The impact of the two deadly Boeing aircraft crashes is still being felt a year after the first of the two crashes, as the government seeks to intervene to prevent future accidents. 

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing Tuesday, Oct. 29, on the one-year anniversary of Lion Air Flight 610 from Indonesia, to discuss the future of aviation safety in regards to Boeing’s 737 MAX. 

The 737 MAX 8, which showcased Boeing’s new Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) was involved in both the Lion Air crash and, five months later, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The crashes resulted in a combined 346 fatalities and the grounding of all 737 MAX aircraft worldwide.

Scrutiny of the Chicago-based aviation giant has grown after revelations from whistleblower reports were made public. Emails turned over to lawmakers in October contained conversations between former Boeing chief technical pilot Mark Forkner and an unnamed Federal Aviation Administration employee, in which Forkner says he is working on “Jedi-mind tricking regulators.” Phone calls made to the FAA’s whistleblower hotline by Boeing employees in the days following the Ethiopian Airlines flight expressed concerns about the 737 Max’s angle of attack sensor and MCAS.

The MCAS is meant to automatically angle the plane downward if it senses that the plane may be stalling.

At the Senate hearing, lawmakers focused on whether Boeing was negligent in its testing of MCAS and how much the aviation giant may have known about the potential hazards posed by its flight control system.

Lawmakers also heard from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was criticized for his high salary. On Wednesday, he said he will forego his 2019 bonuses, trimming earnings that had grown 27 percent from 2017 to 2018.

“We cannot have a race for commercial airplanes become a race to the bottom when it comes to safety,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA. “The company, the board, cannot prioritize profits over safety.”

According to Dov Fischer, a business professor at Brooklyn College who has written extensively about Boeing and the 737 MAX, “Boeing absolutely wanted to skimp on the technology” because they saved billions of dollars by doing so. 

The company has also tried to direct blame towards pilot error and away from its technology. Kevin Kuhlmann, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, said he views pilot training as the forefront of the problem. 

“I don’t think MCAS design should be to blame,” he said. “It’s a blame, but not the largest part.” 

He added that the 737 MAX 8 planes “were being operated on by multiple carriers in multiple parts of the world.”

 “What was the training like?” he said. “Especially when we look at maintenance.”

From a legal standpoint, the answer may not be so cut and dry. William Bradley Wendell, a professor of law at Cornell College, said the blame might lie with more than one department at Boeing. “Various theories of liability may be asserted which implicate actions by design engineers, flight-test pilots, the department that writes and certifies the manual and training materials, et cetera,” he said in an email.  

Boeing has set up a $100 million compensation fund to address the more than 50 lawsuits it has been met with in relation to the Lion Air crash and the dozens it faces in relation to the Ethiopian Airlines crash. While many of the victims’ families have opted to settle, there is also pending litigation. Victims’ families have until Dec. 31 to file a claim with the Boeing compensation fund.

“No individual is going to pay damages in this case, no matter what they did wrong,” Wendell said. 

Ahead of the hearing, Cantwell and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-IL, introduced a bill to increase government oversight of Boeing. The legislation would make aviation safety recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Transportation Department’s Inspector General’s office legally enforceable.

 In addition to compensating victims’ families, critics say internal change needs to be made regarding the way the corporation is run. 

“I would assign some blame to the decision makers, whether the CEO or the Board of Directors, who decided to move management to Chicago and leave engineering in Seattle,” Wendell said of the decision to move Boeing’s headquarters to Chicago in 2001. “That creates an unnecessary information-flow barrier.”  

Fischer said the blame lies with more than just the CEO.

“More importantly,” he said, “it’s the current board who share accountability.”