Assuming what's revealed so far is reasonably accurate and the decisions were not taken for some yet to be revealed completely unexpected reason (unlikely) here

Assuming what's revealed so far is reasonably accurate and the decisions were not taken for some yet to be revealed completely unexpected reason (unlikely) here's who to blame. This was a business decision to remove re-certification/re-training for some 60B sales. So yes the CEO is responsible. If you can float on money for the success you can spend the lifetime in jail for the deaths too. But that might be a little extreme. So here's a better one for after Lion Air crash there is no reason to believe that Boeing including the CEO didn't go over this, didn't realize they made a risky plan and even then they didn't go through with their temporary mitigation with a fine tooth comb. So yes it seems the CEO and some big shots and maybe some down the line should go to jail. No one is sent to jail for complicated to reason or never before seen problem that they didn't know about or didn't think about and it happened. This wasn't an accident, they implemented absolutely critical safety feature by design without triple redundancy as well understood to be required then they lied about it (if I understood the max change from earlier to later version), tried to downplay it and when a crash happened due to this didn't own up to it. So for sure this helps safely culture. If you hide safety problem knowingly for greed/money, because your boss asked and you didn't care you shouldn't be working in safety critical system. > Boeing & Airbus are largely responsible for the massive improvements in flight safety over the last 40 years. It’s incredible that flying is as safe as it. Yes the deaths are a tragedy, but every time I get in a plane I accept the fact that the physics of flying could ultimately kill me, and I trade that off against the convenience of getting somewhere quickly. I don't even know what to say to this. So I drove safely for 40 years and today I decided to see if I can safely drunk drive if I play the music really loud and killed a family of four. This was not physics, this was not a complicated software bug (at the core) but it was cutting corners for profit.