Boeing 737 Max aircraft are assembled at the company’s plant in Renton, Washington, U.S. June 25, 2024.

Jennifer Buchanan | Via Reuters

Boeing has won regulator approval to ramp up production of its best-selling 737 Max jetliners to 42 a month, a milestone for the manufacturer nearly two years after the Federal Aviation Administration capped its output after a midair near-catastrophe.

In January 2024, the FAA restricted Boeing to building the planes at a rate of no more than 38 a month — though it had been below that level at the time — after a door plug from a nearly new 737 Max 9 blew off from an Alaska Airlines flight as it climbed out of Portland, Oregon.

Boeing failed to reinstall key bolts on the door plug before it left the factory, a National Transportation Safety Board report found. The 737 Max returned and landed safely, but it put the company back into crisis mode just as leaders were expecting a turnaround year.

The FAA said Friday that it would still oversee Boeing’s production. “FAA safety inspectors conducted extensive reviews of Boeing’s production lines to ensure that this small production rate increase will be done safely,” the agency said in a statement.

Boeing said it would work with its suppliers to increase production.

“We appreciate the work by our team, our suppliers and the FAA to ensure we are prepared to increase production with safety and quality at the forefront,” Boeing said Friday in a statement.

Read more CNBC airline news

An increase in output is key to the company’s turnaround after years of problems, since airlines and other customers pay for the bulk of an aircraft when they receive it. CEO Kelly Ortberg, named last year to stabilize the top U.S. manufacturer, said last month he expected to soon win FAA approval to raise output to 42, with other increases planned for down the line.

“We’ll go from 42 and then we’ll go up another five, and we’ll go up another five,” Ortberg told a Morgan Stanley investor conference in September. “We’ll get to where that inventory is more balanced with the supply chain, probably around the 47 a month production rate.”

The change shows the FAA’s softening tone and increased confidence in Boeing after years of restrictions. Last month, the agency said it would allow Boeing to again sign off on some of its aircraft itself before they’re handed over to customers, instead of that responsibility falling solely with the FAA.

The Max program was crippled following two crashes of the planes in 2018 and 2019, which killed all 346 people on the two flights. The aircraft was grounded for nearly two years. Covid also hurt production, followed by supply chain problems and, last year, a labor strike at Boeing’s main factories in the Seattle area.

Boeing hasn’t posted an annual profit since 2018. But it has increased output, and its deliveries of new planes are on track to hit the highest rate since that year.

Boeing is scheduled to release quarterly results on Oct. 29.

— CNBC’s Phil LeBeau and Meghan Reeder contributed to this report.

The post FAA raises Boeing 737 Max production cap to 42 a month appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Ethiopian Federal policemen stand at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 11, 2019.

Tiksa Negeri | Reuters

The U.S. Justice Department said Friday that it has reached a deal with Boeing that will allow the aircraft maker to avoid prosecution over two crashes of its 737 Max planes that killed 346 people.

The non-prosecution agreement would allow Boeing, a major military contractor and top U.S. exporter, to avoid being labeled a felon. The decision means Boeing won’t face trial as scheduled next month, as crash victims’ family members have urged for years.

The Department of Justice met with crash victims’ family members last week to discuss the potential deal.

In a court filing Friday the DOJ said it “is the Government’s judgment that the Agreement is a fair and just resolution that serves the public interest.”

The agreement “guarantees further accountability and substantial benefits from Boeing immediately, while avoiding the uncertainty and litigation risk presented by proceeding to trial.”

The DOJ said it intends to file a motion to dismiss the case once the “agreement in principle” is finalized, by no later than the end of next week.

Under the agreement, Boeing will have to “pay or invest” more than $1.1 billion, the DOJ said in its filing in federal court in Texas on Friday. That amount includes a $487.2 million criminal fine, though $243.6 million it already paid in an earlier agreement would be credited. It also includes $444.5 million for a new fund for crash victims, and $445 million more on compliance, safety and quality programs.

Boeing declined to comment.

The company has been trying for years to put the two crashes of its best-selling Max planes — a Lion Air flight in October 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight less than five months later — behind it. The Maxes were grounded worldwide for nearly two years after the second crash, a pause that gave rival Airbus a head start in recovering from the Covid pandemic.

But families of the crash victims have criticized previous agreements as sweetheart deals for Boeing, called for more accountability from the company and said its executives should stand trial. In 2022, a former chief technical pilot for Boeing was acquitted on fraud charges tied to the Max’s development.

Several of the victims’ family members issued a statement through their lawyer shortly after the court filing was released criticizing the deal and saying it set a troubling precedent for other large companies.

“This kind of non-prosecution deal is unprecedented and obviously wrong for the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history. My families will object and hope to convince the court to reject it,” said the families’ lawyer, Paul Cassell.

The Justice Department said relatives of more than 110 crash victims told the government they support the non-prosecution agreement or “support the Department’s efforts to resolve the case pre-trial more generally,” but added that others said they want the U.S. to take Boeing to trial and that they would litigate to dismiss the deal.

The aerospace giant reached a settlement in 2021 in the final days of the first Trump administration that shielded it from prosecution for three years.

Under that deal, Boeing agreed to pay a $2.51 billion fine to avoid prosecution. That included a $243.6 million criminal penalty, a $500 million fund for crash victims’ family members and $1.77 billion for its airline customers. The new fund will be on top of the $500 million that was already established.

Rescuers work at the scene of an Ethiopian Airlines flight crash near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Monday, March 11, 2019.

Mulugeta Ayene | Reuters

That 2021 settlement was set to expire two days after a door panel blew out of a nearly new 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines on Jan. 5, 2024, after the aircraft left Boeing’s factory without key bolts installed.

But last year, U.S. prosecutors said Boeing violated the 2021 settlement, accusing the company of failing to set up and enforce a compliance and ethics program to detect violations of U.S. fraud laws.

Last July, toward the end of the Biden administration, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to the criminal fraud charge in a new settlement. A federal judge later rejected the plea deal, citing concerns with diversity, equity and inclusion requirements for choosing a corporate monitor.

Under that 2024 deal, Boeing would have faced a fine of up to $487.2 million, though the Justice Department recommended that the court credit Boeing with half that amount it paid under the previous agreement.

Family members hold photographs of crash victims lost in two deadly Boeing 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people as Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg testifies before a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on aviation safety and the grounded 737 Max, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Oct. 29, 2019.

Sarah Silbiger | Reuters

The U.S. had accused Boeing of conspiracy to defraud the government by misleading regulators about its inclusion of a flight-control system on the Max that was later implicated in the two crashes.

“Boeing’s employees chose the path of profit over candor by concealing material information from the FAA concerning the operation of its 737 Max airplane and engaging in an effort to cover up their deception,” then-acting Assistant Attorney General David Burns of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said at the time of the 2021 deferred prosecution agreement.

Messages revealed in an investigation into the Max’s development showed the former top Boeing pilot who was found not guilty of fraud in 2022, Mark Forkner, told the FAA to delete the flight-control system known as MCAS from manuals and, in a separate email, he boasted about “jedi-mind tricking” regulators into approving the training material.

Lawyers for victims’ family members railed against last year’s preliminary plea deal, equating it to a slap on the wrist for the corporate giant, which recently won a contract worth billions to build the next-generation fighter jet and works on other military programs including outfitting two new presidential jets.

The post Boeing, DOJ reach deal to avoid prosecution over 737 Max crashes appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Scene from season 3 of White Lotus.

Source: HBO

HBO became HBO Max became Max. Now, it will be HBO Max once more.

Warner Bros. Discovery is renaming its streaming platform again starting this summer, restoring a name it ditched just two years ago. The company announced the rebranding Wednesday during its upfront presentation in New York.

The change comes as Warner Bros. Discovery seeks to scale back its volume of content and focus on quality programming and storytelling.

“The powerful growth we have seen in our global streaming service is built around the quality of our programming,” said David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, in a statement. “Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media, to further accelerate that growth in the years ahead.”

The company’s streaming business has turned around its profitability by almost $3 billion in the last two years and scaled globally with around 22 million subscribers added in the last year. Warner Bros. Discovery aims to have more than 150 million subscribers by the end of 2026.

Still, Warner Bros. Discovery lost live rights to National Basketball Association games beginning next season. And the company has focused on paying down debt rather than spending on new content to compete with Netflix, which has more than 300 million subscribers.

Ironically, the HBO Max branding was intended to showcase its competitive global streaming ambitions. Now, WBD is changing the name back to emphasize the opposite — quality over quantity.

“We will continue to focus on what makes us unique – not everything for everyone in a household, but something distinct and great for adults and families,” said JB Perrette, president and CEO of streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, in a statement. “It’s really not subjective, not even controversial – our programming just hits different.”

Competitor Disney has taken a similar tack, with CEO Bob Iger noting in recent investor calls that the way to win in streaming will be quality content.

The legacy media companies have all struggled to achieve profitability in their streaming businesses since launching their own services in recent years. That’s led to an increased emphasis on advertising tiers, crack downs on password sharing and more streaming service bundles.

The Upfronts week in New York has already been heavy on naming news. ESPN announced its upcoming flagship streaming app will be named simply ESPN. Fox said its forthcoming streamer will be named Fox One. And, last week, Comcast’s cable portfolio spinoff announced its new holding company name, Versant.

Warner Bros. Discovery first launched its standalone streaming service HBO Max in 2020 when the brand was still owned by AT&T. The “Max” moniker was added to signify that the platform would have a wide array of content, from reality TV, documentaries, kids programming and movies, as well as the prestige branding of HBO titles.

At the time, leadership believed that HBO had too small of an audience, much of which was U.S.-based, and that there was more value in making HBO a sub-brand within a larger streaming offering.

The service was later renamed Max in 2023. That change came after the merging of Discovery Communications and WarnerMedia, which was divested from AT&T in 2022. Content from Discovery+ was added to HBO Max under the new name.

Now, two years later, Warner Bros. Discovery has reversed course.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of CNBC. Versant will be the new parent company of CNBC under the proposed cable portfolio spinoff.

The post HBO Max is coming back appeared first on Our Story Insight.

FILE PHOTO: The American flag flutters at a Nissan automobile dealership in Irvine, California, U.S., March 27, 2025. 

Mike Blake | Reuters

Nissan Motor’s new Americas leader said the automaker is aiming to “max out” production at its largest American production plant amid President Donald Trump’s 25% auto tariffs.

Christian Meunier, who started as chairman of Nissan Americas in January, said the tariffs are accelerating already needed plans for the automaker to increase domestic production to assist in a turnaround of its embattled U.S. operations.

“We have big facilities, big capacities and today we don’t have max capacity. We still have more room to improve our capacity,” Meunier told CNBC during a virtual interview Wednesday. “We’re looking into selling more of the U.S. products, and adjusting, along the way, vehicles that are coming from Mexico and from Japan.”

Meunier said his “ultimate goal” is to “max out” capacity at the automaker’s 6-million-square-foot facility in Smyrna, Tennessee. The facility is capable of producing 640,000 vehicles a year on three shifts, he said. It produced more than 314,500 vehicles last year on two shifts with about 5,700 people.

“We’re looking at maxing out capacity and making Smyrna the powerhouse that it used to be,” he said. “That’s my ultimate goal … to get the plant full and make a lot of money again.”

Meunier declined to speculate on a timeframe for hitting that maximum production at the plant, which currently makes four products, including the automaker’s Nissan Rogue – its top-selling vehicle domestically. He said it takes time to change plans and move production.

“We can increase production, as I described on the existing models that we have in the U.S., and commit to a plan to bring a product the next two years … or a couple products to the U.S. market. But it cannot happen overnight,” he said.

Meunier’s comments come two days after Trump said he’s looking to potentially “help” some automakers, saying the companies need time to alter production plans.

Christian Meunier, then-chief executive officer of the Jeep brand at Stellantis NV, during the 2023 New York International Auto Show (NYIAS) in New York, on Wednesday, April 5, 2023.

Stephanie Keith | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nissan is looking at adding hybrid production to Smyrna as well as new products such as an Infiniti model, Meunier said. He also said the company is analyzing production increases for powertrain components such as engines and increasing domestic content.

“The good thing is, we have flexibility. We have an ability for us to to accelerate, to do things faster than we would have normally,” Meunier said. “I was already working on it before the tariff, because I, I’m convinced that localization is the way.”

Tariffs on imported vehicles into the U.S. have been in effect since April 3, despite Trump’s pullback last week on other country-based levies. Additional 25% tariffs on auto parts are scheduled to take effect by May 3.

Meunier said those potential parts tariffs would hurt the company and its plans.

“Hopefully there will be solutions that don’t hurt completely, to a full extent at 25% because that’s a lot,” he said. “Hopefully there will be a compromise in between.”

Nissan has two assembly plants in Mexico that produce a variety of vehicles, including imports such as the Nissan Kicks and Nissan Versa. In 2024, Nissan reportedly produced nearly 670,000 units in Mexico, with over 456,000 being exported, according to UnoTV in Mexico.

Autoworkers at Nissan’s Smyrna Vehicle Assembly Plant in Tennessee, June 6, 2022. The plant employs thousands of people and produces a variety of vehicles, including the Leaf EV and Rogue crossover.

Michael Wayland / CNBC

In the U.S., Nissan says it has assembly facilities capable of producing more than 1 million vehicles, 1.4 million engines, 1.4 million forgings and 456,000 castings annually. Of that full capacity, the automaker produced nearly 525,600 vehicles in the U.S. in 2024.

Other than Smyrna, the company has a large powertrain plant in Tennessee and another large vehicle assembly plant in Canton, Mississippi.

The Canton plant currently produces the Nissan Altima sedan and Nissan Frontier midsize pickup truck. It employs roughly 5,000 workers on a single shift for the Altima and two shifts for the Frontier.

The Rogue and the Pathfinder, as well as the Frontier, which has experienced significant market share declines in recent years to roughly 7% to 8% of its segment, are among the vehicles with the greatest growth potential for Nissan in the U.S., Meunier said.

Nissan lowered pricing of the Rogue and Pathfinder by between $640 and nearly $2,000, depending on the vehicle and model, in response to the tariffs. It also stopped taking new orders from the U.S. for two Mexican-built SUVs for its Infiniti luxury brand.

“Nissan has struggled a little bit lately, but we have a good plan,” he said. “We have good product in the pipeline. We’re launching super good product now that are successful, and we’re gonna turn it around despite the tariff.”

The post Nissan aims to ‘max out’ U.S. production plant amid Trump’s tariffs appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Nadia Milleron, whose daughter Samya Stumo was killed in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, holds a sign with photos of the crash victims during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on aviation safety and the future of the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, in the Hart Building in Washington, D.C., Oct. 29, 2019.

Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

A federal judge on Thursday rejected Boeing‘s plea deal tied to a criminal fraud charge stemming from fatal crashes of the manufacturer’s 737 Max aircraft.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas expressed concern in his decision that the selection process for a government-appointed monitor, a condition of the plea deal, would be affected by diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

He wrote that “the Court is not convinced in light of the foregoing that the Government will not choose a monitor without race-based considerations and thus will not act in a nondiscriminatory manner. In a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency.”

The Justice Department is reviewing the decision, a spokesperson said. Boeing didn’t immediately comment.

In October, O’Connor ordered Boeing and the Justice Department to provide details on DEI policies that might affect the selection of the monitor.

The court gave Boeing and the Justice Department 30 days to decide how to proceed, according to a court document filed Thursday.

In July, Boeing agreed to plead guilty to a criminal charge of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government by misleading regulators about its inclusion of a flight-control system on the Max that was later implicated in the two crashes — a Lion Air flight in October 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines flight in March 2019. All 346 people on the flights were killed.

Boeing and the Justice Department didn’t immediately comment.

Victims’ family members had taken issue with a government-appointed monitor as a condition of the plea agreement, which they called a “sweetheart deal,” and sought to provide more input on the monitor’s selection.

Erin Applebaum, an attorney representing one of the victims’ family members, applauded the judge’s decision. “We anticipate a significant renegotiation of the plea deal that incorporates terms truly commensurate with the gravity of Boeing’s crimes,” Applebaum said in a statement. “It’s time for the DOJ to end its lenient treatment of Boeing and demand real accountability.”

The deal was set to allow Boeing to avoid a trial just as it was trying to get the company back on solid footing after a door panel on a 737 Max 9 blew out in midair during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan. 5.

The new plea deal arose after the Justice Department said in May that Boeing violated a previous plea agreement, which was set to expire days after the door panel incident.

O’Connor said in his decision Thursday that it “is not clear what all Boeing has done to breach the Deferred Prosecution Agreement.”

Under the new plea agreement, Boeing was set to face a fine of up to $487.2 million. However, the Justice Department recommended that the court credit Boeing with half that amount it paid under a previous agreement, resulting in a fine of $243.6 million.

The post Court rejects Boeing plea deal in 737 Max crashes, citing DEI concerns appeared first on Our Story Insight.