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Boeing pledges $100M to families of 737 Max crash victims – TechCrunch
Boeing has said it will offer $100 million to the families and communities of those who died aboard the two 737 Max passenger jets that crashed earlier this year. This “initial outreach” will likely only be a small part of the company’s penance for the mistakes that led to the deaths of 346 people.
In a statement, the company said it expected the money to “address family and community needs,” and “support education, hardship and living expenses.”
[...] CEO and president Dennis Muilenburg... earlier this year accepted the blame, acknowledging that “it is apparent that in both flights, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS, activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”
[...] This initial payout is voluntary; it is highly unusual for an airplane maker to pay such a sum to the victims of a crash ahead of any lawsuits. Boeing, Airbus and other companies involved in passenger flight have certainly in the past paid damages, directly or via insurance or some other means, but that was generally after a lawsuit forced them to. Sometimes a company will approach families with ready money to prevent them from filing a lawsuit, but that’s not often publicized.
And lawsuits are certainly underway already, with dozens of families bringing suits for each crash. The amounts these could bring are very difficult to predict, but given the loss of life and that the flaws that led to it can be traced directly to mistakes by Boeing, the company could be on the hook for hundreds of millions more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @03:03PM
You're not going to get rid of the price on human lives. There will always be MBAs and C*Os calculating whether it is cheaper to do it right or to kill people and pay the penalties.
The only thing you can do is make the penalty so high that it is never the rational choice. Corporate death penalty. All assets seized and sold off at public auction. Everybody above lower-middle-management has their contracts terminated immediately for malfeasance, with no benefits. What money you get from selling the assets goes to the victims.
If you can ever prove that they knew people would die, then murder charges for individuals.