminal monetary amount of over $2.5 billion, composed of a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, compensation payments to Boeing’s 737 MAX airline customers of $1.77 billion, and the establishment of a $500 million crash-victim beneficiaries fund to compensate the heirs, relatives, and legal beneficiaries of the 346 passengers who died in the Boeing 737 MAX crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.”
Good. I would hope that this would help drive a change to Boeing’s corporate culture. But I’m not holding my breath.
This isn’t “Boeing,” it died by ritual suicide with the MD merger. This is MD in drag, and it being HQ’d in “the most corrupt city in America” (aka Chicago) is perfect product placement.
How about people going to jail?
2.5 Billion keeps people out of jail.
I agree. All the people I know who are actually in jail are poor.
The increasingly cynical side of me, would love to see the rest of the most recent emails and call logs and GPS and who met who this last month. It was no, no, deny, no, deny, forever, then all of a sudden “yes”? The execs figuring take advantage of the situation now when the “agreement” (already sanitizing the lingo) will get lost in all the other news vs. later when it might have been the top headline all over.
Oh, and will they use funding from here, all fungible after all.
https://www.washingtonpost….
At NASA we would say Boeing moved to Chicago to show the Mob how it’s done….
I remember back in the days $2.5B was real money, enough to fund a lunar lander program. I wonder where this money from Boeing will go, if simply into the general fund it will effectively disappear. But in the grand scheme of things unfortunate it came to this rather than Boeing risk a sizable amount of money for something revolutionary like the Dash 80. But not take chances like 787Max.
To me the most disappointing element is the underlying human factors problems which have never been clearly identified.
If the pilots somehow got the aircraft flying really slowly at a very high angle of attack, heard the stall warning and instinctively applied full throttle to recover instead of dropping the nose, the larger engines produced an upward pitching moment that the rather small elevators could not overcome. Dropping the nose in an airliner to recover from a low altitude stall could result in too much altitude loss, so adding power is the recommended action.
But wait! Is this a real problem? Why would airline pilots fly into a stall at low altitude? The only situation in which it could actually occur was if the pilots set the autopilot on altitude hold and then cut the throttles. The autopilot was (is?) so dumb it would try to hold altitude by cranking the nose up until it stalled.
If the aircraft had a modern fly-by-wire control system it would have just been a matter of updating the code to keep the same control response. But AFAIK it is still built today, in 2021, with actual steel cables linking the control column and trim crank to the elevators and stabilizers Because … it would be too expensive to “certify” it with a modern control system!
So instead, the kludge system which took control and ran the trim down electrically was installed. To prevent a problem that had never actually occurred and only had to be mitigated because the company wanted to continue to use obsolete control technology while massively increasing power, without recertifying or even providing providing simulators for transition training, so they had to claim it would handle the same way in a near stall as the 40 year old original design.
The company is at fault, but so is the certification system, which made it cheaper to patch and complicate the old system than to use a modern and intrinsically safer design.