Boeing has told a US court it was not guilty of concealing information about flight control systems on its 737 Max aircraft, which led to two crashes, killing 346 people. Flaws in the systems were found to have led to the accidents, but Boeing avoided a trial by agreeing to pay $2.5bn (?1.8bn).

A total of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft were involved in catastrophic accidents that led to the global grounding of the fleet. The first was Lion Air Flight 610, which crashed into the Java Sea shortly after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, on October 29, 2018, killing all 189 people on board. The second was Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which crashed near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019, resulting in 157 fatalities. Both crashes were attributed to a flaw in the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), which erroneously pushed the nose of the aircraft down based on faulty sensor data. These tragedies resulted in a 20-month grounding of the aircraft worldwide, the longest in aviation history. Since returning to service in late 2020 after extensive software fixes and pilot training overhauls, the MAX 8 has flown millions of hours, but these two events remain a landmark case in aviation safety and corporate accountability.