Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to defraud the US government in a case linked to the crashes of its 737 Max jets that killed 346 people, the Washington Post reports. The plea deal, reached just before a midnight deadline on Sunday, marks a significant turn for the aerospace giant and comes after the Justice Department determined that Boeing failed to meet the terms of a 2021 agreement to avoid prosecution for allegedly not sharing crucial information from the Federal Aviation Administration about a new automated control system on the Max. This system was implicated in both the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes, causing uncontrollable dives.
The deal comes after the Justice Department said the company had violated that 2021 agreement by not properly addressing issues, namely, by not making the changes it had committed to in order to detect and prevent violations of federal anti-fraud laws.
The plea agreement, which must still be approved by the court, includes several key provisions. Boeing will pay an additional $487.2 million in penalties, agree to oversight by an independent monitor, spend at least $455 million to strengthen compliance and safety programs, and be placed on supervised probation for approximately three years, a Justice Department official told the Washington Post.
"This criminal conviction demonstrates the department's commitment to holding Boeing accountable for its misconduct," the official stated.
The deal also includes a long-sought meeting between Boeing's board of directors and the families of crash victims. However, Paul Cassell, an attorney representing the families and a professor at S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, immediately filed an objection to the agreement on their behalf.
The criminal case delves into the design of the Max, an updated version of Boeing's popular 737. The company was racing to compete with European rival Airbus in the 2010s when it developed the automated system implicated in the crashes. Prosecutors allege that two technical pilots concealed information about the system's expanded capabilities from an FAA oversight office, leading to its omission from a safety report and leaving pilots unfamiliar with its operation.
This plea agreement comes on the heels of a January 2021 deferred prosecution agreement between Boeing and the Justice Department. Under that deal, which expired shortly after a midair blowout incident on an Alaska Airlines 737 in January 2024, Boeing acknowledged that its technical pilots misled federal regulators about the software system.
The Washington Post reports that by May, federal prosecutors found Boeing had violated the terms of the 2021 agreement, partly by failing to create agreed-upon compliance and ethics programs.
