It will take months to determine exactly what led to the midflight blowout of a door on an Alaska Airlines plane last week. According to NBC News, investigators “have indicated an increasing focus” on the hardware of the aircraft, a Boeing 737 Max 9. Not only are bolts missing from the recovered door plug, both United Airlines and Alaska Airlines reported finding loose door plug bolts on a number of the now grounded Max 9s.
But it’s not too soon to consider another bigger and more systemic culprit: America’s corporate accountability crisis. From the 2008 financial crisis to the present, again and again corporations have treated their customers with complete impunity, and received nothing more than wrist slaps for extreme malfeasance. While massive scandals at corporations from Wells Fargo to Purdue Pharma fill the headlines, white-collar prosecutions have continued to decline.
Given this farcical excuse for accountability, it’s no surprise that the trouble didn’t stop for Boeing.
Boeing and its 737 are a textbook case. In October 2018 and March 2019, two crashes of an earlier version of the Max 737 killed 346 people, and grounded the planes for nearly two years. The disasters were ultimately traced to design failures in the model’s flight control software info that was not conveyed in its guidance to pilots, not to mention the Federal Aviation Administration, even though executives knew about it.
Yet repercussions were almost nonexistent. A midlevel functionary charged criminally was acquitted by a jury in a matter of hours. It took the better part of a year — and two embarrassing days of congressional testimony — for Boeing to fire then-CEO Dennis Muhlenberg. The Trump administration ultimately decided to fine Boeing $2.5 billion for not informing the FAA about software changes that contributed to the fatal airline crashes, while deferring a criminal charge against the company. For Boeing, the fine effectively amounted to a business expense. The…
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