Boeing (BA) has a court date in June.
Judge Reed O’Connor of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas scheduled a June 23 trial date for the government’s conspiracy case against the aerospace giant.
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The Justice Department alleges the company misled regulators about the 737 Max jetliner before two of the planes crashed, killing 346 people, the Associated Press reported.
Lawyers for the aerospace company and federal prosecutors have spent months trying to renegotiate a July 2024 plea agreement that called for Boeing to plead guilty to a single felony charge.
Families of the victims of two deadly crashes hailed an “opportunity for justice,” according to The Guardian, while Boeing said it was in “good faith discussions” with the DoJ.
The deal the judge declined to approve would have averted a criminal trial by allowing Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud Federal Aviation Administration regulators who approved minimal pilot-training requirements for the 737 Max nearly a decade ago.
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Boeing CEO called tough negotiator
More intensive training in flight simulators would have increased the cost for airlines to operate the then-new plane model.
The aircraft, which has become Boeing’s bestselling airliner, became an intense focus of safety investigators after two Max planes crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019.
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The Boeing 737 Max was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020, and again in 2024, despite public assurances from then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg that the plane was safe.
Muilenburg also spoke with President Donald Trump on the phone and “made clear to the president that the Max aircraft is safe,” Boeing said, after Trump had complained on Twitter that planes are “becoming far too complex to fly.”
Bob Lang, a veteran options trader and market technician and a regular contributor to TheStreet Pro, noted that after the twin disasters, “the company kept tripping over itself, more interested in pleasing shareholders with empty promises rather than truly fixing their internal problems, which were mounting.”
“Sentiment at Boeing was extremely poor, as many employees lashed out at policies and some even started blowing the whistle on the company,” he said in his TheStreet Pro column.
“It all added up to chaos, and the stock reflected it as it lost more than 74% of its value over a 2 1/2 year span and was, no question, the worst-performing stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average,” he added.
In December 2019, Boeing said that Muilenburg had resigned as CEO and a director and was succeeded by David Calhoun.
Boeing was rocked again last year when a door plug blew out midair on a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the fuselage.
Calhoun stepped down at the end of last year and Robert “Kelly” Ortberg, who previously served as CEO of Rockwell Collins, took the helm.
Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu said in a research note last year that at Rockwell Collins Ortberg was a “tough negotiator dealing with a diverse set of customers and suppliers and managing the complexity of its diverse customer base,” including Boeing, CNBC reported.
Trader: Boeing a name to buy and hold
“There is much work to be done, and I’m looking forward to getting started.” Ortberg said in statement.
The company ended 2024 on a sour note, reporting $4.3 billion of combined fourth-quarter losses in its commercial and defense arms.
Related: Boeing is the best comeback story investors can’t ignore
“They had a horrible quarter that they reported” in January 2025, Lang said in a video interview. “I’m going to call that the kitchen sink quarter, where they just threw everything but the kitchen sink in and wiped everything, all the bad stuff, away from their books.”
During the company’s earnings call with analysts, Ortberg said Boeing was making progress in its multiyear journey to change its culture.
“In 2025, we’ll be rebaselining our core values and behaviors to make our expectations perfectly clear to all our Boeing teammates,” he said.
“These will be incorporated into our leadership development program and become fundamental elements of our performance management system,” Ortberg added.
Leadership promotions will be grounded, he said, “not only in what we get done, but how we get things done.”
“As I talk with employees, there’s a growing swell of excitement around restoring trust and getting their Boeing back, and they want to be a part of this turnaround,” he said.
Lang said that Boeing, which is scheduled to report quarterly results next month, has been working hard to fix itself following the 737 Max disasters and with Ortberg on board, “Boeing has resurfaced as a name you want to buy and hold.”
“First time that sentiment has been talked about in years…,” he said, adding that Ortberg “is doing a fantastic job.”
“They’ve come out with some new contracts with the U.S. government recently, some new plane orders with [some other airlines],” he said.
Boeing shares are off 2.1% since January and off 10.2% from a year ago. They finished Friday regular trading off 3.2% at $173.31.
Lang said that the $200 level is not going to be easy to exceed.
“We could see a lift, however, later in the year,” he said. “I suspect a move towards $250 eventually should be anticipated. Just give it about 12 to 14 months’ time.”
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