Boeing has been having serious problems all year but it’s beginning to look like the company may actually be in pretty deep shit. After lawmakers humiliatingly yelled at the embattled plane maker’s CEO during a disastrous Congressional hearing earlier this week, lawyers for the families of victims of the notorious 737 Max crashes are now urging the Justice Department to take action against the company and its former corporate leadership.
The 737 Max crashes, which occurred in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia, were some of the worst commercial aviation disasters in history. In 2021, company executives avoided criminal charges by reaching a deferred prosecution agreement with the federal government. In May, the Justice Department said that Boeing’s recent string of safety issues and internal problems signified a breach of that former agreement. Now, attorneys for the families of the victims have published a 32-page letter urging the government to take action against former executives, and the company itself.
Specifically, those attorneys have suggested that the government criminally prosecute the former executives who ran the company at the time of the crashes, while also fining the company $24 billion.
“The salient fact in this case is that Boeing lied, people died,” said Paul Cassell, one of the attorneys, in the letter. “Indeed, 346 people died in the deadliest corporate crime in our nation’s history. That staggering loss should be reflected in the sentence in this case—including in the fine. Indeed, it would almost be morally reprehensible if the criminal justice system was incapable of capturing the enormous human costs of Boeing’s crime.”
Gizmodo reached out to Boeing and the Justice Department for comment and will update this story if they respond.
The calls for action come on the heels of a Congressional hearing, during which lawmakers grilled Boeing about its recent safety problems. During his opening remarks, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who chairs the committee where the hearing took place, said he felt there was “mounting evidence that the deferred prosecution agreement concluded in 2021 with the United States Department of Justice has been violated.” He added: “In fact, there is near overwhelming evidence—in my view, as a former prosecutor—that prosecution should be pursued.”
Other lawmakers joined in on bashing the company. Republican lawmaker Josh Hawley notably took time out of his busy schedule to verbally eviscerate the planemaker’s current CEO, Dave Calhoun. “You’re not focused on safety, you’re not focused on quality, you’re not focused on transparency, all of this is on the record,” said Hawley. “But actually, you’re focused on exactly what you were hired to do, which is that you’re cutting corners, you are eliminating safety procedures, you are sticking it to your employees, you are cutting back jobs because you’re trying to squeeze every piece of profit out of this company.”
This week’s hearing is one of several that have occurred recently as a result of various ongoing allegations of deficiencies in Boeing’s safety procedures. Since a bad flight in January where a Boeing plane had part of its hull blown out, the company has been ensnared in ongoing controversies, including various high-profile plane malfunctions, whistleblower allegations, and several federal investigations.
