Boeing and Southwest Airlines are at the center of a new legal dispute that accuses the two companies of conspiring to cover up a fatal flaw in the embattled 737 MAX airplane.
The lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Texas by 11 people who purchased a Southwest ticket to fly on a 737 MAX between Aug. 29, 2017 and March 13, when the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the fleet of planes following two fatal crashes in a five-month span.
“This action seeks to hold Southwest and Boeing responsible for their reckless, greedy conspiracy to launch the defective 737 MAX 8 and to keep it flying,” the passengers, who want a jury trial, said in their court filing.
The lawsuit claims Southwest made money through a “collusive relationship” with Boeing, the carrier’s sole supplier of its jets. The two companies, the lawsuit claims, were engaged in a scheme in which the carrier would pay the least among airlines for Boeing planes so long as Southwest operated the largest fleet of aircraft in the U.S. solely from the Chicago-based planemaker.
Southwest said in a statement it plans to “defend vigorously against the claims” in the lawsuit and believes the accusations are “completely without merit.”
“Safety always has been Southwest’s most important responsibility both to our customers and to our employees and we stand ready to comply fully with all requirements to return the MAX aircraft safely to service,” the company said. “Southwest proudly maintains one of the best safety records in our industry, and has throughout nearly five decades of operation. Our commitment to safety is unwavering.”
Southwest is 1 of 3 U.S. airlines that flew the 737 MAX before federal regulators ordered the planes out of commercial service in mid-March. The Dallas-based carrier had 34 of the jets in its fleet of more than 750 Boeing 737s and was scheduled to receive an additional 44 planes this year.
The lawsuit claims that neither Boeing nor Southwest told pilots of the new anti-stalled system installed in the 737 MAX, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. The software was implicated in the two crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed all 346 passengers on board, as an investigation revealed it fed the plane’s computer system inaccurate data on its angle-of-attack, leading to a struggle between the anti-stall system and the pilot.
Despite knowing that the 737 MAX was “fatally flawed,” the lawsuit alleges Southwest “knowingly risked the lives of its customers, its pilots and its other employees” by continuing to sell seats on the jets.
“Each of the plaintiffs bought a ticket to fly on a safe airline that flew safe planes. None of them would have bought a ticket — let alone for the price they paid — to potentially fly on a plane that Southwest and Boeing knew was fatally defective,” the lawsuit states. “Put simply, Southwest and Boeing conspired to cover up this indisputable fact: The 737 MAX 8 was so defective and poorly designed that it could easily kill you.”
Boeing and U.S. airlines have continued to grapple with the fallout from the issues with the 737 MAX, even after the aerospace giant completed a software patch for the anti-stall system in May.
Federal regulators have yet to sign off on the software update, which is keeping the jets on the ground. With Boeing still awaiting recertification from the Federal Aviation Administration, Southwest, United Airlines, and American Airlines — the latter two also have 737 MAX planes in their fleets — extended flight cancellations through October and November.
