When the board of directors of Boeing Co. had its first official meeting about seven weeks after the initial crash of the 737 MAX, at the end of 2018, the directors did not have in-depth discussions about the safety of the aircraft, according to the recently published details of the company’s internal documents.
Later Monday, Boeing’s current chief executive told reporters that the company’s executives had moved quickly to address the crash, according to excerpts from company documents contained in a shareholders’ lawsuit.
This and other new information in the lawsuit cast doubt on whether Boeing executives pressured management about safety issues or seriously considered grounding the plane before a second 737 MAX crash in early 2019.
Parts of the internal Boeing documents, which indicate the dates and details of the meetings that the directors held and what was discussed, are cited in the shareholders’ action, according to which the directors violated their fiduciary duties in supervising management. The lawsuit also claims that David Calhoun, then the CEO who later became CEO, exaggerated to the journalists the degree to which the directors took care of safety issues between and after the two accidents.
The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Calhoun, who became CEO in early 2020, ran a public relations campaign that “insisted that the board acted more urgently and was more engaged than it actually was” in the aftermath of the two accidents. which killed 346 people in October 2018 and March 2019. The lawsuit mentions Boeing’s internal e-mails and other documents that were not previously public.