Two people hold up a banner with pictures of victims of crashed Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 Boeing 737 MAX 8, on April 2, 2025 on Capitol Hill in Washington., D.C., during congressional testimony from Boeing's chief executive officer. (Ken Cedeno/Reuters)
Boeing has somehow avoided serious consequences for two fatal air crashes related to its 737 MAX planes, which took the lives of 346 people. The crashes (one in Indonesia and the other in Ethiopia) revealed a number of uncomfortable facts about Boeing, including its willingness to prioritize profits over safety and its negative corporate culture. The 737 MAX had an automated system designed to keep the plane from stalling, but when a sensor malfunctioned and the pilots were unaware, the outcome was disastrous.
Now, in November of 2025, Boeing has avoided nearly all repercussions for its action. A federal judge in the United States has approved (at the government's request) an arrangement and Boeing will not plead guilty to all of the allegations against it. Clearly this angered the family members of the dead. The families have been pursuing justice for years, and the best they could get is that Boeing will plead no contest and pay fines, and that they will promise to improve internal practices regarding safety issues. Boeing’s manipulation of maintenance records needed an immediate remedy when safety was clearly compromised and repeated again after the crash demonstrates that the organization was more focused on reputation, seizing the media narrative, and saving money than preserving human life.
Boeing will pay $1.1 billion as part of the settlement. That is a huge amount of money, until you put it in the context of what was lost. Boeing does not admit to any criminal wrongdoing and there are no real consequences for what occurred. The question should be, when a corporate entity can essentially pay its way out of accountability, what is to stop future issues from occurring?
The government says they are more strictly monitoring Boeing now, but crashes of Boeing planes on the news remind us that the public trust in the company, and in the industry, is incredibly low.
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