My predictions?

- Boeing will lose 10s of billions of dollars because of this in damages, lost contracts, and redesign costs.

- Their CEO will resign.

- The FAA will revamp many procedures to vastly increase certification costs and not allow these types of same-class-rating bullshit.

- The FAA or similar EU agencies may slap some fine against Boeing

- The families will sue and win a large settlement.

- One or more engineers may commit suicide. (which would be itself tragic)

- Middle management will pay zero or nearly zero price.

- No one will be internally fired by Boeing as the problem is systemic.

- No criminal charges.

Many of these things will only happen with a sustains public relations compaign against Boeing, congressional hearings, persistent news articles, documentaries highlighting the harrowing crash, etc.

EDIT: I’d say there’s a small chance even that a system called MCAS never flies again, even if that means the entire MAX concept has to be shelved.

If the MAX can fly without MCAS but just under a new type rating, that could be the way they go. Boeing simply has not been successful introducing computer-moderated flight controls and envelopes the way that Airbus has over the last decade (and those lessons were hard learned too).

Incidentally, Boeing has received billions of dollars in illegal tax subsidies from the US (as in, anti-competitive with non-US manufacturers like Airbus): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38131611 So it's hard to imagine fines or market penalties actually conveying any productive sense of punishment.

I've read a couple of these things (strongly recommended — aviation postmortems are a model for us all) and my impression is that "too large" or "slap" are foreign terms in their debugging culture.

Their priority list is, AFAICT: 1. Find out what happened. 2. Find out why. 3. Find out how to make sure it doesn't happen again. 4. See point 3. 5. See point 3.

We are at the 'accident investigation' stage. Accident investigators do not hand out punishments. That comes later, during civil or criminal procedures in the various courts of jurisdiction, and by the regulators.

It is certainly within the realm of possibility that there will be severe consequences, up to and including criminal charges.

What charges do you recommend? Links to the US code here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text

Still too early to tell, this report is just the first step and inevitably will invoke conversation around who's to blame.

Boeing's bottom line would like this is be crew or operating procedure.

This is an absurd comment. The rule of law works in the USA as much as it does in other developed countries. There is no such thing as "too large to take on". I note though that there is not yet any evidence of a crime having been committed.