On the Boeing-DoJ Decay of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282: When Flight Characteristics and Sensors Fail: A Brief Letter to the Victims’ Families
Boeing’s board of directors has also agreed to a meeting with families of the crash victims as part of the agreement, which the families have criticized as a “sweetheart deal.” Paul Cassell, a lawyer for victims’ family members, is planning to object to the deal on their behalf, saying to The Washington Post that “through crafty lawyering between Boeing and DOJ, the deadly consequences of Boeing’s crime are being hidden.” Boeing previously agreed to pay the families $500 million.
The door-plug panel on the plane blew off in midair in January, and that letter came a few months later. The incident involved Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 sparked renewed scrutiny of Boeing’s operations by federal regulators, as well as the Justice Department.
Family members of the Boeing victims met several times with federal prosecutors, and they wanted harsher punishments for the company. In the DOJ court filing, the government conceded that some families “expressed their opposition to any plea agreement” and to terms of the plea offer.
The two crashes, which happened in 2018 and 2019, killed more than 300 people. The planes malfunctioned because of software that was intended to correct for a design flaw — and that software, called MCAS, relied on just a single external sensor for its data. Boeing did not tell the Federal Aviation Administration, airlines, or pilots about the flight characteristics of the plane in order to skirt safety regulations. The pilots were fighting against MCAS when they went down, and likely didn’t know the software existed.