FILE – A Boeing 737 Max jet prepares to land at Boeing Field following a test flight in Seattle, Sept. 30, 2020.
Elaine Thompson/AP
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Elaine Thompson/AP
DALLAS — Boeing will not face a criminal conspiracy charge over two 737 Max jetliner crashes that killed 346 people, after a federal judge in Texas on Thursday granted the government’s request to dismiss the case.
As part of a deal to drop the charge, the American aerospace company agreed to pay or invest an additional $1.1 billion in fines, compensation for the crash victims’ families, and internal safety and quality measures. The agreement lets Boeing choose its own compliance consultant instead of getting an independent monitor.
Prosecutors said Boeing deceived government regulators about a flight-control system that was later implicated in the fatal flights. The ruling comes after an emotional hearing in September in Fort Worth where relatives of some of the victims urged U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor to reject the deal and instead appoint a special prosecutor.
O’Connor wrote Thursday that the deal “fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public.”
Still, he said, the court can’t block the dismissal simply because it disagrees with the government’s view that the deal serves the public interest. The Justice Department has said a jury trial risks sparing Boeing from further punishment.
The judge also said the government hadn’t acted in bad faith, had explained their decision and had met their obligations under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
All passengers and crew died when two 737 Max jetliners went down less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019 — a Lion Air flight that plunged into the sea off the coast of Indonesia and an Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed into a field after taking off from Addis Ababa.
Some of the victims’ families plan to appeal O’Connor’s decision.
“When a company’s failures cost so many lives, ending a criminal case behind closed doors erodes trust and weakens deterrence for every passenger who steps onto a plane,” Paul Njoroge, a Canadian man who lost his wife and three small children in the Ethiopia crash, said in a statement released by the families’ attorneys.
The long-running case has taken many twists and turns since the Justice Department first charged Boeing in 2021 with defrauding the government but agreed not to prosecute if the company paid a settlement and took steps to comply with anti-fraud laws. However, federal prosecutors said last year that Boeing had violated the agreement, and Boeing agreed to plead guilty to the charge. O’Connor rejected that plea deal.
In a statement after Thursday’s ruling, Boeing said it would honor the agreement and continue “the significant efforts we have made as a company to strengthen our safety, quality, and compliance programs.”
The Justice Department said in a statement that they are “confident that this resolution is the most just outcome.” The department has said the families of 110 crash victims either support resolving the case before it reaches trial or did not oppose the deal.
Meanwhile, nearly 100 families have opposed the agreement. More than a dozen relatives spoke at the Sept. 3 hearing in Texas, with some coming from Europe and Africa.
“Do not allow Boeing to buy its freedom,” said Catherine Berthet, who traveled from France. Her daughter, Camille Geoffroy, died in the Ethiopia crash.
The first civil trial over that crash opened Wednesday in federal court in Chicago. The jury must decide how much Boeing has to pay the family of one victim, Shikha Garg, a United Nations consultant who was among several passengers traveling to a U.N. environmental assembly in Kenya.
The criminal case centered around a software system that Boeing developed for the 737 Max, which airlines began flying in 2017. The plane was Boeing’s answer to a new, more fuel-efficient model from European rival Airbus, and Boeing billed it as an updated 737 that wouldn’t require much additional pilot training.
But the Max did include significant changes, some of which Boeing downplayed — most notably, the addition of an automated flight-control system designed to help account for the plane’s larger engines. Boeing didn’t mention the system in airplane manuals, and most pilots didn’t know about it.
In both of the deadly crashes, that software pitched the nose of the plane down repeatedly based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots flying for Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines were unable to regain control. After the Ethiopia crash, the planes were grounded worldwide for 20 months.
Investigators found that Boeing did not inform key Federal Aviation Administration personnel about changes it had made to the software before regulators set pilot training requirements for the Max and certified the airliner for flight.
