The US Department of Justice has until 7 July to make a final decision on whether to prosecute the firm.

US prosecutors have recommended that the Department of Justice (DoJ) brings criminal charges against Boeing.

It follows a claim by the DoJ that the plane maker had violated a settlement related to two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft which killed 346 people.

Boeing declined to comment when contacted by the BBC but previously it has denied violating the deferred prosecution agreement.

The DoJ has until 7 July to make a final decision on whether to prosecute the company. The DoJ has been contacted for comment.

The recommendation is not a final decision and the details of any potential criminal action are not known, according to CBS, the BBC’s US partner.

"This is a really critical decision that is coming up,” said Ed Pierson, who is the executive director of the Foundation for Aviation Safety and a former senior manager at Boeing.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
    8·
    7 months ago

    This is a huge point. My wife made an off-hand comment about Boeing looking like a good take-over target for Airbus, and my response was, “never. Then there would be only one airline maker in the world.”

    There are exactly two manufacturers of large passenger jet liners. It’s not even a question of too big to fail; it’s far worse than that.

    Personally, I think they’re going about this the wrong way. You could prosecute executives for past decisions, but they were just doing the job they were hired for: maximize profits over every other consideration. The ones that didn’t, got replaced by ones that did.

    For companies like Boeing, we need a different model of capitalism. One where engineers can be in charge, and the metrics for success are dominated by something other than sheer profitability. I don’t know; it seems as if we used to know how to do capitalism better. We had a functioning, funded, effective NASA, which operated almost entirely outside of The Market and which was a national pride; now it’s overshadowed by SpaceX. Boeing made good planes.

    I don’t have a solution, but I can tell that we’ve gotten lost somewhere along the way.

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
        2·
        7 months ago

        Yeah. There are lots of areas I think government control is better than private sector, but they’re mostly infrastructure/monopoly areas. Power, internet, roads, etc. Normally I wouldn’t put Boeing in this category, but you may be right. Thinking about NASA, and what we achieved as a country, maybe there are some endeavors that are simply so expensive and important (as in, safety) that they shouldn’t be private.

        I don’t know if breaking things up would help, though. Boeing re-uses liners for both cargo and passengers; and there are other companies making smaller planes for other sectors: military, private jets, etc. It’s just those big airliners where the cost of operating is so enormous, and the cost of entry so high, and the market so constrained, that I really can’t see any room for more competition. Do you?

          • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
            2·
            7 months ago

            I think we’re of like mind on this. It’s possible to realize something is broken without knowing how to fix it.

            I’m not sure why Boeing is in space, except for the “me too” factor when they noticed the successes SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin were having. I wasn’t aware they had a military division - what do they make? I mean, outside of repurposed commercial cargo jets. I don’t think spinning off a division that’s simply modifying an existing design for a specific market makes much sense; most of the work is in the original design and manufacture, right?