Boeing To Pay $2.5 Billion To Settle US Probe of 737 MAX Crashes (wsj.com) 66
phalse phace shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Boeing Co. will pay $2.5 billion to resolve a Justice Department investigation and admit employees misled aviation about safety issues linked to two deadly crashes of its 737 MAX jet, U.S. authorities said. Federal prosecutors had been investigating the role of two Boeing employees who interacted with the Federal Aviation Administration about the design of the 737 MAX and how much pilot training would be required for the new model.
The settlement includes a $243 million fine as well as $2.2 billion in compensation to airline customers and families of the 346 people who perished in two MAX crashes. The plane maker was charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., but will avoid prosecution on that charge as long as it avoids legal trouble for a period of three years. The deal also calls for Boeing to comply with any ongoing investigations, including probes by foreign law-enforcement and regulatory authorities, and to beef up compliance programs, according to its agreement with prosecutors.
The settlement includes a $243 million fine as well as $2.2 billion in compensation to airline customers and families of the 346 people who perished in two MAX crashes. The plane maker was charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., but will avoid prosecution on that charge as long as it avoids legal trouble for a period of three years. The deal also calls for Boeing to comply with any ongoing investigations, including probes by foreign law-enforcement and regulatory authorities, and to beef up compliance programs, according to its agreement with prosecutors.
The Rich Pay Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
The poor go to jail for manslaughter.
Re:The Rich Pay Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
The poor go to jail for manslaughter.
Not really "the poor" vs "the rich" here. It's more of a "average person" vs a "flagship American company" case.
Re:The Rich Pay Fines (Score:5, Interesting)
Even here on Slashdot you can see it. The many important truth is that Boeing as a company admitted to fraud [theguardian.com] . That isn't even mentioned in the WSJ article that I can see (I'm not going to pay subscription or register - it's not in the first several free paragraphs so if it's there most people won't read it). Think about how many comments there have been from Boeing shills on Slashdot trying to blame the pilots for the accidents which in itself is fraud and slander.
At this point, all planes containing Boeing components produced in the recent era should probably be grounded until the whole lot are evaluated and accidents like the Boeing 787 battery fires are re-investigated to see if there were cover ups. Not to mention, the FAA's ability to certify planes as safe to fly should be suspended until they rebuild get the capability to spot problems like this. I wonder if Lockheed could rebuild the ability to produce passenger airliners and basically accept those Boeing engineers and designs that haven't been compromised?
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To add to this point, according to the story, the incentive is now made to ensure that Boeing will stonewall, stall and defang any ongoing/future investigations for next three years.
Because that's the time it needs to keep "out of legal trouble" for deal not to prosecute it on count of conspiracy to defraud the US to hold.
Which makes it really perverse that
>The deal also calls for Boeing to comply with any ongoing investigations, including probes by foreign law-enforcement and regulatory authorities, and
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At this point, all planes containing Boeing components produced in the recent era should probably be grounded until the whole lot are evaluated and accidents like the Boeing 787 battery fires are re-investigated to see if there were cover ups.
Based on what? You can ground a plane based on a safety concern, but we have plenty of evidence that the 737MAX had an abnormal safety record, and the other planes didn't. There were fire incidents on the 787, whether they covered something up or not is irrelevant to their safety in the air as they addressed the issue and the abnormal high rate of fires has been eliminated.
There's no basis for grounding based on operational experience we have. There's plenty of reason to keep investigating Boeing but it's u
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Based on what?
Lack of care; inability to trust that Boeing did test is compensated for by experience that their planes haven't fallen out of the sky yet. However we are no longer able to trust their engineering at all. There might be a calendar based computer flaw. There might be a set of components that gradually weaken and then fail. There might be an incorrect maintenance instruction which normally works but can occasionally lead to an engineer fitting a part the wrong way round and then the plane falling out of
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Again, lack of care is irrelevant. We have statistics that show absolutely no abnormal safety concerns on other Boeing planes, and what you're doing is proposing to punish the customers.
bp is currently in the media again due to a fuel issue that stranded a ship in Mauritius last year. Should based on that the government come and take your keys away because you fueled up your car at a bp service station and bp showed a lack of care on another product, and yet your car is doing just fine? Your post makes no s
Bypass Paywalls (Score:2)
for 3 browsers, I use the Firefox one, works great. [github.com]
Re: The Rich Pay Fines (Score:1)
Re: The Rich Pay Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the company consists of rich people.
The fine will ultimately be paid by the shareholders. Most stock is owned by middle-class pension funds.
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Nope. According to 26 U.S. Code 162(f)(1) [cornell.edu]:
Feel free to check the exceptions below, but none of
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The price will ultimately be paid by the average workers who get laid off due to management incompetence.
Re: The Rich Pay Fines (Score:2)
Can you tell me what's different in these pictures (Score:3)
Me: They're the same picture.
Criminal charges wouldn't be levied against Boeing like they're a person, you'd investigate, find the assholes who signed off on it when they clearly knew it was dangerous, and toss 'em in prison for manslaughter.
They literally put a safety feature behind a paywall. This would be like if you had to pay a fee or your airbags didn't work.
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It ought to be remembered that airbags used to be optional. For which read "you had to pay extra for the safety feature". It took about 20 years before airbags became a standard feature of all cars....
There was debate over how much safety they added (Score:2)
And yeah, I suspect the car companies probably knew how important air bags were too. Go watch the first 10 minutes of Fight Club again.
Re: The Rich Pay Fines (Score:1)
Re:The Rich Pay Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
WIth that said, paying the fine also shields the people lower down the ladder from prosecution. The engineers, QA guys, lawyers and accountants and so on.
Re:The Rich Pay Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
To large-company CEOs, "responsibility" is a word used to increase their salaries, nothing else. You would think after they have committed criminally negligent manslaughter on mass-scale, that some of the ones personally responsible (which does include the CEO because of his oversight duties) would go to jail or at least have to pay a fine personally.
This way, Boeing just charges a bit more on their next defense contract and nicely recovers all that money.
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Re: The Rich Pay Fines (Score:1)
There is an off chance, but they would have to prove the execs knew.
Volkswagen had one exec at least get time. No idea if he is even serving and one other person was given some time.
Not bad for the scam they pulled off.
Re:The Rich Pay Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
The poor go to jail for manslaughter.
The hell do you mean the "Rich" pay fines? Didn't Boeing get a line item in the 2020 bailout to the tune of $17 billion?
That's 17 billion taxpayer dollars. Next week's executive meeting at Boeing will be to discuss bonus structures for the other $14.5 billion they budgeted for this payoff.
The poor paying for this, are the ones voting for it.
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The poor go to jail for manslaughter.
The hell do you mean the "Rich" pay fines? Didn't Boeing get a line item in the 2020 bailout to the tune of $17 billion?
That's 17 billion taxpayer dollars. Next week's executive meeting at Boeing will be to discuss bonus structures for the other $14.5 billion they budgeted for this payoff.
The poor paying for this, are the ones voting for it.
Fair comment.
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Must we remind you that Boeing turned down that bailout?
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
They got help, no question, but it wasn't tax dollars or bailouts.
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The poor go to jail for manslaughter.
Nope. The rich have their company pay the fines for them and keep their large salaries and bonuses...
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This is the US issuing a fine to Boeing. The 737 MAX's faulty sensors killed people in flights with a foreign origin. Unless there were any American civilians on those flights (were there?), it's unlikely that any employee of Boeing could be held criminally liable in American courts for the deaths.
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This is the US issuing a fine to Boeing. The 737 MAX's faulty sensors killed people in flights with a foreign origin. Unless there were any American civilians on those flights (were there?), it's unlikely that any employee of Boeing could be held criminally liable in American courts for the deaths.
Ralph Nader's niece was killed in the Ethiopian crash; she was American. I'm sure there would have been other people on holiday or work trips, given that we're talking about hundreds of deaths.
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737 MAX: unsafe at any speed?
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Then at the very least, Nader's family could sue for wrongful death. I would be surprised if they didn't.
Re: The Rich Pay Fines (Score:2)
Covid Relief (Score:4, Insightful)
Do they get the money from some covid relief fund? I wouldn't want Boeing to suffer from this you know.
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This is simply moving things from one pocket to another. Let's hope that the other regulatory authorities do slightly better on this one.
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$17bn
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Do they get the money from some covid relief fund? I wouldn't want Boeing to suffer from this you know.
$17bn though in an underhanded way that doesn't directly name Boeing https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Re: Covid Relief (Score:1)
And they still closed a facility. Nice!
A remarkably cheap "deal" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A remarkably cheap "deal" (Score:5, Informative)
What's more, only $500m of the $2.5b fine is going to families of those killed in the two air disasters. The majority of the cash ($1.77bn) is going to Boeing's "customers who were affected by the grounding of the planes following the crashes.", the BBC reports [bbc.co.uk].
Wouldn't want Boeing's corporate customers to be upset, would we?
Nice to see that legal justice has its priorities in order
Boeing customers should be concerned (Score:2)
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Pilots should refuse to fly these deathtraps. Unfortunately, the job situation for pilots is not that good.
Wow, the fine is just $243 million (Score:5, Informative)
They hid vital data from the FAA to get their plane approved, which lead to hundreds of deaths and they get a little slap on the wrist. Only the $243 million in fines is the actual "punishment", and a small token amount to victims (well, they are not Americans so who cares I guess), most of the money ($1.77B) goes to the airlines for the groundings, which is something Boeing had already started to arrange with the airlines anyway. Wow.
Also, why paywalled articles, it's pretty much everywhere [bbc.co.uk].
Re:Wow, the fine is just $243 million (Score:5, Insightful)
They hid vital data from the FAA to get their plane approved, which lead to hundreds of deaths and they get a little slap on the wrist. Only the $243 million in fines is the actual "punishment", and a small token amount to victims (well, they are not Americans so who cares I guess), most of the money ($1.77B) goes to the airlines for the groundings, which is something Boeing had already started to arrange with the airlines anyway. Wow. Also, why paywalled articles, it's pretty much everywhere [bbc.co.uk].
Amazing what kind of deals you get when you buy lawmakers that lobby to hold that seat for life.
We'll start seeing former members of Congress and Presidents become billionaires soon. Still won't change a damn thing.
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I mean, it is by design. Other countries call it corruption and bribery and some of them fight it others don't. The US decided to institutionalize it and call it "lobbying" and it works great for politicians and companies, money is made, nobody risks jail.
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"They hid vital data from the FAA to get their plane approved"
Worse than that. They conspired with the FAA to make that hidding possible to start with.
Why is a fine even possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
Negligent homicide (Score:5, Insightful)
So they commit 346 homicides by negligence, and nobody faces any single personal punishment. Only the company investors. Wow.
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So they commit 346 homicides by negligence, and nobody faces any single personal punishment. Only the company investors. Wow.
Not no one. Corporations are people [wikipedia.org] so Boeing is a person and therefore facing personal punishment of the only kind it could understand, financial punishment.
</s>
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I think it's about time to institute the death penalty for corporate persons.
Re: Negligent homicide (Score:2)
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So they commit 346 homicides by negligence, and nobody faces any single personal punishment. Only the company investors. Wow.
Corporations are people too, my friend. Immortal, criminally immune people.
Must be nice (Score:3)
The plane maker was charged with one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., but will avoid prosecution on that charge as long as it avoids legal trouble for a period of three years.
I wonder how many people who have been charged with conspiracy will use this in their court hearing?
"Yes, your honor. I and my associates did conspire to steal, and did steal, millions from the company as well as source code, but if we stay out of other legal troubles for the next three years I'd appreciate it not being brought up on those charges."
Deceived aviation (Score:1)
How does one deceive the science of aviation?
(TFA says aviation regulators. I'll give the editor the benefit of the doubt and assume that the typo was copied & pasted from the article and that the original has since been corrected.)
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Newt Gingrich realized that he didn't have to eliminate organizations like the EPA, the FDA, the IRS, or the FAA to please his corporate patrons, all he had to do was make enforcement of their regulations a line item in the budget, and then squeeze. Once upon a time the FAA had people on staff competent to look at the 737-MAX and say, "This is a new aircraft and needs a new certification." Later they were still able to contract someone to do it. Now their enforcement and certification budget has been shr
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Aviation isn't a science. Used as a noun, it encompasses all the activities related to mechanical flight. This mess involved deceiving aviation regulators, pilots, passengers; "aviation" is an appropriate word to use in the circumstances.
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Sure, it's not a science technically, you got me there. That's not really the point though of my (not very good) joke. The article now says "deceived aviation regulators," which makes perfect sense, while the Slashdot summary just says "deceived aviation" without "regulators", which isn't anything anyone would intentionally write.
Slap on the wrist. (Score:1)
Corporate death penalty needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the US cannot and would never do such a thing, but EU and other foreign laws could be changed to ban purchases from companies whose actions amount to organized crime.
While less developed nations will buy whatever their corrupt leaders are bribed to buy, the EU could levy penalties like a ten year moratorium on Boeing commercial airliner purchases.
Predatory monster companies are only as strong as their profits. Don't merely fine them, STOP THEM FROM MAKING NEW MONEY. That would be devastating.
If this had been Airbus... (Score:2)
One of the biggest issues with the application of the law to corporations is the complete inconsistency of penalties being levied.
In this particular case, with Boeing admitting that employees of the company had been engaging in wilfully deceiving their regulator in a way that led to deaths, then either Boeing and/or the individuals concerned are