(New York) The U.S. Justice Department has informed the judge in charge of the criminal case related to the crash of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets that the plea agreement will not be finalized until July 24 “at the earliest,” pushing back the deadline once again.
“The government and Boeing have made significant progress […] but we will not be able to finalize the agreement by tomorrow,” the department said in a progress update filed Thursday in federal court in Texas.
The two sides announced an agreement in principle on the night of July 7-8, and their intention to submit the final agreement no later than July 19. But on July 14, they indicated that the discussions could extend beyond that, without giving a precise timetable.
The department now expects the final agreement to be filed in court “no earlier than” July 24, “based on the work remaining to be done, and the company’s formalities to finalize the plea agreement.”
The negotiations come after the department ruled in mid-May that the group had violated an earlier agreement over plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
This so-called deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) of January 7, 2021 required Boeing in particular to improve its compliance and ethics program, with a three-year probationary period.
But the group has been accumulating a series of production and quality problems for many months.