Boeing thought they could sweep another disaster under the rug.
But families of the victims aren’t backing down.
And Boeing just got slapped with a lawsuit that exposes one ugly truth about giant mergers.
Fourteen families take Boeing to court over South Korea crash
Fourteen families who lost loved ones when Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed in South Korea last December filed a bombshell lawsuit against Boeing on Tuesday.¹
The complaint, filed by Seattle’s Hermann Law Group in Washington state, doesn’t pull any punches about what really caused 179 people to die that day at Muan International Airport.²
According to the lawsuit, the Boeing 737-800 experienced a bird strike while approaching the runway — something aircraft engines are specifically designed to handle.³
But instead of the plane safely absorbing the impact like it should have, the bird strike triggered what the families’ attorneys call a "massive failure of nearly all of its antiquated electrical and hydraulic systems."⁴
Here’s the part that should make anyone nervous about flying on a 737-800: Those critical systems were designed back in the 1960s.⁵
That’s right — the technology keeping passengers safe on one of the world’s most widely used aircraft dates back to when Lyndon Johnson was President.
The crash happened on December 29, 2024, when the plane carrying 175 passengers and six crew members from Bangkok attempted to land at the South Korean airport.⁶
Security footage showed the aircraft speeding across the airstrip without its landing gear deployed, overshooting the runway before slamming into a concrete barrier and erupting into a fireball.⁷
Only two flight attendants survived, both pulled from the wreckage of the plane’s tail section — the only part that retained any recognizable shape.⁸
The lawsuit targets Boeing’s corporate culture shift
The families’ legal complaint goes beyond just this one crash.
Their attorneys argue that Boeing’s legendary "safety-first culture" began eroding after the company’s 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas.⁹
They point to Harry Stonecipher, the former McDonnell Douglas CEO who became Boeing’s president and later CEO, as the architect of a fundamental shift in the company’s priorities.¹⁰
Stonecipher famously declared that Boeing would be "run like a business rather than a great engineering firm."¹¹
That quote tells you everything you need to know about what went wrong at Boeing.
Before the merger, Boeing was run by engineers who believed in building the best, safest aircraft possible — and profits would follow that commitment to excellence.¹²
After McDonnell Douglas executives took over, the focus shifted to cutting costs, maximizing shareholder returns, and meeting Wall Street’s quarterly earnings expectations.¹³
Many Boeing veterans described the cultural takeover with a bitter joke: "McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money."¹⁴
The lawsuit alleges Boeing failed to modernize the 737’s outdated electrical and hydraulic systems, whose basic designs trace back to the aircraft’s original 1968 models.¹⁵
Lead attorney Charles Herrmann didn’t mince words about Boeing’s response to the disaster.
"Rather than admitting its fault in this tragic accident, Boeing resorts to its old, worn out ‘blame the pilots’ tactic," Herrmann stated in his firm’s news release.¹⁶
"These pilots make easy targets; they perished in the flames with the passengers. They cannot defend themselves," he added.¹⁷
The complaint explains what happened in the cockpit after the bird strike hit.
Both pilots were seasoned professionals who managed to keep flying the crippled aircraft back toward the runway.¹⁸
But the cascade of system failures stripped away their ability to land safely — the landing gear wouldn’t extend, critical displays went dark, and hydraulic systems failed.¹⁹
They landed 1,200 meters down the 2,600-meter runway at 175 mph — too far and too fast for any chance of survival when they hit that concrete wall.²⁰
Bird strike regulations expose Boeing’s failure
Here’s what makes this lawsuit particularly damning for Boeing.
Under U.S. regulations, both engines on aircraft like the 737-800 are required to withstand ingestion of up to four one-pound birds without thrust dropping below 75 percent.²¹
DNA tests on the birds that struck the Jeju Air plane showed they weighed about one pound each.²²
The engines should have handled the strike without any problem — that’s exactly what the safety regulations are designed to prevent.
Instead, the bird strike set off a chain reaction that took down nearly every critical system pilots needed to land the plane.
The families’ attorneys argue this proves Boeing’s decades-old electrical and hydraulic systems aren’t up to modern safety standards, even when the company knows bird strikes are a routine hazard in aviation.²³
Boeing told The New York Times they don’t comment on active litigation, sticking to their standard playbook when facing legal challenges.²⁴
The families are seeking economic damages, though the complaint doesn’t specify exact amounts.²⁵
But this isn’t really about money for most of these families.
"Bereaved Families deserve the truth," Herrmann explained in the news release. "Met with evasion in Korea, these plaintiffs seek justice in U.S. courts where we can legally compel them to reveal the truth."²⁶
Investigation reveals pilot confusion during emergency
Initial investigation results paint a picture of pilots struggling in the dark — literally and figuratively — after the bird strike knocked out critical cockpit systems.
Evidence reviewed by Reuters showed the pilots shut down the left engine instead of the right one after the bird strike.²⁷
The left engine had sustained less damage from the birds, and shutting it down removed the aircraft’s main source of thrust at the worst possible moment.²⁸
Investigators found both engines were functioning normally before the crash — the pilot error came from flying blind without proper display systems working.²⁹
"If the pilots lost their displays after the bird strike, they may have had no clear indication of which engine was damaged," aviation expert Joe Jacobsen told The New York Times.³⁰
That’s the critical failure Boeing’s antiquated systems created — pilots couldn’t see what was happening to make the right decisions in an emergency.
Modern aircraft have multiple redundant systems and clearer display information precisely to prevent this kind of confusion during emergencies.
The 737-800, built on 1960s technology that’s been incrementally updated but never fundamentally redesigned, left these pilots flying on instinct without the information they desperately needed.
The bigger picture Boeing doesn’t want you to see
Look, Boeing has gotten away with prioritizing profits over safety for nearly three decades since that McDonnell Douglas merger.
Two separate 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people between 2018 and 2019 — disasters that should have forced Boeing to return to its engineering roots.³¹
Instead, Boeing doubled down on financial engineering, stock buybacks, and satisfying Wall Street analysts while their aircraft fell out of the sky.
This Jeju Air lawsuit exposes Boeing’s strategy of blaming dead pilots who can’t defend themselves rather than taking responsibility for design decisions made decades ago.
The families filing this lawsuit understand something crucial: Boeing will never voluntarily admit their outdated systems contributed to killing 179 people.
That’s why they’re forcing the issue in U.S. courts where discovery rules will compel Boeing to produce internal documents about what they knew and when they knew it.
If Boeing’s 1960s-era electrical and hydraulic systems truly can’t handle a routine bird strike without cascading into total system failure, every one of the roughly 4,400 Boeing 737-800s still flying passengers worldwide represents a potential disaster waiting to happen.³²
The company that once defined aviation excellence through engineering brilliance now defines itself through legal maneuvering and blame-shifting.
Harry Stonecipher got what he wanted — Boeing run like a business focused on quarterly earnings instead of a great engineering firm.
But the cost of that transformation is measured in lives lost, families destroyed, and a once-proud American company’s reputation reduced to rubble.
¹ David Chiu and Sam Gillette, "Disastrous Plane Crash That Killed 179 People Linked to Decades-Old Boeing Tech, Lawsuit Claims," PEOPLE, October 16, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ "Jeju Air plane crashes while landing in South Korea, killing 179," Al Jazeera, December 29, 2024.
⁷ "How did South Korea’s Jeju Air plane crash? Here’s what we know," Al Jazeera, December 30, 2024.
⁸ "179 dead, 2 rescued after plane crashes while landing in South Korea," ABC News, December 30, 2024.
⁹ "’Cascade of System Failures:’ Families Sue Boeing Over Fatal Jeju Air Crash," AVweb, October 16, 2025.
¹⁰ "Boeing Faces Lawsuit After 2024 Jeju Air 737 Crash," Simple Flying, October 16, 2025.
¹¹ "Boeing’s Shift from Engineering Excellence to Profit-Driven Culture," AirGuide Business, January 16, 2024.
¹² "The 1997 merger that paved the way for the Boeing 737 Max crisis," Quartz, July 21, 2022.
¹³ Ibid.
¹⁴ Ibid.
¹⁵ David Chiu and Sam Gillette, "Disastrous Plane Crash That Killed 179 People Linked to Decades-Old Boeing Tech, Lawsuit Claims," PEOPLE, October 16, 2025.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ Ibid.
¹⁸ "Boeing Faces Lawsuit After 2024 Jeju Air 737 Crash," Simple Flying, October 16, 2025.
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ Ibid.
²² Ibid.
²³ David Chiu and Sam Gillette, "Disastrous Plane Crash That Killed 179 People Linked to Decades-Old Boeing Tech, Lawsuit Claims," PEOPLE, October 16, 2025.
²⁴ Ibid.
²⁵ Ibid.
²⁶ Ibid.
²⁷ Ibid.
²⁸ Ibid.
²⁹ Ibid.
³⁰ Ibid.
³¹ "Boeing’s Shift from Engineering Excellence to Profit-Driven Culture," AirGuide Business, January 16, 2024.
³² "The Boeing 737 model in the South Korea crash has a stellar safety record," Yahoo News, December 30, 2024.
