The Department of Justice has confirmed it may drop criminal charges against Boeing over the deadly crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people. According to The Seattle Times, prosecutors filed documents on Saturday saying they were considering a deal under which Boeing would avoid prosecution on criminal fraud charges and instead pay fines and establish a compensation fund for the families. It would also improve its compliance and hire an independent consultant to oversee the changes. The so-called "nonprosecution agreement" has outraged families of victims of the two crashes.
Definitely should. Had the pilots followed the QRH and kept the trim cutout switches in cutout, reduced thrust instead of leaving them firewalled, the planes could have been recovered. Yes Boeing should have documented MCAS in training, but pilot skill played a part as well.
There was no need to document MCAS in pilot training. In fact pilot training on MCAS is not even possible—the system has no human interface. It is one of a number of components that can cause a runaway stab trim when it malfunctions, but Boeing does not provide pilot training on those systems and how they can cause a runaway trim, simply because that knowledge is of no value to a pilot when a runaway occurs. Aside from there not being any way to diagnostically isolate the fault to the particular component causing the runaway, knowing such doesn’t enable the pilot to fix the component, nor does it affect the recovery procedure, it is the same regardless. If pilots DID know the details of all that can cause a runaway (and some discover a few by reading the maintenance rectification details after an occurrence) I suspect Boeing knows that a hefty percentage of them would be inclined to do exactly that—fault isolate and try to fix it—instead of promptly executing the runaway trim procedure, thus tempting fate by allowing a situation that requires a prompt response to become hazardous or catastrophic. THAT is why MCAS is not in the ops manual or training.
Too late. That was the purview of the agencies conducting the investigations per Annex 13 of the Chicago convention. But they would have been foolish to venture into that territory while under pressure to not shine a bad light on the airline or the domestic aviation regulatory agency and while the news media was having a field day blaming Boeing for bad design based on zero knowledge of basic engineering, misinterpretations of Boeing’s engineering documents and internal communications, and hurling accusations of shady engineering and business practices, which the media invented to bolster those bad design allegations. The investigators (the official ones, not the wannabes in the media) chose to copy-paste from media reports rather than do a proper investigation. It may have been a copy-paste from a Congressional Hearing Report; doesn’t matter, same thing. Congress didn’t do any investigation at the hearings, they did most of the talking, prejudiced by what they’d read in the news and unable to discern fact from fallacy anyway. Then in their report they listed a bunch of egregious “findings” against Boeing and even provided links to the analyses or evidence that founded the findings. Most of the links were to…news articles (imagine that!) some of which yielded “404 not found” errors when the report was published. All in all a very worthless and very expensive charade.
Expecting giant corporations to face the same accountability as an average person might be a stretch. They don’t just play by different rules – they often help write them. I remain with the crews, and pax, who lost their lives and their families.
It’s not that simple, and with the way MCAS worked at the time, it could run the trim rather quickly. Under the right (or “wrong”) circumstances, one could find themselves in a situation where recovery is basically impossible. Any system that is aggressive as MCAS was without a direct indication of what’s going on is asking for an accident. If there really was no fault to be found with the system, it wouldn’t have been redesigned as much as it was.