Boeing facing criminal charges for MAX crashes

BOSTON — Four years ago, the Stumo family got a text message from their daughter, Samya Rose — a Massachusetts native. She had just flown from Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on a business trip. Her final destination was Uganda.

“Just arrived in Addis, two more hours to Nairobi,” the text read. “Love you all.”

“That was it,” said Michael Stumo, Samya’s father.

Samya Stumo was one of the more than 150 passengers and crew killed when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plunged into the ground six minutes after takeoff. It was the second crash of a brand new Boeing 737 MAX in five months and led to the grounding of the plane for more than a year.

A federal investigation found deep flaws in not only the design of the 737 MAX — but in the corporate attitude towards its safety. Boeing’s chief goal, the report indicated, was to keep costs down — including training costs. The aircraft manufacturer had financial incentives to deliver an aircraft that required no simulator training for pilots.

But there was a problem with the MAX from the get-go. Its high-efficiency engines were larger than those on the previous iteration of the plane — the 737 NG — and that meant mounting them further in on the wings.

The result was a plane with a propensity to pitch up because the engines made the forward section of the fuselage heavier. Boeing’s answer to this design problem — a software program known as MCAS. Operating silently in the background, MCAS was meant to apply corrections to pitch, based on data from a single Angle of Attack sensor.

But MCAS was only as good as the data it was fed — and it’s believed faulty information triggered both MAX crashes — with the pilots struggling to maintain control of planes that kept, inexplicably, pitching down.

Two years ago, Boeing reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the Justice Department over the MAX fiasco. Half a billion dollars was set aside to compensate relatives and heirs of crash victims. But Michael Stumo said there was just one legal problem with this settlement: the families were never consulted about it.

“We filed, several months later, a motion in the court saying the Justice Department violated the Crimes Victims Rights Act,” Stumo said. “We say it violated the law, it’s insufficient and wrongfully exonerated the executives.”

The act requires victims be consulted in a timely manner whenever there is a plea deal or deferral of prosecution. Stumo said Boeing and the Justice Department fought the families on the grounds that they were not victims.

“We were — and the judge agreed with us,” Stumo said.

That would be a judge in Texas, who last week conducted the arraignment of a Boeing executive on criminal charges that the company engaged in conspiracy and fraud.

The executive pleaded not guilty — and Boeing told Boston 25 News, in a statement, it is “deeply sorry to all who lost loved ones on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.”

The company said it will never forget the lives lost in the two accidents — and that they serve as an inspiration to elevate the safety of Boeing products.

“We have made broad and deep changes across our company,” the statement continued. “And made changes to the design of the 737 MAX to ensure that accidents like these never happen again.”

Michael Stumo is not impressed.

“Executives should go to jail when they commit crimes — just like street criminals,” he said.  “Every other study and investigation found a widespread culture of concealment and wrongdoing at Boeing over the course of years — and all the way to the top.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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